More Likely Knock-on Effects of the Neolithic Agricultural Revolution

And the consequent modern difficulty of following Grace Slick’s advice to feed our heads

Human beings with their tampering do something wrong, leave the damage unrepaired, and when the adverse results accumulate, work with all their might to correct them.  When the corrective actions appear to be successful, they come to view these measures as splendid accomplishments.  People do this over and over again.  It is as if a fool were to stomp on and break the tiles of his roof. Then when it starts to rain and the ceiling begins to rot away, he hastily climbs up to mend the damage, rejoicing in the end that he has accomplished a miraculous solution.

— Masanobu Fukuoka, 1978, The One-Straw Revolution

Introduction

Pacheco, Easterling, and Pryer (1965) combined the observation that some schizophrenic patients exhibit strong cravings for carbohydrates immediately before their mental illness worsens, and the fact that the risky but beneficial schizophrenia treatments of that time – electroshock therapy and insulin-induced diabetic coma – temporarily induce high levels of blood ketones in so treated patients, to reason that schizophrenic symptoms might be somehow triggered or caused by faulty carbohydrate metabolism.¹

Carbohydrate consumption seemed to Pacheco et al. to exacerbate this particular mental illness, while inducing a changeover to fat-burning ketogenesis rather than carbohydrate-burning by applying electroshock or insulin shock therapy, reduced schizophrenia symptoms.  Speculating accordingly that ketogenic diets might therefore improve schizophrenia with much less risk to the patient,  Pacheco et al. conducted a small-scale clinical trial that placed 10 female chronic schizophrenics on a low carbohydrate ketogenic diet for two weeks with the following results:

“The Beckomberga Rating Scale for the S-Factor, which was especially constructed to determine clinical change in schizophrenic patients was considered by the authors to be the most promising of the three measures used. This scale was administered to all patients 3 times: during the first 2 days of the study, after 2 weeks on the diet, and one week after discontinuing the diet. During an interview with the patient, ratings were made independently by one of the authors (A.P.) and by a Clinical Psychology Intern. After the interview the two raters discussed each item and then made a joint rating. These joint ratings were considered to be reliable since high statistical agreement was obtained between the independent ratings of the psychiatrist and psychologist at each of the 3 rating periods.

Rather than tabulate the various scores, the results on the Beckomberga scale can be summarized as follows: The average of the scores showed a statistically significant decrease in symptomatology after 2 weeks on the ketogenic diet. The third rating, taken one week after discontinuing the diet, showed that in 7 of the 10 patients there was a slight to fairly large increase in symptomatology. Although these changes were not significantly different from the second rating, they were still significantly better than the initial rating.”

Psychiatrist Christopher Palmer, in his 2022 book, “Brain Energy”, reports that the original observations and conjectures of Pacheco et al. have recently led to something of a revolution in the understanding and treatment of a wide range of previously chronic mental disorders.

Evidently, a wide variety of intransigent mental illnesses like schizophrenia, major depression, and bipolar disorder – and irritating and debilitating mental states like chronic anxiety – all can often be lessened or extinguished if the inflicted consistently take steps to raise their blood ketone levels and lower their blood glucose and insulin levels.  One way of doing this – the original Pacheco et al. dietary approach -- is for the sufferers to permanently drop all, or nearly all, carbohydrate foods from their daily diets and dwell in a state of nutritional ketosis. 

Georgia Ede (like Palmer, also a psychiatrist), in her more technical and more recent complementary book to Palmer’s about the positive effects of elevated serum ketones on mental health conditions, points out, moreover, that vigorous exercise, caloric restriction, and intermittent fasting (including that daily fasting undergone throughout an undisturbed night’s sleep) also significantly raise levels of blood ketones, and thereby help accomplish much the same mentally beneficial effects as carbohydrate minimization or avoidance.²

According to both Palmer and Ede, the significant improvement in symptoms of  chronic mental health problems achieved by undertaking a low carbohydrate diet is the result of a general improvement in cellular metabolism that is obtained by increased use of fat-derived ketones (rather than just carbohydrate-derived glucose) to meet the fuel needs of the body’s energy-producing mitochondria – especially those mitochondria inhabiting brain cells.

