Ally Houston - Metabolic Mental Health - (Ancestral Health Today Episode 037)

welcome to ancestral Health today evolutionary insights into Modern Health hi everyone and thank you for being on the ancestor Health podcast today uh we are honored to have Ali Houston today with us Ally welcome to the podcast how are you thank you Isabel I'm well thank you yeah really happy to be here wonderful thank you so much for being with us Ally can you let our audience know um about you who you are have you've gotten to this space and um anything else that may be relevant yeah so I used to be a physicist whose mental health was terrible and now I'm a metabolic mental health coach whose mental health is much much better thankfully I had um chronic anxiety seasonal depression and really bad kind of edhd symptoms since I was a kid and I I got to the stage where um you know I had other metab metabolic problems into my 20s struggling with my weight which was a big driver to try to improve my health but um ended up getting a Physics degree and working in industry for a few years starting a PhD in gravitational wave physics at the University of Glasgow and kind of got lucky because my physics Professor Ken strain had a few years before um being diagnosed with mecfs and being told he probably wouldn't ever work again and he was devastated he was in his early 40s um really in the prime of his career trying to find gravitational waves and he did a bit of his own research discovered Gary tabs good calories bad calories is the the name in the UK of the of his book and tried a ketogenic diet and within months he was running 10ks again having been bedridden so he he was amazed and went back to work um trying to find gravitational waves which they did in 2014 but developed this really deep side interest in researching the human body and why what he did had helped him so much you know he' he'd taken some supplements as well and um learned a lot of things along the way around the damage that can be caused by grains and by modern fats that are not necessarily well suited to human anatomy and various other things so he would say things like wheat isn't food and nobody should be eating margarine and b day was just invented by uh marketing people and I thought what is he talking about and then when I wased him a bit more I realized he' made this almost miraculous recovery from mecfs and he was able to see that compared to my previous work history and uh undergraduate degree result I was really massively underperforming my brain fog was worse than it had ever been so my ADHD symptoms were off the charts um I was seriously depressed during the winters um and my anxiety was was terrible and I still couldn't control my weight and he didn't tell me what to do he just said look here's some places you can look so I went away red for hundreds of hours and I'm got more and more convinced that you know eating in a in a ketogenic way maybe even a carnivore way could be extremely powerful in um affecting your metabolism and your mental health and ultimately controlling your weight that was what I was most convinced about at first so I thought okay I'll give it a goal and I decided to try a kind of um pretty extreme version of a ketogenic diet that was being talked about by Peter Dober milsky who wrote the amazing blog hyper lipid and it was really uh ghee lots and lots of egg yolks and some cream that I would mix with the egg yolks and some sweetener some AR oil to make a a sort of ice cream and within days I felt much much better my gut problems started to clear up I was sleeping better I used to have terrible heartburn all the time that went away completely I could sleep lying down instead of half sitting up were you just eating that during that time for a time yeah yeah um I feel like it was a clean Elimination Diet and I was convinced by the work of Georgia Eid by that point as well that an elimination diet is really the gold standard in seeing if there's any interaction between um your your food environment and your health because yeah there are tests you can do but they're expensive inconclusive and the only way you ultimately find out is to try cutting things out so I didn't realize that Dairy could be such a problem for me and in the end I did cut out Dairy I don't really eat it these days but at the time I thought well there's not much Dairy protein and ghee and cream so I'll give it a go and that would be a fairly clean Elimination Diet I felt absolutely incredible mentally and that was the most profound change for me I mean yes the extra weight melted off and and stayed off which was which was great but you know like others have said sometimes you come for the the weight loss and you stay for the mental health benefits now the year before in 2015 I'd been formally diagnosed with ADHD which made a sense of a lot of my symptoms kind growing up and I'd been on rlin for that year at first it had helped with Focus but then I needed to take more to get the same effect I started to get nasty side effects like kind of emotional numbness and um irritability and anger so I didn't like them and um when I uh changed my diet and felt so much better I came off the the rle and felt fine my focus was good my mood was high and even my anxiety wasn't there and my weight was under control and always at the end of the summer I would get worried thinking okay here comes the freight train of seasonal depression and 2016 was the first year since I was a kid that I didn't get depressed in the winter and it was just amazing it was like it was like having my brain back and the only person who was really making sense of this at the time that I could find was Dr Georgia Eid and her brilliant blog about how uh food can affect mental health so at the time I I decided that if I could go through this transformation then I could help others to do the same thing in fact I felt like a kind of Duty to do that and to understand why it might have helped because it's one thing accepting that a clinical outcome is probably