It’d be nice to go on a diet that has a cure for everything, but there’s no such thing. However, there are diets, such as the ketogenic diet, that can help improve many health conditions. In the Body Reboot book, we discuss how going on a low-carb, high-fat diet can reduce body inflammation, help with weight loss, and it may even help with brain disorders. Healthline explains how the ketogenic diet may be therapeutic for brain disorders, such as epilepsy, Parkinson’s disease, and Alzheimer's Disease. There have been multiple studies done to determine whether this low carb diet can help with brain diseases, and we discuss some of the study's results in this article and below.

It is often claimed that glucose is necessary for the brain… and it's true.

Some part of the brain can only burn glucose. That's why the liver produces glucose out of protein if we don't eat any carbs.

But a large part of the brain can also burn ketones, which are formed during starvation or when carbohydrate intake is very low.

This is the mechanism behind the ketogenic diet, which has been used for decades to treat epilepsy in children who don't respond to drug treatment.

In many cases, this diet can cure children of epilepsy. In one study, over half of children on a ketogenic diet had a greater than 50% reduction in seizures. 16% of the children became seizure free.

Very low-carb/ketogenic diets are now being studied for other brain disorders as well, including Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease.

For example, The Lancet Neurology did a study on how the keto diet may treat children who weren’t responding to epilepsy treatment. They discovered that a low-carb, high-fat diet could help treat children and ease their symptoms.

The ketogenic diet has been widely and successfully used to treat children with drug-resistant epilepsy since the 1920s. The aim of this study was to test the efficacy of the ketogenic diet in a randomised controlled trial.

Methods
145 children aged between 2 and 16 years who had at least daily seizures (or more than seven seizures per week), had failed to respond to at least two antiepileptic drugs, and had not been treated previously with the ketogenic diet participated in a randomised controlled trial of its efficacy to control seizures. Enrolment for the trial ran between December, 2001, and July, 2006. Children were seen at one of two hospital centres or a residential centre for young people with epilepsy. Children were randomly assigned to receive a ketogenic diet, either immediately or after a 3-month delay, with no other changes to treatment (control group). Neither the family nor investigators were blinded to the group assignment. Early withdrawals were recorded, and seizure frequency on the diet was assessed after 3 months and compared with that of the controls. The primary endpoint was a reduction in seizures; analysis was intention to treat. Tolerability of the diet was assessed by questionnaire at 3 months. The trial is registered with ClinicalTrials.gov, number NCT00564915.

Findings
73 children were assigned to the ketogenic diet and 72 children to the control group. Data from 103 children were available for analysis: 54 on the ketogenic diet and 49 controls. Of those who did not complete the trial, 16 children did not receive their intervention, 16 did not provide adequate data, and ten withdrew from the treatment before the 3-month review, six because of intolerance. After 3 months, the mean percentage of baseline seizures was significantly lower in the diet group than in the controls (62·0% vs 136·9%, 75% decrease, 95% CI 42.4–107.4%; p<0·0001). 28 children (38%) in the diet group had greater than 50% seizure reduction compared with four (6%) controls (p<0·0001), and five children (7%) in the diet group had greater than 90% seizure reduction compared with no controls (p=0·0582). There was no significant difference in the efficacy of the treatment between symptomatic generalised or symptomatic focal syndromes. The most frequent side-effects reported at 3-month review were constipation, vomiting, lack of energy, and hunger.

Interpretation
The results from this trial of the ketogenic diet support its use in children with treatment-intractable epilepsy.

There have been more studies on other brain disorders such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson’s disease. This is what they have discovered so far:

The ketogenic diet has been in clinical use for over 80 years, primarily for the symptomatic treatment of epilepsy. A recent clinical study has raised the possibility that exposure to the ketogenic diet may confer long-lasting therapeutic benefits for patients with epilepsy. Moreover, there is evidence from uncontrolled clinical trials and studies in animal models that the ketogenic diet can provide symptomatic and disease-modifying activity in a broad range of neurodegenerative disorders including Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease, and may also be protective in traumatic brain injury and stroke. These observations are supported by studies in animal models and isolated cells that show that ketone bodies, especially β-hydroxybutyrate, confer neuroprotection against diverse types of cellular injury. This review summarizes the experimental, epidemiological and clinical evidence indicating that the ketogenic diet could have beneficial effects in a broad range of brain disorders characterized by the death of neurons. Although the mechanisms are not yet well defined, it is plausible that neuroprotection results from enhanced neuronal energy reserves, which improve the ability of neurons to resist metabolic challenges, and possibly through other actions including antioxidant and anti-inflammatory effect.

Recent studies have raised the possibility that the ketogenic diet could provide symptomatic benefit and might even be disease modifying in Alzheimer’s disease. Thus, Reger et al. (2004) found that acute administration of medium-chain triglycerides improves memory performance in Alzheimer’s disease patients. Further, the degree of memory improvement was positively correlated with plasma levels of β-hydroxybutyrate produced by oxidation of the medium-chain triglycerides. If β-hydroxybutyrate is responsible for the memory improvement, then the ketogenic diet, which results in elevated β-hydroxybutyrate levels, would also be expected to improve memory function. When a patient is treated for epilepsy with the ketogenic diet, a high carbohydrate meal can rapidly reverse the antiseizure effect of the diet (Huttenlocher, 1976). It is therefore of interest that high carbohydrate intake worsens cognitive performance and behavior in patients with Alzheimer’s disease (Henderson, 2004; Young et al., 2005).

