Author: Mary O'Donnell

The Proposed Key Clinical Takeaways are as follows:

1. Endotoxicity and oxidative stress effect on sleep.
2. Nutritional protocols for concussion, Alzheimer’s, and brain health.
3. The emerging area of innovative sleep tools.
4. Review the physiology and neurobiology of sleep.
5. A functional approach to improved sleep.
6. The gut-brain axis effect on sleep.

While there is some very valuable information in this lecture about the importance and centrality of sleep for brain health and whole body health, including Dr Rob’s own whole body protocols and favorite supplements PLUS all the recent research showing which herbs are outperforming sleep meds, at the end of the lecture having spoken about the connection of sleep to detox and brain detox and alzheimer’s prevention he heads into Recode, Dr Dale Bredesen’s new reversing Alzheimer’s protocol and also Ketoflex his ‘anti-alzheimer’s diet. However some points to note on these:

The Problem with ‘Recode’

You don’t need keto or intermittent fasting for BDNF!

And he says keto is intermittent fasting here, used interchangeably, again I’ve seen David Jockers use these words interchangeably last week at his fasting summit but they are really two different things because you can go 12 hours from supper to breakfast like we used to do in the normal Irish way of life when I was growing up and still not be ‘fat adapted’ changing your metabolism over to burning fat instead of carbs is true keto so all this fluffy middle of the road stuff is confusing, at best, but on a deeper note is being just too casual with keto and I’m hearing many deaths and injuries associated with it.

BDNF brain derived neurotrophic factors do NOT require keto

What I’d like to draw your attention to here is that the very reason Dr Silverman gives for using the Bredesen Recode protocol has already been overturned by him in a previous lecture ie the production of BDNF is not exclusive to ketosism, there’s a long list of things will produce BDNF outside of keto!

In one of Silverman’s earlier lectures at FMU, The Impact of Concussion on the Gut-Brain Axis, Silverman gave us a list of 8+ things that will increase BDNF.

8 Things that wil increase BDNF outside of a ketogenic diet

And they include things like:

• Turmeric
• Walking/exercise <—not high impact for elderly!
• Prebiotics
• Probiotics, he entions Lactobacillus brevis and Bifidobacterium longum
• DHA is what Silverman suggests but I’d go with Prof Basant Puri and EPA
• Low level laser
• Whole coffee extract <—new kid on the block, has it stood the test of time?
• Alpha lipoic acid
• Ketone bodies ie BHB betahydroxybutyrate powder <—only 1 out of 9 and a supplement potentially, not a diet!

In his previous lectures in the brain health series at FMU he mentioned the ketone BHB betahydroxybutyrate as increasing BDNF and that it can be got in powder form as a supplement. In no way is the ketone route to increasing BDNF superior to all the other ways to increase BDNF! So this list eliminates the need for keto altogether!

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Keto being used for ‘compliance’ not out of necessity

In addition we have had a guest lecture by Dr. Mary Kay Ross who works with Dr Dale Bredesen and though she likes to put people with cognitive decline or any sort of dementia onto keto she actually admitted it wasn’t necessary but was being used for compliance!?! And yet the title of her lecture was ‘the functional medicine approach to reversing cognitive decline’, however it is not ‘the’ functional medicine route – there are varieties of opinion within functional medicine!

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The Dangers of Keto – Not Enough Warnings

I personally object to lumbering people with an extreme keto lifestyle unnecessarily which many doctors and scientists are calling a fad that omits a major food group, puts the body into a survival alternative metabolism which is unnatural to sustain long term and causes all sorts of problems long term.

