My guest is Dr. Chris Palmer, M.D., a board-certified psychiatrist and professor at Harvard Medical School. He explains how specific nutrition, exercise, supplement-based, and other factors can improve mitochondrial health and thereby provide relief from adult and childhood ADHD, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and symptoms of autism. We discuss mitochondrial biology, whether vaccines can impact inflammation and mitochondrial health, and the potential ramifications. We also review creatine, methylene blue, and urolithin A, as well as the role of B vitamins and iron in treating depression. By the end of this episode, you will understand the powerful link between metabolic health and mental health, and the lifestyle, dietary, and other factors you can leverage to help overcome common mental health challenges and disorders. Read the episode show notes at hubermanlab.com. We want to hear from you. Take our quick survey to help improve Huberman Lab. Thank you to our sponsors AG1: https://drinkag1.com/huberman Our Place: https://fromourplace.com/huberman LMNT: https://drinklmnt.com/huberman Eight Sleep: https://eightsleep.com/huberman Function: https://functionhealth.com/huberman Timestamps 00:00:00 Dr. Chris Palmer 00:02:15 Integrating Metabolic, Mental & Physical Health; Childhood Trauma & Risk 00:10:46 Sponsors: Our Place & LMNT 00:13:44 Depression Causes, Molecule Model?, Neuroplasticity?; Metabolism 00:22:20 Mitochondrial Functions, Stress Response, Mental Health 00:31:09 Sponsors: AG1 & Eight Sleep 00:33:59 Mitochondrial Health & 6 Pillars of Lifestyle Medicine 00:39:38 Stimulants, Mitochondria, Dopamine; Alcohol 00:45:47 Nicotine; Substance Use, Metabolic Health & Disease 00:52:23 Children, Energy & Metabolic Function; Diseases of Aging & Mental Disorders 00:59:18 Sponsor: Function 01:01:06 Diet & Metabolism; Ultra-Processed Foods, Additives, GRAS 01:09:30 Rebellious Spirit, Ultra-Processed Foods & Food Industry Funding 01:19:14 Ketogenic Diet, Epilepsy, Schizophrenia, Bipolar 01:22:52 Ketogenic Diet, Fasting & Mitochondria; Gut Microbiome, Brain Metabolism 01:30:06 Low-Fat Diets; Tool: Occasional Fasts; Ketogenic Diet; Intermittent Fasting 01:38:40 Nutrition Research, Food Industry Lobbyists; Ultra-Processed Foods, Addiction 01:46:55 Creatine & Mitochondrial Health 01:52:34 Methylene Blue & Mitochondria; Serotonin Syndrome 02:02:58 Urolithin A, Mitochondria Function; Supplements & Appropriate Use 02:11:14 Vitamin Deficiencies, Iron Deficiency 02:16:06 Vitamin B12 & Folate Deficiency, Autoimmune Disorders 02:24:48 Mental Illness & Root Causes 02:29:02 Vaccines, Inflammation, Mitochondria, Autism 02:39:17 Neurodevelopmental Disorder Onset & Follow-Up 02:45:31 Vaccines, Autism, Future Research; Mother Obesity & Diabetes 02:51:23 Father Obesity & Autism; Poor Metabolic Health, Blood Biomarkers 02:56:44 Assessing Metabolic Health & Biomarkers; National Institutes of Health (NIH) 03:02:59 Future Directions, Bridging Mental & Physical Health 03:09:27 Zero-Cost Support, YouTube, Spotify & Apple Follow & Reviews, YouTube Feedback, Protocols Book, Social Media, Neural Network Newsletter Disclaimer & Disclosures
Chapter 1: Who is Dr. Chris Palmer and what is his focus?
Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr. Chris Palmer. Dr. Chris Palmer is a psychiatrist and researcher at Harvard University.
He focuses on how metabolic health and mitochondrial health in particular can be leveraged to treat and in some cases cure psychiatric disorders, including schizophrenia, autism, depression, bipolar and ADHD.
Chapter 2: Can metabolic health influence mental disorders?
Today, we discuss how metabolic health, something we hear a lot about nowadays, is really about mitochondrial health and the specific lifestyle and other factors that you can use to improve mitochondrial number and function. We talk about things like exercise, sleep, sunlight, which you've heard about before, but we talk about those from a different perspective.