due to an intervention but it's another thing at really understanding the causes because when you do then you can do the much more powerful thing which is help people who haven't been helped by a common or Gan ketogenic dying so I set about doing that I read a lot about the mecfs community because they're very knowledgeable they have to be because of the neglect that they face um and so there's all this amazing information on Phoenix rising and um sahy Hill Community and various other communities before we go into that detail were you diagnosed with an autoimmune condition in addition to um the depression and the ADHD so I was diagnosed with sarcoidosis which is sometimes disputed as a direct autoimmune um some people call it kind of autoimmune adjacent and uh I had that in my lungs and on my skin and um I also have easia of the cardia where my food pipe closed up when I was 8 years old and I lost lots of weight I had to get um I had to get a balloon dilation twice under anesthetic which allowed me to eat fairly normally and it's thought that that might be autoimmune in nature um certainly members of my family have direct autoimmune um diagnoses including alipa hypothyroid ashimoto hypothyroid um childhood arthritis these these types of things so my family is like an autoimmune bom site and I've got some of the shrapnel for sure um I mean I had testicular cancer when I was 20 so it might be that is partially autoimmune in nature you know I think what's so powerful about the mecfs stuff is that I see it as a kind of umbrella for almost everything that can go wrong in the human body because it's so well investigated but as I say in 2016 there was no join at thinking in this regard it was really still very much siloed and even the sort of early work of people like David Unwin looking into uh diabetes remission using diet was still seen as really Fringe and so I just plugged away I started selling paleo keto food and um start started a podcast and tried to educate people and and and sort of informally help people and then round about 2019 I thought well maybe I could formalize this and started to look at coaching options to kind of get a qualification in what I was doing already and ended up doing a qualification with a company called Precure which had brilliant training it's h Bas in New Zealand some uh Grant and Luis scoffield and they're you know extremely experienced in public health they they know the benefits of diet and a holistic approach and uh really enjoyed that training and started to coach people professionally and then around 2022 the bazooki group uh appeared and their son Matt has uh been three years now with no bipolar disorder symptoms having used the principles of metabolic psychiatry which include using a ketogenic diet and the time they set up the foundation it had been more than a year that he'd been without symptoms this is in the context of his absolutely terrible bipolar disorder where he would run away from home during his um periods of mania um you know thinking he had magic powers and they he would lose they would lose contact with him they didn't know where he was it was incredibly scary and then when he was at home he was extremely depressed suicidally depressed so that had been going on for for some years and they met Chris pmer eventually having tried everything it seemed all sorts of different drum combinations and um you know different technologies that they thought might held and nothing had and Chris pmer suggested using a ketogenic diet and here he is more than three years later so and people who don't know David bazuki co-founded Roblox which is is a global gaming platform and is uh very successful so they're very well resourced so they wanted to put philanthropic money into the space and started to fund Research into ketogenic diets of why did this help their son so much and David and Jan his wife uh run the bazooki group and announced prizes in 2022 for people who'd really been foundational in using ketogenic diets and met Psychiatry for mental health which included Dr Georgia Eid and various other people who'd been pushing it Forward over the last few years so that really let a fire under everyone and myself and my metai business co-founder Dr Rachel Brown decided it would be a good time to try to coach people using the principles of metabolic Psychiatry and and that's where men s is R now that's wonderful that's a great story um tell us a little bit about what were the things that you had tried prior to 2016 in addition to riddlin and how did that compare to the changes that you saw after you found the ketogenic diet great question well I think a lot of people end up self-medicating and I think I'd found a form of stimulation like rle in in uh caffeine for sure and I used to be an absolute caffeine fiend these days I I tend to stick just to tea I can't trust myself with coffee I take it too far but I maybe have like two cups of tea a day in the morning and in those days I might have five six seven eight really strong cups of coffee Double Espresso kind of strength and it would keep me going but again like the rling I developed some kind of Tolerance I started to know to side effects and in the end I had to quit for a time and then I'd start again because I wanted those benefits back afterwards I think the focus benefits from a ketogenic diet were very apparent because I wasn't getting distracted in the same way I was able to keep my focus and how a Clarity of thought that otherwise I would need to really pump stimulants into me to feel and uh I have also been able to experiment with exogenous keton to see if they have an independent effect and I believe they do because if I take exogenous ketones then my clarity of thought my kind of articulate um articulacy and um my uh you know ability to focus are markedly better even over and above a normal ketogenic state so quite interesting that I also um I also tried various sort of Valyrian methods for depression like 5htp um valarian was more for anxiety really