Looking at Elevated Blood Ketones -- and Better Mental (and Physical) Health -- from the Perspective of the Evolutionary Discordance Hypothesis

The authors Palmer and Ede are both practicing psychiatrists -- so are chiefly concerned with mental and physical health problems taking place in the here and now.  But what if their observation that elevated blood ketone levels therapeutically ‘alleviates’ the various human mental disorders they see each day is an exactly backasswards and basically confused way of looking at things?  What if it is more to the point to approach the matter by obeying our genome and behaving at the outset in ways that avoid causing damage to a set of otherwise long-evolved and wholly functional biological systems?

In other words, what if episodically cycling into dietary ketosis -- like our Pleistocene ancestors often had to do, due to their much higher levels of physical activity, sporadic lack of food, and the former general scarcity of dietary carbohydrate food sources – is what our evolutionary history requires for the proper care and maintenance of most, if not all, of our mental and other biological systems?

Important Possible Social Impacts of Breaking Evolutionary Rank with Our Pleistocene Heritage

Mental Health America reports:

“Nearly 1 in 5 American adults will have a diagnosable mental health condition in any given year.

46 percent of Americans will meet the criteria for a diagnosable mental health condition sometime in their life, and half of those people will develop conditions by the age of 14.”

What are some of the possible social and cultural ramifications of the fact that almost 50% of the American public is mentally ill during some time in its life – and what if this is the simple result of most of Americans not moving and eating in ways consistent with its evolutionarily-imposed requirement to make frequent use of ketones as an energy source?

Mental difficulties have more than personal ramifications.  For example, according to the American Psychological Association (2021), an affliction with the most common serious mental disorders is an apparent multiplier (~4X) of the normal or basal frequency of human-against-human violence:

“Overall, people with serious mental illness — which generally refers to those with major depressive disorder, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and schizoaffective disorder — are somewhat more likely than members of the general public to commit acts of violence, research shows. A study by Richard A. Van Dorn, PhD, of RTI International, and colleagues, for example, found that in a nationally representative community sample of 34,653 people from the National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions, 2.9% of people with serious mental illness had committed violent acts between 2 and 4 years following the study’s baseline, compared with 0.8% of people with no serious mental illness or substance use disorder. However, 10% of people with both serious mental illness and substance use disorder committed such acts during that time (Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology, Vol. 47, No. 3, 2012).”

Short of physical violence, are there any other common modern problems in America that might be causally related to American discordance with the metabolic mandates evolved and embedded in the human genome during and before the Pleistocene?

Palmer (ibid., Chapter 8) proposes that all mental disorders can be categorized generically as “delirium” with two subcategories -- transient delirium and chronic delirium.  He says this because all mentally ill people exhibit the mental disturbance of delirium from time to time, a fact consistent with an underlying mitochondrial dysfunction in the brain.  He defines delirium per se here:

“Delirium is a serious condition defined as an acute mental disturbance. The word “acute” means that it happens rapidly. The “mental disturbance” can be any psychiatric symptom — confusion, disorientation, distractibility, fixation on certain topics, hallucinations, delusions, mood changes, anxiety, agitation, withdrawal, dramatic changes in sleep, and personality changes. Every single symptom of any psychiatric disorder can occur during delirium. Even changes in eating behaviors and perception of body image that mimic an eating disorder have been observed during delirium.”

To repeat, in Palmer’s (and Ede’s) view, if a person has any basic psychiatric disorder caused by neurological/mitochondrial energy deficits that could be ameliorated by a ketogenic diet, sufficient exercise, and/or occasional fasting, then there is an extremely high probability that they will also episodically (acute delirium) or regularly (chronic delirium) evidence confusion, disorientation, distractibility, fixation on certain topics, hallucinations, delusions, mood changes, anxiety, agitation, withdrawal, dramatic changes in sleep, and personality changes.

Do any of these symptoms of mental illness and its attendant delirium sound culturally, socially, and politically familiar?  

1. It has since been found that schizophrenics have a 2-5X’s greater likelihood of developing Type II diabetes – a fact supporting the early Pacheco et al. hypothesis that schizophrenics have difficulty metabolizing carbohydrates.

2. For a scientific review of the various means of raising blood ketone levels in humans, see “Intermittent metabolic switching, neuroplasticity and brain health”.