And we discuss some things that have never been discussed before on this podcast, at least in light of mitochondrial health. Things such as creatine, methylene blue, nicotine, And we talk about the key role of specific B vitamins and iron in brain function.
We also have a very direct discussion about vaccines and whether or not inflammation caused by vaccines can potentially damage mitochondria, which then leads to mental health challenges. And of course, in that context, we discuss the vaccine autism debate.
We also discuss public health and what is needed to truly change the way people exercise and eat and the rapidly changing landscape of the National Institutes of Health and the CDC. As you'll soon hear, Dr. Palmer gives us a masterclass on mitochondrial function and how to improve this vital aspect of our health.
If you've heard about metabolic health, you've heard about the obesity crisis, that's important. But looking at all of that and approaching it through the lens of mitochondrial health, you'll soon learn is absolutely the way to go.
It's a new perspective that will change the way that you think about mental and physical health and that no doubt will impact your health practices in very positive ways. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.
It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, this episode does include sponsors. And now for my discussion with Dr. Chris Palmer. Dr. Chris Palmer, welcome back. Thank you so much for having me back. I credit you with leading the
call to arms, the public awareness and the implementation of what some people call metabolic psychiatry, but what we could easily just call the relationship between mental and physical health and the use of nutrition. supplementation and where appropriate prescription drugs for the treatment of mental health.
But what do you call this field that you've basically founded and that you're pioneering? There are others, right? But that you're pioneering and how should the general public think about the relationship between mitochondria and their mental health for those that are not aware? Educate us.
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Chapter 3: What role do mitochondria play in mental health?
shorter, they lose 20 years of life because of those adverse childhood experiences. And so is that a mental health issue? I would say it's a physical health issue. It's both. It's both a mental health issue and a physical health issue. And so how can we understand that? How can we understand that trauma in childhood increases risk for heart disease and obesity and diabetes and dementia?
and PTSD and ADHD and substance use disorders and the only way to connect it is through metabolism and ultimately through mitochondria. Unfortunately, people like simple answers, and they're like, so diet will fix everything. I'm like, no, I never said diet will fix everything. But it can help. It can help, and it can be life-changing and life-saving.
I don't want to minimize or step back from my work with dietary interventions. There is no doubt in my mind it can dramatically change people's lives. But it's not just diet. It's lots of other things. And so it's putting it together and trying to make sense of the science for what does cardiovascular disease have to do with depression or PTSD.
On the surface, a lot of people scratch their heads and they really don't know. They assume that, well, one's a brain disorder and one's a heart disorder. And it's like, no. We need to integrate that because all of the risk factors, essentially the same biopsychosocial risk factors that increase risk for heart disease also increase risk for brain disease. And we need to start putting it together.
We need to be more sophisticated. We have computers. We have AI. It's 2025. We can do better. Yes.
Well, first of all, I and I'm sure the listeners really appreciate your humility regarding... who is responsible for the big surge in the interest in this field. So thanks for crediting your predecessors and the others in the field.
At the same time, I credit you with really popularizing a lot of these terms, being willing to go public facing and share about metabolic psychiatry, for lack of a better way to put it. metabolic psychiatry, and really championing these ideas and being open to being part of a medical and science and public discourse community. So I'd be remiss if I didn't say that.
So hopefully you'll take that in.
And if you won't, then- I very much appreciate it. Well, it's true. Thank you very much.
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Chapter 4: Are lifestyle changes effective for mitochondrial health?
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I also drink Element dissolved in water during any kind of physical exercise that I'm doing, especially on hot days when I'm sweating a lot and therefore losing a lot of water and electrolytes. They have a bunch of different great tasting flavors of Element. They have watermelon, citrus, et cetera. Frankly, I love them all.
If you'd like to try Element, you can go to drinkelement.com slash Huberman to claim a free Element sample pack with the purchase of any Element drink mix. Again, that's drinkelement.com slash Huberman to claim a free sample pack. If I think about a mental health condition like depression, let's take depression to start off.
I can just broadly create two columns of things or approaches that one might take. One is this mental model of sort of a molecule deficiency. I'm not saying this, but there are many who at one point thought depression is related to a deficiency in serotonin, or depression is related to a deficiency in dopamine, either levels, regulation,
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Chapter 5: How does diet impact mental and physical health?