um things like meditation and uh exercise and all of them were very helpful and I think they can't there is a role for drugs and supplements and uh lifestyle interventions like exercise and um meditation meditation was a very interesting one because it made me realize that my thoughts not me I could choose whether to listen to them or not so I I came to view my thoughts as like fish swimming up to me and I could pick them out of the water and have a proper look at them and then decide whether I wanted to keep them for dinner or throw them back but the great thing about my thoughts since I went on a ketogenic diet is that I just don't get the horrible fish anymore so it's not so much of a problem I don't need to I don't need to slow down in that same way to catch myself feeling anxious and examine the thoughts cuz they just don't come and it was another curious thing about you know past traumatic experiences things that I really needed to work through I was much more able to do it uh after starting a ketogenic diet this is something that comes up again and again with clent is you know it's not the stress you put under it's the strain that you feel and you're always going to get stresses and the way that um one patient of Georgia eids described it was before she started a ketogenic diet her trauma was kind of in front of her face like it was a hand in front of her face at all times and then when she started a ketogenic diet it was like there but arms length so she could deal with it and this comes up again and again where clients of mine feel much better and then they spontaneously want to go to therapy to untie that knot and it's not like therapy has been in the past and in a way how it was for me before I changed my diet which was that it felt something like picking at a wound or opening a wound um not necessarily healing it sometimes but often times it just felt like you were running over the same ground whereas therapy after K Jen diet it was like you could resolve stuff and move on and this is something that I've seen again and again with clients and with other people in the space it's quite amazing so I have tried lots of stuff um I mean for the weight the the thing that you hear all the time from doctors and nutritionists and dietitians and uh people in Authority is you just need to eat less and move more and so I tried that several times thinking and this is something coming from a physics background you get a lot from physicists is it's calories in calories out you know you can't cheat the laws of thermodynamics but what they're not taking into account is that the body is a complicated hormonal system and that the calories outp part of the equation is not simply determined by how much exercise you do and some chart that says if you weigh this much this is how many calories you'll expend you know it's very clear from the work of Herman poner and others that it doesn't matter whether whether you're a hunter gatherer in Tanzania walking for 12 hours a day or someone who's sitting at their desk in an office in Scranton Pennsylvania you're going to be burning the same amount of calories within a few percent purely based on your um you the mass so it's really about working out what calories in will rev up the calories out and this is something that that I and loads of my clients have noticed is that they can sometimes be eating 3,000 calories a day and lose weight or change body composition but look much better because they're revving up their metabolism so yeah it is calories in calories out but the calories they're putting in are increasing the calories out they're spontaneously feeling like exercising they feel warmer both in terms of temperature and mood if you like the brain has more energy so I tried starving myself with uh eating lower calorie and yeah I got thin but then hunger won and I would just start eating again and I would put on all the way plus a little bit more because I'd convinced my leptin my fat cells um where whatever the the loop is with the hypothalamus that I had been starving and that I needed to put on a bit of more uh fat to protect myself so after a ketogenic diet yeah I've had kind of ups and downs with weight um a couple of times but basically it's been smooth sailing yeah the the myth of koris in and color is out is so pervasive in the way that it is understood I wish that everybody you know would take a closer look at the research the um the nature of you know human metabolism and how it just doesn't operate in that way especially in the context of our modern diets um so really great bringing that research to the Forefront um so going from a physicist to what you're doing now what were the early um science and research um understandings that drove you to have such a drastic change in in your career well well first of all it was like a damine moment where I myself turned my health around and I think there's so many practitioners in the space whether they're doctors nurses coaches people used to be lawyers or whatever it is and they've had that themselves and sort of feeling is believing it's really hard to explain improvements in mental health you can tell but they might not believe you in fact I know that people don't believe me a lot of the time because how could that be the case everyone would know about it if it worked and also um it's really hard to just explain what that feeling is like so I've had clients who talk about it like finding a state of grace or the clouds parting and the sun shining through you really need this almost religious spiritual metaphorical language to convey the change in perception that I went through so that would have been enough to be honest even if the science didn't exist at all but what I found when I when I dog was that there was this kind of interesting jeros between clinical practice findings and academic research findings you know academic research moves much much slower because clinical practitioners have much more leeway to try things off label um especially if you're not