It is also possible that the ketogenic diet could ameliorate Alzheimer’s disease by providing greater amounts of essential fatty acids than normal or high carbohydrate diets (Cunnane et al., 2002; Henderson, 2004). This is because consumption of foods or artificial supplements rich in essential fatty acids may decrease the risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease (Ruitenberg et al., 2001; Barberger-Gateau et al., 2002; Morris et al., 2003a, b).

One recently published clinical study tested the effects of the ketogenic diet on symptoms of Parkinson’s disease (VanItallie et al., 2005). In this uncontrolled study, Parkinson’s disease patients experienced a mean of 43% reduction in Unified Parkinson’s Disease Rating Scale scores after a 28-day exposure to the ketogenic diet. All participating patients reported moderate to very good improvement in symptoms. Further, as in Alzheimer’s disease, consumption of foods containing increased amounts of essential fatty acids has been associated with a lower risk of developing Parkinson’s disease (de Lau et al., 2005).

In conclusion, the Behav Pharmacol. 2006 Sep. study revealed that the keto diet provides many benefits to combatting brain disorders:

A wide variety of evidence suggests that the ketogenic diet could have beneficial disease-modifying effects in epilepsy and also in a broad range of neurological disorders characterized by death of neurons. Although the mechanism by which the diet confers neuroprotection is not fully understood, effects on cellular energetics are likely to play a key role. It has long been recognized that the ketogenic diet is associated with increased circulating levels of ketone bodies, which represent a more efficient fuel in the brain, and there may also be increased numbers of brain mitochondria. It is plausible that the enhanced energy production capacity resulting from these effects would confer neurons with greater ability to resist metabolic challenges. Additionally, biochemical changes induced by the diet – including the ketosis, high serum fat levels, and low serum glucose levels – could contribute to protection against neuronal death by apoptosis and necrosis through a multitude of additional mechanisms, including antioxidant and antiinflammatory actions. Theoretically, the ketogenic diet might have greater efficacy in children than in adults, inasmuch as younger brains have greater capacity to transport and utilize ketone bodies as an energy source (Rafiki et al., 2003; Vannucci and Simpson, 2003; Pierre and Pellerin, 2005).

Controlled clinical trials are required to confirm the utility of the diet as a disease-modifying approach in any of the conditions in which it has been proposed to be effective. A greater understanding of the underlying mechanisms, however, should allow the diet to be more appropriately studied. Indeed, there are many as yet unanswered questions about the use of the diet. For example, in epilepsy, how long an exposure to the diet is necessary? Do short periods of exposure to the diet confer long-term benefit? Why can the protective effects of the diet be readily reversed by exposure to carbohydrates in some but not all patients? In situations of acute neuronal injury, can the diet be administered after the neuronal injury, and if so, what time window is available? Does monitoring the diet through measurements of biochemical parameters improve efficacy and, if so, what is the best marker to monitor? Finally, the most fundamental research questions are what role ketosis plays, if any, in the therapeutic effects of the diet, and whether low glucose levels contribute to or are necessary for its symptomatic or proposed disease-modifying activity.

Moreover, a better understanding of the mechanisms may provide insights into ketogenic diet-inspired therapeutic approaches that eliminate the need for strict adherence to the diet, which is unpalatable, difficult to maintain, and is associated with side effects such as hyperuricemia and nephrolithiasis, and adverse effects on bone health and the liver (Freeman et al., 2006). A variety of approaches have been devised that allow ketosis to be obtained without the need to consume a high fat, low carbohydrate diet. The simplest is the direct administration of ketone bodies, such as through the use of the sodium salt form of β-hydroxybutyrate. Toxicological studies in animals have demonstrated that β-hydroxybutyrate sodium is well tolerated, and that theoretical risks such as acidosis and sodium and osmotic overload can be avoided by careful monitoring of blood parameters (Smith et al., 2005). Intravenous β-hydroxybutyrate has the potential to provide neuroprotection against ischemia during some surgical procedures, such as cardiopulmonary bypass. Owing to its short half-life, β-hydroxybutyrate sodium is, however, not suitable for long-term therapy in the treatment of chronic neurodegenerative disorders. In these circumstances, orally bioavailable polymers of β-hydroxybutyrate and its derivatives with improved pharmacokinetic properties may be of utility (Veech, 2004; Smith et al., 2005). Another interesting alternative to the ketogenic diet is the administration of metabolic precursors of ketone bodies. Among potential precursor molecules, 1,3-butanediol and 1,3-butanediol acetoacetate esters have been most extensively studied. These compounds are metabolized in a chain of enzymatic reactions in the plasma and liver to the same ketone bodies that are produced during the ketogenic diet (Desrochers et al., 1992, 1995; Ciraolo et al., 1995). Although each of the aforementioned alternatives is still early in development, the idea of developing the ketogenic diet in a ‘pill’ is very attractive and may be approachable.

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Sources: Healthline, Science Direct: Lancet Neurology, Volume 7, Issue 6, June 2008, Behav Pharmacol. 2006 Sep., NCBI: CNS Drug Rev. 2005