‘Doing it wrong’ myth, ‘Ancient Fasting’ myth, Deaths and Injury reality

In fact many deaths and injury are being reported with short term exposure to keto including Dr Michael Murray who said at his Healing Power of Food Summit that he had to pull the plug on keto he was losing muscle and all his biomarkers were going the wrong direction – and he was doing it properly. It’s a bit of a backpaddling myth out there at the moment that when things go wrong blame the person for doing it wrong, no, keto and the new type of fasting lifestyle currently trending does go wrong for many people who do it ‘right’. On that note, they do claim this fasting is ancient, but actually when you know the history of healing and original sources you see this ‘Intermittent fasting’ and keto is a completely new take on fasting at the moment that was never done before unless you were in an ancient monastery!

*Note Dr Murray despite dropping a clanger like that against at his summit was not standing up to keto at all, he had way too many keto speakers dominating the summit, with a handful of people against keto thrown in and some of them did not directly say so, you had to join the dots – it’s like people are afraid to speak out and there’s one big ecumenical hug, except for people like Naveen Jain or David Katz who will come straight out and say ‘keto is a fad’.

There is also a long list of people and conditions now beginning to be admitted to as not suitable for a ketogenic diet at all and these range from being on certain types of diabetic meds, any sort of thyroid issue – while last year they were saying huge percentages of people had undiagnosed thyroid issues and it wasn’t being measured properly either, where on earth do you go with that then if David Jockers will ‘occasionally’ say ‘get your thryoid tested first’ and Elle Russ says ‘keto will screw your thyroid if you do it wrong’ – also it’s been known to cause a long list of problems such as hormones, heart, blood sugar, and other things people report to me because they know I speak out against it.

The worst report I heard was from a nurse called by the ENTs to revive a comatose post partum woman who was emulating precisely what David Jockers said his wife did to get back in shape after pregnancy – I saw that coming as soon as I heard him suggest that to the masses – but back to my point that keto is being recommended unnecessarily and with high risk And most practitioners are not being warned about that in enough time.

Medical research student saved by her own studies AFTER being told to go into ketosis!

Fitness buff one day away from coma after keto fitness challenge

This man also explained that his blood normalized and looked great just like everyone is saying but then he was in hospital with an IV in his arm being told he had one more day left before they’d have been trying to revive him from a coma…and they don’t always revive!

**I get a lot of testimonies, this is just a snippet for you to sample.

Irresponsible proponents of keto slow to change

Certainly the main proponents of keto who are gaining extraordinary momentum in the digital marketing groups are NOT doing enough in terms of warning and precautions even right up to the latest summit on fasting last week by David Jockers and Health Talks Online which I refused to promote. I did sign up to it and was bombed with emails telling me I was about to be fast tracked onto keto, not one question as to my history or health, just get in and oh, pay an extra $59 discounted from the regular $97 to be even more fast tracked seeing as I had already ‘bought’ the summit – no, actually I got a refund.

And no, that’s not what functional medicine or healing is about, I’m surprised it has not been shut down by the FDA except to note that even conventional circles are seeing keto as a bit of a money spinner $$$

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The Problems with Bredesen’s Ketoflex include the following:

1. Not distinguishing between a healthy and a healing diet: Note this is an ‘anti-Alzheimer’s’ diet so therefore aimed at healthy people who want to prevent becoming ill – yet much of what is on this diet is what an ill person would be doing, and even then under particular individual needs must scenario only. So he has not differentiatd between a healing and healthy diet. I’ll give you an example of a preventative diet by someone in his 80’s now whose dad died from Alzheimer’s at the end of this paragraph.
2. He equates keto with intermittent fasting but a 12 hour gap between supper and breakfast is not keto, you are not switching into a fat adapted metabolism away from carbs, you can still eat food without having to measure everything and without being afraid of apples, oats, white potatoes, carbs as this sort of break was natural to us growing up in Ireland and sometimes we’d take toast for supper, and we always had carbs during the day – not keto! Dr John R Christopher and the western Master Herbalist tradition would have done a sort of stint like that, not religiously and often had a fruit breakfast, even orange juice – carbs still being the main fuel and not fat, and not fear and they’ve gotten better healing results than anyone.
3. Sparing on meat: He promotes Plant Based – well plant-high we can agree on but it’s been proved over and over that some people will only do well with meat in their diet and not pigeon portions either. And we’ve had Patrick Holford of Optimum Nutrition UK say he just had to include salmon in his diet, he couldn’t get his nutritional needs met as a vegan. We also have the Paleo Cardiologist Jack Wolfson in the guest lecture series at FMU for all you meat eaters, to see how he stays heart healthy safe with meat, maybe much higher meat than most peeps!
4. Lack of Resistant Starch: He promotes non-starchy vegetables but we’ve just had Alan Christianson give an hour lecture at Murray’s HPOF summit on white potatoes being a ‘cure-all’ resistant starch, put some butter on there and you amp up the butyrate and you’ve got a diet we’ve been on in Ireland for hundreds of years and thriving on. Dr Max Gerson MD had white potatotes on his cancer therapy protocol over 100 years ago, to be eaten twice a day! And Dr Michael Murray has just added them to his diet at 60 years of age because ‘the research on them is pretty recent’ lol, what does that tell you about culture, the history of healing, and the ‘research’?! And also what does it suggest to be putting healthy people on it now to avoid Alzheimer’s? Illogical on all fronts! Theory on Bredesen’s part, and Silverman here unfortunately in his attempt to showcase him. Silverman is one of my favorite speakers but he has bought into this more than he needed to.
5. Glycemic Index vs Glycemic Load : He states foods with a GI under 35 but that falls into the glycemic index vs glycemic load fallacy- it’s the fiber that makes all the difference and ‘glycemic index’ is a total fallacy.
6. Fear of Fruits, Veggies, Juices: This error then leads them further to not want to eat most fruits and many vegetables and bans fruit juices but this is jumping from one fallacy to another and tying again into the current low carb keto fad currently in fashion out there – a world where you have to be afraid of good real food really raises a red flag immediately as to the philosophy behind the diet, and yes they are philosophically based not nutritionally based eating. And look at the older schools of healing that had entire Incurables Programs based on fruit juices including the so-called ‘sweet’ ones eg Gerson therapy uses carrot and apple juice but with a proper juicer nothing less than a double masticating Greenstar to extract the nutrients and within a healing protocol; the Master Herbalists used all sorts of fruit and veg juicing again with a good juicer nothing less than a Champion single auger; and then Ann Wigmore cured her gangrene with a humongous amount of wheatgrass juice /yes false bio circulating about her out there at the mo, she cured gangrene not cancer. I personally used the latter 3 protocols on my healing journey and beat the odds to survive 14 years and counting, I wouldn’t have managed on keto and that’s why I’m so concerned to expose it and it’s lack of basis in our history of health and healing.
7.  Dodgy meal replacements: You’d be better off on something like Vitalerbs or Jurassic greens and EPA than a keto shake or MCT powder, these latter things have not stood the test of time. Real food, even a soup blended would be better. There are other ways to make up protein shakes for ill people but remember he is still talking ‘prevention’ in healthy people here and their digestion should be working! And vanilla or chocolate flavored bone broth is not natural, don’t kid yourself, they shouldn’t even appear in the same sentence.

Here is a very interesting testimony from a man now in his 80’s who said when his dad died of Alzheimer’s 30 years back he had wanted to prevent it happening to himself in the future, and given it was in his family and he is now a very fit alert 82 year old travelling the country with his wife and starting a new business online learning websites – he is living proof how simple it is to lead an anti-Alzheimer’s diet with just fish oil! His total monthly supplement bill now in his 80’s and despite Alzheimer’s running in his family is around $12. Now THAT is prevention!

*I’ve learned in my own case and from the research of Prof Basant Puri way back in 2004 that fish oil won’t work for some people with CFS or ME or any active virus they may not even be aware of in the body, the virus prevents the breakdown of omega 3 to EPA so taking EPA directly in the form of a supplement he formulated called VegEPA at 4g a day reverses cognitive decline and that quantity can be reduced after 6 months. It works very fast in some people to halt that decline, it takes longer to restore what was lost. And other people will have more detective work to do for their cognitive decline.