a doctor and you're kind of a a functional Medic or a um some other holistic practitioner you can encourage clients to experiment by telling that this or that thing has worked for other people in a similar situation and I think discounting those anecdotes because they're here and there is um an abuse of the Pyramid of evidence if you have a situation where nobody ever gets better right and someone gets better just because it's an anecdote it doesn't mean it's worthless that is heavily weighted towards investigation because those that person was um someone who doesn't get better anywhere else so we mustn't dismiss those uh apparent blacks ones to our theories and what I was doing was consuming as much patient data from um either forums which people were self responding or from clinicians who are involved in mecfs diabetes mental health any of these areas and um and then comparing it with the existing literature so I was most amazed at first by individual stories you know zero carb xen was one of the places I looked first where people were getting better from all sorts of apparently different diseases by going zero car beneath in carnivore and and then the kind of connective tissue between these two kind of legs of uh uh clinical practice and academic work where people like Georgia Eid and Peter do rilski and um you know Emily deons I read a lot of it first people who were uh blogging about it whilst sort of trying to connect the the academic and the and the clinical and car Gary TOS as well there's there's a lot of evidence out there most of it at the time was mechanistic speculation so taking the the amazing clinical data and saying we we accept that it was probably this intervention that worked now can we explain post- factal why it worked here's half a dozen plausible explanations and to be honest that is pretty much still where we are with ketogenic diet for mental health and there's nothing wrong with that if um if clinicians are adopting it and it works but we still want to know the next step of exactly why it works because as I said then you can start to really understand why it's not helping some people and and set about helping them and the main kind of um opposition you get to all this is that oh if they got better then they they can't have had the disease in the first place the sort of no true Scotsman fallacy and um obviously that's not true in all these cases and so I think different different elements have different levels of academic research behind them I'd say that diabetes is is now very robustly understood um in comparison to say cancer or a lot of the mental health and with with complicated systems like the human body right we can have the same presentation of a disease without necessarily the same triggers right so that makes it even more complicated absolutely you know one of my favorite researchers alesio Fano is Big looking at gluten and it and its problems with gut health and the connections with neurological and psychiatric illness and of course there's no real difference between a neurological neuron and a psychiatric neuron and so we're kind of talking about the same thing there and so you know he talks about how schizophrenia should really be called schizophrenias because it's an umbrella term it's not one it's not one disease with one root cause and there's a subset that directly caus by gluten consumption and people can hardly believe that that you know such an everyday substance as bread is responsible for Wrecking the lives of millions of people and of course it's absolutely un incontrovertible uh stuff it's already established in the literature so absolutely and once you break it down you know I think it it's hard for scientists to admit that we don't really know a lot of this we're just kind of Illuminating a very small part of the chessboard yeah one of the things I'm really excited about is seeing the recent connections that have been made because L Co patients develop um you know psychiatric problems that they didn't have prior to Long Co and the research with neuroinflammation I think is shedding a lot of light um in that regard um any emerging research that you're excited um that has come out lately or that you have been diving into yeah well I mean actually I think a lot of the long Co mecfs stuff around gut health and um you know micral activation um and this sort of neurological in systemic neurological inflammation is so fascinating and I've come to think that when you look at epilepsy or which ketogenic diets have been used for more than a century now successfully it used to be the only Treatment available and um it's kind of a miraculous cure for about a third of people right it just they stop more or less stop having seizures then for another third it seems to do something but not as much as they would want and then for maybe a third or so these are all rough numbers a third or so people just don't seem to get the benefit so yeah it could be that epilepsy has several different diseases which uh have different root causes and some of which might not respond to a ketogenic diet or it could be that the root cause isn't say a deficiency in ketones it's more like something deeper where which a ketogenic diet can help but doesn't always um in and of itself and that is my head Theory based on all the stuff coming out about gut integrity neuroinflammation and um micral activation and the Damage that things like lipopolysaccharide can do so what do this got to do with ketogenic diets and mental health well I think that there's a clear signal in the clinical data that some people who do not succeed in improving their mental health with a ketogenic diet alone do with a carnivore diet what is that about because the the nutrient profile is probably going to be quite similar you know yeah they replace some of their um their calories with plants but if you're talking about low carb vegetables then it won't be much of the calorie content and it's very um interesting difference that so my guess is that if someone has