So most people know mitochondria as the powerhouse of the cell, if they know it at all. So these tiny little organelles... And the powerhouse of the cell reference means that mitochondria take the breakdown products of the food that we're eating. They are the primary thing using the oxygen that we're breathing in. They are creating the carbon dioxide that we're breathing out.
And that they are turning food into ATP, which is the energy currency of the cell. So they're taking food and oxygen and lots of other things, but let's just simplify food and oxygen, converting it into ATP. And that is what the powerhouse of the cell kind of refers to. There is no doubt they do that.
There is no doubt that when that process stops, humans have about six minutes or so, and then we're dead. That process is critical to life. There is no other process in the human body that you can disrupt. that will kill the organism faster. It is central to living organisms, this production of ATP.
So I don't at all mean to take away or minimize that function, but research over the last 25 years has completely upended that simplistic notion of what mitochondria are doing. They are actually doing so much more. Some people have created the reference that mitochondria are like the workers inside a cell.
that in order for a cell to work, you need a workforce because there's so much that needs to be done. Signals need to be sent. Like all this work, all of these different things need to be functioning. And mitochondria are absolutely providing the energy for those things to happen, but they're also orchestrating a lot of it. So for example,
They play a direct role in converting food into some of the substrates for the production of neurotransmitters. But they also go further. They store some neurotransmitters like GABA within themselves, and that plays a role in GABA's release from a neuron. They actually go to the cell membrane and move along the membrane itself. dispensing vesicles of neurotransmitters.
And when you take the mitochondria away from the synapse but provide that synapse with ATP, vesicles don't get released. Neurotransmitters aren't getting released. The mitochondria are doing more. We don't exactly know what, but they're doing more than just providing the energy They play a role in turning inflammation in immune cells both on and off.
They help start the process, but they also help coordinate the cessation of that process. They play an instrumental role in both the first and the last step in the synthesis of cortisol.
And they play a role in the first step in the synthesis of all of the steroid hormones, which include estrogen, testosterone, progesterone, so that if you have dysregulation of cortisol or if you have dysregulation of testosterone or estrogen or progesterone, you must...
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Chapter 6: What are the mental health benefits of the ketogenic diet?
Again, that's functionhealth.com slash Huberman to get early access to Function. Let's talk about diet and nutrition for a moment. In recent years, you've talked a lot about the clinical use of the ketogenic diet. for various mental health disorders and cited some spectacular results. And this has had a huge impact on everybody's thinking about what ketogenic diets originally were for.
It was developed as a medical treatment for epilepsy, is my understanding. Only later did it become popular as a potential avenue for losing body fat, et cetera. What are some of the ways that people can use diet and nutrition to improve metabolic health generally? But let's be more specific, mitochondrial health, number, turnover, all the good stuff that happens in mitochondria.
um how can nutrition be used um to improve that and why would it be that the ketogenic diet would improve mitochondrial function or is it that the ketogenic diet bypasses the need for standard cellular metabolism by um pulling on some other cellular metabolism um uh mechanisms i'm just trying to draw the link here between uh ketogenic diet and mitochondria because
We've, you've well established that mitochondria are central to this whole picture of mental and physical health.
I'll throw in a plug before I go deep into the ketogenic diet story. But you also threw a question in there about other dietary interventions or how can diet impact. There is no question diet plays a profound, profound and central role to human metabolism and all of the consequences of human metabolism. And you very eloquently laid out the case for early life.
A woman who's breastfeeding her infant, that breast milk has a profound impact on whether that baby's brain develops normally or not. That has dire consequences potentially for the outcome and the health of that child. And it's all about nutrition. We've known that for decades, that if women are malnourished during pregnancy, it impacts that infant's, the fetus's lifespan, really.
It increases risk for mental disorders and metabolic disorders. Increases risk if your mother is starving. while she's pregnant or has to fast or has to go without nutrients, it increases that child's risk for metabolic disorders, obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease. We've known that. And that is, you know, there are lots of theories about obesity around that. It also...
Surprisingly, increases risk for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder and antisocial personality disorder and all sorts of other mental disorders. In terms of other dietary patterns, I just want to, and we can do a deep dive into any of these if you want, and then I'll go on to ketogenic diets, but ultra processed foods. really bad for your physical health and your mental health.
We have just growing body of evidence for that.
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