Prof Puri insisted on EPA not DHA because it is more stable! And it converts to DHA in the body, I’ve never taken DHA at all and it worked for me. The American research now in 2019 is way behind that pre-2004 research in the UK and the supplement lines coming out really should focus on EPA!

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I’ve Recovered from 3 types of Dementia without Keto

And I can add that I’ve recovered from 3 types of dementia as listed on the Bredesen scale, including the case study mold induced form in the Dr Ross guest lecture. I did so without keto and without Bredesen type protocols and with primarily 4g EPA as in vegEPA for the rapid cognitive decline while doing Gerson style high nutrition and juicing and detox and for the other types one was food sensitivity related and then the extreme prolonged mold exposure and I responded better to wheatgrass, herbs, garlic for that, and Master Herbalist herbs and detox which is Western Herbalism – systems based herbalism which now Jay Davidson is beginning to admit is core to his new detox protocols.

– there are many others getting results with different protocols out there but Bredesen happens to be in the limelight at the moment.

• Prof Basant Puri of Imperial College London had the product vegEPA on the market at least as early as 2004 and was recommending 4g per day pure EPA without any DHA back then and getting fantastic results with that – that’s what I used to halt rapid cognitive decline and reverse it and I find it worked much faster than even Dr Michael Murray expects his current omega 3 formula to work, currently in the pipeline at his lab. Prof Puri was not functional medicine, if anything fmed should be improving on his results but to date I haven’t seen anything proposed that is better than that 4g EPA in these protocols.
• There are also two other groups working on reversing dementia in the UK, mentioned by Patrick Holford last year.
• And there is an ALS group in the US who have rejected keto in favor of AKG and AAKG type supplements and the body’s natural metabolism of protein, carbs and fats.
• Take a look at what Naveen Jain of Viome has to say on the endothelial lining not doing well with keto. Also David Katz calling it a fad. Alan Christianson spending an hour talking about resistant starch and white potatoes being the new ‘cureall’ as they are so good for immunity and cancer prevention – not possible to eat them on keto! And then people like Joel Fuhrman and the iThrive docuseres reversing diabetes without keto.

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Beyond Keto

We have some practitioners promoting keto within FMU, we’ve even had a series by Joe Mercola on how to do keto, but we also have those who do not use it – who use Mediterranean type diets, and then we also have those who go beyond keto, for example a recent guest lecture by Dr Michael Jurgelewicz of Designs for Health showed many other ways to upregulate everything in the body without having to use keto – look out for his lecture in the archives inside. He simply looks at what they are aiming for and knows there are other well known ways to achieve that, as well as new supplements. Natural or supplements or both – the education is there to go whichever route you choose but for sure ‘one’ route like keto is not for all or necessary.

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Full Education – Covers ALL Opinions

That is what is missing on the Health Talks Online and other summits and docuseries, they invite their similarly minded friends, the summit is costing in excess fo $30k and they are getting more and more pumped towards selling their own products and creating their own inner membership circles, less actual clinical work with that, but I’m hearing it is just not working out for attendees longterm as regards resolving their health issues.

As you can see Functional Medicine University has ALL the opinions, all the different routes you can choose to take, all the different modalities too. And it’s focused on clinical practice where doctors and practitioners actually practice 😉

Be sure to join Functional Medicine University for the full training in healing modalities and protocols as well as the continuing education and the core CFMP training. Winter enrollment is now open Jan 21st-28th, read all about it here, and there’s an exclusive $250 cashback voucher if you use the link from this site to enroll.

*Sleep Matters guest lecture by Dr Robert Silverman is free to view during winter enrollment week, just remember to come back and use the voucher link here before you enroll in order to qualify for the $250 cashback, this link alone tracks it.