gut dispos or even more broadly microbiome despois which could be any microbiome you know in the the cusis um the stomach the small intestine the large intestine the the biomes that we have inside or lymphatic system and you know different tissues around the body if they get out of whack then a ketogenic diet can go a long way to starving pathogenic microbes okay great so some people are just going to starve out what they need take uh they're going to have a a a more um nutritious diet because animal foods are much higher in nutrition they will be running on ketones and fatty acids which the body is extremely attuned to doing especially if you're already insulin resistant which quite often happens with people with chronic illness so ketogenic di to all these boxes great but it might not go far enough in starving the pathogenic microbes that are causing this problem and therefore a ketogenic diet which removes all fiber and starch Al together will go further in starving pathogenic microbes I think that is probably the difference between carore and keto why we see this clinically but um what if that doesn't work or what if you want to go back to eating veggies one day or what if you are worried that there's something underlying that's still there that you want to be more aggressive about and see if you can get rid of it because it still might be causing underlying issues just because you feel better it doesn't mean you're optimal and you might still be running uh with pathogens that are causing issues so I'm more interested now in um how you can disrupt biofilms around the body and kill pathogens that might be there and safely push them from your body and then I think you get more towards the kind of Garden of Eden State of Grace uh you know um position that all those people that Weston Price saw were in where they were eating this massive variety of diets from zero carb all the way up to kind of 9 5% carbs and they were all in the picture of good health but they didn't have um cesarian births and they W in bottle fed and I'm not judging and understand why it happens just they weren't and they didn't have rounds and rounds of antibiotics throughout their childhood and and adulthood again they can be LIF saving but of course they decimate the microbiome and what comes back in its place is anyone's guess um they didn't they weren't exposed to the modern food environment all these things which wreck gut health so yeah keto and carnivore might starve a lot of these pathogens but they don't necessarily stamp them out and and and kill them and replace them properly so that's a kind of area that I'm interested in sparked in no small part by a remission biome this amazing clinical finding that people were having remission events which are incredibly rare almost non-existent and some Cas is going from bedro into skipping down the street you have to listen to that and it's such a huge signal in terms of what's come before it so that's where I am with the kind of cutting edge of things yeah the new on that needs to go into right is whether it is a remission event or improvements in different aspects of Health that people experience and how there's regression or a can be uh necessarily duplicated in some people there are so many reasons and so much that needs to be investigated um but I find that so many people stop at well that didn't work for me or it worked for a little bit and then you know I didn't see any benefit and and there's so much more death that we can go into uh to pel out the layers of what happens during those sentances right um what are you hoping to see in this field in the next five 10 years where do you think that we are going and and maybe cave at that with the reality of you know our modern food system and our society in general because there are so many factors in our um society and our lifestyles that you know contradict our biological needs and we have to face the reality that this is the world that we live in right um living this world only happens one way uh but where do you see the contrast between the two where we're going and how we can mitigate based on where we are yeah great questions um I want to see more joined up thinking and I think it's unlikely to happen in the way I want because everyone has to get their head around something to fund it so whether that's giving into a crowdfunding campaign or uh an an a public health body funding something through a specific funding call where the call is very narrow for the the subjects that they'll fund or a philanthropist who really cares about a specific issue um that only wants to fund that understandably you know um I think if you could Define the problem how we're trying to Define it in that very broad deep sense than I think you would get further by starting off with that joined up approach so I would love to see that happen but certainly what is happening is there's more money going into metabolic mental health research which is great and I think the clinical signal is going to show up more in uh in the academic studies and that that will just result in more academic study I was a little bit skeptical that there would be any public money going into it but then with the bazooki fund research in Stanford and in Edinburgh and elsewhere around the world that's now um kind of been rolled into the UK to a 22 a. half million pound UK which is the the Public Funding Bo one of the Public Funding bodies um grant for five research hubs for mental health in the UK two of which are for metabolic mental health so one of them is in Edinburgh one of them's in Cambridge both top top universities getting public money money to investigate ketogenic diets for mental health amazing and I think I think that is um a very interesting change in the wind direction and one I'm I'm very uh I'm I'm very wel I'm very welcoming to and of course um I've won some money from the bazooki group very kindly uh offered to match the crowdfunding we're doing for uh the Oxford study next year in ketogenic diet or ADHD