I was diagnosed in 1996, before symptoms started. I am a pianist, suddenly unable to open my hands wide enough to get 8 keys. Nobody in my family had MS, nor my grandparents. Last year a cousin younger than me had MS, she is 40. I have primary progressive MS. I do not walk for the last 18 years, I was born in 1962. I have had 6 strokes and 1 heart attack. The Rebif (beta-1a) did very little to help me. The medical team did even less. After roughly five unending years of trauma in the family my MS developed into progressive. There have been many changes in the last 3 to 4 years. Many falls, many fractured bones, and three moves all in five years. I have gone downhill. Considerably. I used different supplements that didn't work. I started on MS-4 Protocol from www. Limitlessnaturalwellness .com , the MS-4 Protocol immensely helped my Multiple Sclerosis condition, I'm able to walk and the constant fatigues are gone. My life is back. I Adhere anyone reading this to try natural approach.
Agreed. Our diet needs to be improved. I do like the multimodal interventions approach. It says that there are many paths, only exploration can help to identify what suits the individual.
Awesome SubStack, Thank you Dr. Matt for your insights. I’m a 79 year old, who in 2021 was diagnosed with stage 3a kidney disease, NAFLD, hypertension, pre diabetes and over weight. Was offered medication but turned the offer down. Found ketogenic way of eating and intermittent fasting, current medical checks show no sign of any of the diagnosed issues and still on no medications.
What is great for your patients seems to me to be also of huge benefit to all who have metabolic issues.
Keep up your great work, eventually mainstream will catch up and people will be able to live a long healthy life. 🙏😊👍
love this info.......i am using keto/fasting for meningioma and heart health.......exciting times in the improving metabolic health world ... thank you Matt , a very timely article for me and my loved ones....who have all been sent a copy...lol
Thank you for this, I couldn't agree more. It's been my intuition for quite a while that ketogenic (or even paleo/carnivore) diets could be a way of 'system reset'. Rebooting and debugging cellular metabolic machinery, shaking it up from a stuck, rigid state into a more flexible one.
Metabolic flexibility is also seen in the Lean Mass Hyper-Responder (LMHR) phenotype. Carbohydrate restriction raises hepatic output of energy-carrying lipoproteins (with cholesterol as cargo) and simultaneously shifts the brain onto ketones. Intermittent fasting plus a low-carb diet produce this adaptation via mitohormesis—the low-dose stressors of carb restriction and fasting that support mitochondrial and metabolic health.
What fascinates me is the potential ability to cure or prevent more diseases with the same therapy or approach given the common underlying genesis or mechanism that generate the illness.
Combined with the customised medicine, it's going to drastically change the way doctors will treat patients
30 years ago I was an intern in neurological rehabilitation. Now my husband has Parkinson’s disease. In the meantime I studied and worked in public health systems thinking, health promotion and psychology. I love how Martin Pickard and colleagues’ work on mitochondria pulls it all together. And Martin Id love to broadcast your work on my podcast to over 1000 global health leaders.
A healthy brain is not simply an energy-rich brain but an adaptable one, capable of changing its organization in response to circumstances. Consciousness is inherently creative, mobile, and constantly translating itself into physical patterns. The body isn't a machine receiving a fixed quantity of fuel; it is an extraordinarily responsive expression of consciousness. Vitality is not fundamentally a quantity. It is the freedom with which energy can assume different organizations.
Underneath that entire iceberg would be things like beliefs, expectations, emotional patterns, probable realities, and the individual's larger purposes and choices. That does not mean that someone simply consciously “believed themselves into ALS.” That would be a crude rendering of my position. Let us distinguish ordinary conscious intentions from the much larger organization of the psyche.
So where you asks,
What processes are producing dysfunctional mitochondrial behavior?
I add:
What larger pattern of consciousness is the mitochondrial behavior physically expressing?
Let us reinterpret metabolic flexibility as a biological instance of something like: the organism remains healthy partly because it retains many possible responses rather than becoming locked into one habitual response.
The brain isn't the conductor. Consciousness does not originate in the brain. The brain is part of the physical translation mechanism through which consciousness expresses itself within physical reality.
The brain is one section of the orchestra, not the composer.
