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Comment by spudlyo | Hacker News Reader

I feel like the field of metabolic psychiatry is a very promising one. I can say from personal experience that switching to a ketogenic diet along with regular monitoring my blood ketone levels has had a huge impact on my ADHD related doldrums. Over the past two years it has helped me with the motivation and drive to lose weight, consistently exercise, and made it easier to create new habits which seem to have stuck. It seems strange that simply (although radically) altering your diet can lead to a life changing virtuous circle, but that's been my experience.

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For others: most people don't need to go full keto. Just reducing sugars in general helps a lot of people. Refined sugars especially.

I also have ADHD and caffeine/sugar make my symptoms way worse. If I abstain from caffeine the difference is huge.

Alcohol is also something that really screws with ADHD. One drink can have weeks of effects.

I think you might want to look into supplementing vitamin B1. In my personal experience sugar is not in itself the problem, but an impaired ability to process, or utilize, sugar can be. Many caffeinated beverages contain B1-inactivating tannins (tea, coffee), and consuming caffeine on an empty stomach, when blood sugar is already low, can cause mild deprivation of nerve tissues leading to impaired functioning.

Alcohol famously disrupts the metabolism of B1, making it ineffective in the body. In the extreme case it causes the Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome which is exactly related to B1 metabolism.

The "insulinergic" role of potassium and so on in fruit juices also does make them easier to process in this way than something like coca cola.

thanks for the advice but I just don't drink alcohol or caffeine anymore. Why supplement when I can just not do the thing in the first place?

Seems a bit circular, no? Going on a diet to get the motivation to go on a diet. I'd wager a large part of your behavioral change was that you had already changed your behavior to get to that point.

To be fair, I probably wouldn't have been able to do it all if I didn't start out by eliminating work-related stress, which gave me some bandwidth to attempt something difficult. That was the first step in the flywheel, followed by diet, sleep prioritization, exercise, social connections, and structure/routine.

Ymmv but I think the key here is the "virtuous cycle" bit, not the diet. When you gain control over a facet of your life and establish healthy habits, its bound to A) lead to more healthy habuts and B) lead to better mental/psychological hygene which is directly correlated wigh reduced adhd symptoms.

I don't know if you've read Brain Energy by Chris Palmer MD, but you'd probably really like it as a scientific confirmation of what you have experienced.

I used to be ketogenic, but ultimately moved to consuming more simple sugar from fruit juice etc per Ray Peat.

Note: Ray Peat is a crazy person who Twitter bro-science picked up, the kind of guys who were previously into keto and supplements that don't do anything.

They're similar in that they love saturated fat and red meat, and think vegetable oils are bad, but he also wants you to eat ice cream and sugar.

The ice cream part is possibly correct: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/05/ice-cre...

More-or-less, I guess. The methods work well for my feeling good and functioning well. e.g., no more migraines, reduced intensity of springtime allergies, more energy, better resistance to stress, etc.

There's a very, very low chance that consuming fruit juice will improve health.

Consuming fruit, sure.

Juice goes (almost) straight to the bloodstream and messes up an entire range of things (digestion, liver, glycation stuff, etc).

This is a belief that I held for years, leading me to avoid all of that stuff, yet increasing juice intake has been very helpful for feeling good and functioning well.

Then increase fruit instead and get the best of both worlds.

"you'd probably really like it as a scientific confirmation of what you have experienced."

So, bias confirmation? That is the opposite of scientific.

I did use the bad word "confirmation", but I don't think it's harmful to look at scientific dialogue which aligns with what one experiences so as to understand that experience better, from new perspectives, find caveats, etc.

If we believe that our personal experiences can be an ingredient of real knowledge about the world, etc

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