with depression which which is obviously very close to my heart and I'll be running the study there so there's stuff happening and it means that we can roll it into bigger um bigger research there's a six million there's been a $6 million gift from bazookis to research bipolar disorder It's amazing And it'd be great to see multicenter randomized control Trials happen in the next 5 years I think that's ultimately what everyone wants to see and I think as the funding improves the granularity of the data improves and you can um find out more so depends on which measurements are important and um we don't quite know exactly what they are yet we have mitochondrial researchers looking for smoking guns in terms of biomarkers and I know that remission biome is excited about some there I'm very interested in lactate and pyate and um I know other researchers um are looking at kind of dopaminergic uh markers that might indicate um kind of early warning issues and um there's there's there's various other potential metabolites and uh uh areas there that will come to the four and it' be great to have an easily measured biomarker or biomarkers that can indicate when mental health is is declining and improving and start to analyze data sets so that you can optimize that's something that we want to do ultimately at Mets side is build essentially a mental health real time early warning system and Optimizer and what would that look like well what we plan to do is find people with ADHD who want to uh test this where they wear a continuous glucose monitor so it would be like levels or Zoey in the UK but for mental health and we're an uring and that means that you're getting glucose glucose variability data uh heart rate variability Sleep Quality and they will put in their mood and cognition into our platform and we'll be able to see is there causal correlation here between gradients and any of these measures me ments and we think we're going to find them and we think we're going to be able to say to people stop what you're doing you're on a downward curve or keep doing what you're doing you're moving in the right direction based on your past data history and the population data so we're quite ambitious about that but that's where we want nsai to be in the next five years that's amazing um Ellie one of the things that I am very passionate about is accessibility right and when know that accessibility allows people to have access to you know a lot of wearables to get supplements to get a very high quality diet etc etc what do you advise for people who are not in that position how can they get started and what can they do to try to see if they see an improvement with this methology yes such a good question because you know accessibility means all sorts of different things doesn't it it can come in all sorts forums and there's no one right answer I think working with clients who initially think there's going to be a financial barrier or a skills barrier or a movement barrier to doing uh ketogenic or particularly a carnivore diet actually turns out to be um not true you know they realized that they were spending money on on things that they no longer eat or that they were spending time preparing it were actually preparing meat sometimes as much easier and quicker and um doesn't require as much energy now obviously at the the lower end of the scale where people can barely move out of bed or think straight for five minutes then it's a trickier question and sometimes I think having um friends and family that can help is important and I think that's something that we've looked at with metsi in the future how do we build in accessibility and I think having a A system that other people can monitor for you on your behalf could be a really powerful thing now I know that that seems like a bit of a fudge to the question but I also think that in communities like the mecfs community and any chronic illness Community Mental Health is is no different that there's a an understandable callus built up in terms of compassion to new ideas because you just feel like you've tried everything and it's all worked and anytime something else comes along you think oh here we go another snake oil salesman quackery it's just trying to get my money I'm vulnerable and I get it but I think there's a perception that maybe ketogenic diets and um other lifestyle interventions have this big barrier to them I just don't think that's true in practice in my experience except at the end of things where people are are so poor that they can only afford to boil pasta in their Kettle or whatever and I and I I know that people are in that situation and it's difficult so there's no Public Funding anywhere that I'm aware of for this kind of thing although I think it will eventually come and that certain diagnoses will bring with them uh the ability to get prescription food and um I want to see more of that if the prescription food is good but yeah you know it's it's easier than most people think and I think your the second part of your question from before is is important here too around other things you can do Beyond just food and how other lifestyle interventions interact with metabolism and I think there are things that people can do even with low accessibility so light is a huge thing I believe in this because the disconnect between our modern and ancest environments is you know a lot of that is light we're indoors we're not under the sun like we used to be um yes we probably sought shade and had shelters going back a long way in human evolution but we of course would have got a lot of sunlight and that means exposure all throughout the day um and the Spectrum changes throughout the day from you know more uh uh just peeking the green um in the middle of the day and uh more infrared um in the morning and evening and the blue light Fades but now we have blue light from our screens from our bulbs and you know you've seen these graphs of melatonin the sleep hormone does other things of course but it absolutely tanks with