That would give us 2 parallel processes:
Metabolic flexibility:
glucose ↔ ketones ↔ lactate ↔ other metabolic pathways
Psychological flexibility:
belief A ↔ alternative interpretation ↔ new expectation ↔ new response
These wouldn't necessarily be two independent processes where psychology mysteriously “affects” metabolism. They could be different appearances of the same multidimensional event.
The same physical action can have very different psychological meanings for different individuals. Consequently, fasting or ketogenic eating wouldn't automatically produce some spiritually superior state.
For one person, dietary experimentation might embody curiosity, confidence, and increased possibilities.
For another, the identical diet might embody fear, obsessive monitoring, restriction, and the belief that the body is dangerously defective.
Those aren't equivalent interventions simply because their macronutrients are identical.
Vitality continually seeks new forms. Health involves the organism's freedom to respond, reorganize, experiment, and create rather than compulsively reproducing a fixed pattern.
And that produces a very interesting bridge between the two frameworks:
Article: metabolic rigidity → fewer available energetic responses → vulnerability.
Joseph Mccard: rigid beliefs/expectations → fewer perceived and experienced possibilities → increasingly fixed physical patterns.
Possible synthesis? biological flexibility may be the cellular/physiological face of a much broader flexibility of being.
The neurologist is essentially discovering that the body needs alternatives.
Yes, and so does consciousness.
FWIW, The really interesting next question would be about mitohormesis specifically, the article's idea that modest challenges can make mitochondria more resilient.
After going over the particulars of my de novo variant with me, my geneticist peered at me over his glasses and asked “HOW are you functional?” The tools I use are endless. But two HUGE sections of my toolkit are diet and exercise. Here is the thing… within each section of my toolkit I use many individual tools depending upon the context in which I find myself and how my body is functioning in that moment. I have become adept at holding several tools at one time, dropping tools, and grabbing others. Life happens, my body shifts, I choose my tools and flow keeps going.
This means that I do not eat the same way all the time, but that I do know how to eat differently (for however long is required) to maintain optimal function. The same thing goes for exercise.
I was diagnosed in 1996, before symptoms started. I am a pianist, suddenly unable to open my hands wide enough to get 8 keys. Nobody in my family had MS, nor my grandparents. Last year a cousin younger than me had MS, she is 40. I have primary progressive MS. I do not walk for the last 18 years, I was born in 1962. I have had 6 strokes and 1 heart attack. The Rebif (beta-1a) did very little to help me. The medical team did even less. After roughly five unending years of trauma in the family my MS developed into progressive. There have been many changes in the last 3 to 4 years. Many falls, many fractured bones, and three moves all in five years. I have gone downhill. Considerably. I used different supplements that didn't work. I started on MS-4 Protocol from www. Limitlessnaturalwellness .com , the MS-4 Protocol immensely helped my Multiple Sclerosis condition, I'm able to walk and the constant fatigues are gone. My life is back. I Adhere anyone reading this to try natural approach.
Agreed. Our diet needs to be improved. I do like the multimodal interventions approach. It says that there are many paths, only exploration can help to identify what suits the individual.
Awesome SubStack, Thank you Dr. Matt for your insights. I’m a 79 year old, who in 2021 was diagnosed with stage 3a kidney disease, NAFLD, hypertension, pre diabetes and over weight. Was offered medication but turned the offer down. Found ketogenic way of eating and intermittent fasting, current medical checks show no sign of any of the diagnosed issues and still on no medications.
What is great for your patients seems to me to be also of huge benefit to all who have metabolic issues.
Keep up your great work, eventually mainstream will catch up and people will be able to live a long healthy life. 🙏😊👍
love this info.......i am using keto/fasting for meningioma and heart health.......exciting times in the improving metabolic health world ... thank you Matt , a very timely article for me and my loved ones....who have all been sent a copy...lol
Did the als patient stay on keto for 18 months or did he have breaks in between to create the flexibility?
Would this diet be useful for women? I understand the theoretical framework could be generalized.
Thank you for this, I couldn't agree more. It's been my intuition for quite a while that ketogenic (or even paleo/carnivore) diets could be a way of 'system reset'. Rebooting and debugging cellular metabolic machinery, shaking it up from a stuck, rigid state into a more flexible one.
