Diets for cognitive impairment and mental health? When your mental and cognitive health is poor, you often eat poorly which is a super vicious cycle. I've been focusing on incremental dietary shifts to see how they subjectively impact mental health and cognition, which was getting scarily poor, so too was dietary quality. Currently my personal picks, after many a more extreme diet or crappy eating, are in a somewhat similar fashion to more Mediterranean, Nordic, DASH, and MIND type-diets with added ketogenic additions and just diversely spicing and plant-ying up food as much as possible - encouraging a more balanced, lesser caloric intake dietary pattern centred on veg, legumes and added protein - high vegetable/plant intake, focused on high levels of greens, phenolics etc - adding diverse veg, herbs and spices in cooking as much as possible and at relatively high levels, to not only add a rich sensory dimension but boost phytochemical diversity and encourage microbiome health. Branching out to make food also incorporate more diverse herbs and spices eg I make a mung daal with protein with lots of different spices, brahmi etc - Dietary MCTs - Daily Cacao/Dark chocolate - incorporating omega-3's - lots of healthy herbal teas Namely getting basic macronutrients (make a daily curry) but drastically increasing daily intake of phenolics/flavonoids/anthocyanins, increasing greens eg lots of dietary greens, greens powders and spirulina, adding MCTs and decent doses of daily cacao for flavonols and theobromine etc. Maintaining mild ketosis through dietary MCTs 1 Single shifts or extreme diets I haven't found overly robust/sustainable longer-term and with cognitive issues cooking has to be something that's relatively simple. I've been exploring how incremental, seemingly synergistic, dietary changes can affect more serious cognitive complaints. I've found even a few degrees of positive shift towards greater phytochemical diversity and enhanced nutrition, coupled with other lifestyle interventions, can seemingly have quite quick and robust effects on the quality of consciousness, from essentially completely disabling symptoms to some greater stability and peace of mind and functionality. 2 Glucose hypometabolism is not just a hallmark feature of physical neurological damage, however. It is also often observed in neurological and neurodegenerative diseases of varied etiology. MCT addition - Modified ketogenic approaches Adherence to strict dietary patterns could be challenging and it is sensible to examine different methods by which ketosis can be induced and adhered to. This may be particularly beneficial for those who may experience more challenges in adhering to strict diets eg. in cognitive impairment and poor mental health Chris Palmer gives the following ranges of ketones for mental health conditions: For depression, ketones > 0.8 mmol/L For psychotic disorders and bipolar disorder, ketone levels > 1.5mmol/L He states that generally in his clinical experiences, exogenous ketones (eg salts, esters) sans the ketogenic diet don't have the same benefits for mental health as the diet - MCTs are considered ketogenic fats, with C8 and C10 being the most ketogenic of the group, as they elevate blood ketone levels regardless of calorie or carbohydrate content - MCT significantly improved cognition in multiple domains, including the memory-related domain - MCT supplementation of 10–15 g can increase blood ketone levels to 0.3 to 1.0 mmol/L but co-administering with glucose caused a 63% decrease in ketone levels. MCT oil supplementation alone and in combination with a small amount of glucose increased 3 average BHB levels up to physiologically significant concentrations (>0.5 mM) - MCT supplementation of a regular diet appears to affect cognitive function by improving memory, language, executive function, and processing speed. These improvements strongly correlate with the increase in the production of BHB generated after a single dose of MCT or with regular consumption over several months - 20 mL of C8 MCT can promote ketosis within minutes and sustains it for up to 4 h - MCT supplementation were able to elevate the circulating BHB levels within 30–60 min and sustain a significant elevation of BHB for 2–3 h after intake, suggesting that repeated doses at 2–3 h intervals may be necessary to maintain elevated BHB levels. - consuming a low-carbohydrate meal with MCT does not inhibit the ketogenic effect but slightly reduces the production of BHB -slight decrease in blood glucose was observed between t0 and t2 and in blood insulin between t1 and t4 after MCT ingestion alone. - plasma ketone response was also about 2 fold higher without an accompanying meal (4 h area-under-the-curve of plasma β-hydroxybutyrate/acetoacetate was 2-3 fold higher when no meal was consumed) - 10g doses of the kMCT increased the plasma ketone response by 19% while reducing overall glycemia by 12% without altering insulin or FFA levels - Age and the low carbohydrate meal did not affect the ketones response. Ketones may prove beneficial for cognition at least in part because they improve brain network energy status, functional connectivity and axonal integrity. 4