any blue light so I think even people who have very low energy reserves can start to affect their light environments they can wear blue blocking glasses they can um in the evening I mean they can um try to even open their window to get natural sunlight um they can wear cheap infrared uh LED clasps or lamps you do not need to spend a lot of money on a fancy infrared sauna you can literally get a lamp for 30 bucks and it it does the job and there's some fascinating stuff on how um just exposure to infrared light on the back will improve glucose metabolism the next day and people are trying to work out why but I think it's because of the way water is in the body that you structure the water brilliant book called the fourth phase of Water by Jared poock about this and I don't see another explanation of why uh peripheral infrared illumination results in systemic better glucose control um so I think UV light is misunderstood and is vital for human health in the UK where I am and lots of Northern Europe there isn't any UV light between you know October in March there's just none even in the midday sun and so what people used to do was have cod liver oil during the winter and um you know do cold water bathing and stuff like that to H try to um Shore up the the problems with not having direct access to UV they um they would also probably put on a little bit of weight at the end of summer and into Autumn and if you're also getting sunlight then you would store vitamin D in your fat and so you would use it over the winter as well and have access to it but I think it's perfectly understandable why um people with psoriasis get prescribed UV light and why I've heard clients of mine say when I go on a sun bed I feel amazing but I just don't want to get cancer and I get it it's ionizing radiation and there is a risk but I think it's a U-shaped curve I think it's really good for you in the right amount and then it can be really bad for you if you have too much I never would never Advocate Burning in UV light and I would always at limiting non-ancestral foods to try to limit the amount of oxidative damage going on in the skin that can um help UV lights turn into something more serious but I think getting the right light at the right time is almost as important as diet and um that if you can do the things I said then it's cheap it's not free but it it should be accessible to most people yeah wonderful what entry level resources um would you um advise people to get for people who want to read more and and do their own research in this uh field well a great place to start I would say this is msi.com me psy.com because we have deliberately put the information there so um there's a free membership you can join and look at the Forum and uh there's a lot of information there for free and um there is uh my podcast Ali Houston transforms podcast I've interviewed lots of people including Tess faer and many others on a wide variety of topics um including lots about metabolic Psychiatry so Jan bazuki has been on um Ian Campbell researcher from Edinburgh University on bipolar disorder the great Dr George Eid Dr Chris Palmer ballist goes on and on um they're all really good resources and we also have a very affordable monthly membership so um it's it's going the price is going up only a little bit to $19 and that for that you get a an expert Q&A every month and uh videos with experts and uh monthly journal and book club where we dissect some of the latest research or a really interesting book to do with metabox Psychiatry so I think getting this information is enough for some people you know it was enough for me I ran with it and ended up changing my career cuz it was so successful for other people I think they need a bit of help support and accountability and that's what we Tred to do at Mei and um I think once you get there you realize as well that we're not shy about sharing other resources that are you know specialized in in particular areas wonderful are you working with clients directly as well if anybody was interested in working with you yes absolutely so I do think it's important to have a lowcost option um so that people find it accessible but I also do some onetoone work uh I'm very busy so I'm not always available but I do have space for onetoone work as well yeah okay wonderful Ally thank you so much for your time today this has been very informative um anything else that you would like the audience to know before we go yes um so it's been a great chat I really appreciate you having me on and um besides people who might be interested in metabolic Psychiatry for themselves or for others we're also running this study in Oakford for ADHD with depression and we're we're crowdfunding for it so it would be amazing if this is a subject which kind of touches you personally um or you know in your family or anyone you work with and care about and you want to see this research getting done then you can contribute and if if you don't mind I'll share the the link absolutely it's bit.ly that's bit.ly ADHD keto and as I say any donation pounds euros dollars that you give will be matched by bazooki foundation so you'll double your money essentially which is amazing very generous of them and um I really appreciate any any anything that people can give that's wonderful everybody's always asking where is the research on that right so that's a great way to support the research and uh then look at the findings so we can know what subset of people you know this works best for um and which subset of people it doesn't and why that's the importance of further in research right yeah absolutely yeah all right thank you so much Ally for being on the ancestor Health Today podcast we thank you and um looking forward to sharing this with our audience thanks as well thank you thanks for joining us on this episode of ancestral Health today we hope you enjoyed our discussion on how evolutionary insights can inform Modern Health practices be sure to subscribe to our podcast to catch future episodes