Metabolic flexibility is also seen in the Lean Mass Hyper-Responder (LMHR) phenotype. Carbohydrate restriction raises hepatic output of energy-carrying lipoproteins (with cholesterol as cargo) and simultaneously shifts the brain onto ketones. Intermittent fasting plus a low-carb diet produce this adaptation via mitohormesis—the low-dose stressors of carb restriction and fasting that support mitochondrial and metabolic health.
What fascinates me is the potential ability to cure or prevent more diseases with the same therapy or approach given the common underlying genesis or mechanism that generate the illness.
Combined with the customised medicine, it's going to drastically change the way doctors will treat patients
30 years ago I was an intern in neurological rehabilitation. Now my husband has Parkinson’s disease. In the meantime I studied and worked in public health systems thinking, health promotion and psychology. I love how Martin Pickard and colleagues’ work on mitochondria pulls it all together. And Martin Id love to broadcast your work on my podcast to over 1000 global health leaders.
A healthy brain is not simply an energy-rich brain but an adaptable one, capable of changing its organization in response to circumstances. Consciousness is inherently creative, mobile, and constantly translating itself into physical patterns. The body isn't a machine receiving a fixed quantity of fuel; it is an extraordinarily responsive expression of consciousness. Vitality is not fundamentally a quantity. It is the freedom with which energy can assume different organizations.
Underneath that entire iceberg would be things like beliefs, expectations, emotional patterns, probable realities, and the individual's larger purposes and choices. That does not mean that someone simply consciously “believed themselves into ALS.” That would be a crude rendering of my position. Let us distinguish ordinary conscious intentions from the much larger organization of the psyche.
So where you asks,
What processes are producing dysfunctional mitochondrial behavior?
I add:
What larger pattern of consciousness is the mitochondrial behavior physically expressing?
Let us reinterpret metabolic flexibility as a biological instance of something like: the organism remains healthy partly because it retains many possible responses rather than becoming locked into one habitual response.
The brain isn't the conductor. Consciousness does not originate in the brain. The brain is part of the physical translation mechanism through which consciousness expresses itself within physical reality.
The brain is one section of the orchestra, not the composer.
That would give us 2 parallel processes:
Metabolic flexibility:
glucose ↔ ketones ↔ lactate ↔ other metabolic pathways
Psychological flexibility:
belief A ↔ alternative interpretation ↔ new expectation ↔ new response
These wouldn't necessarily be two independent processes where psychology mysteriously “affects” metabolism. They could be different appearances of the same multidimensional event.
The same physical action can have very different psychological meanings for different individuals. Consequently, fasting or ketogenic eating wouldn't automatically produce some spiritually superior state.
For one person, dietary experimentation might embody curiosity, confidence, and increased possibilities.
For another, the identical diet might embody fear, obsessive monitoring, restriction, and the belief that the body is dangerously defective.
Those aren't equivalent interventions simply because their macronutrients are identical.
Vitality continually seeks new forms. Health involves the organism's freedom to respond, reorganize, experiment, and create rather than compulsively reproducing a fixed pattern.
And that produces a very interesting bridge between the two frameworks:
Article: metabolic rigidity → fewer available energetic responses → vulnerability.
Joseph Mccard: rigid beliefs/expectations → fewer perceived and experienced possibilities → increasingly fixed physical patterns.
Possible synthesis? biological flexibility may be the cellular/physiological face of a much broader flexibility of being.
The neurologist is essentially discovering that the body needs alternatives.
Yes, and so does consciousness.
FWIW, The really interesting next question would be about mitohormesis specifically, the article's idea that modest challenges can make mitochondria more resilient.
After going over the particulars of my de novo variant with me, my geneticist peered at me over his glasses and asked “HOW are you functional?” The tools I use are endless. But two HUGE sections of my toolkit are diet and exercise. Here is the thing… within each section of my toolkit I use many individual tools depending upon the context in which I find myself and how my body is functioning in that moment. I have become adept at holding several tools at one time, dropping tools, and grabbing others. Life happens, my body shifts, I choose my tools and flow keeps going.
This means that I do not eat the same way all the time, but that I do know how to eat differently (for however long is required) to maintain optimal function. The same thing goes for exercise.
For me, flexibility yields functionality.