To some extent, Americans are talking about alcohol more than ever. We're having open conversations about the negative health impacts of drinking. People are consuming less booze overall and examining strategies to moderate, even as each drink packs more punch. There is one aspect of alcohol we're still not talking about: addiction, and, more precisely, the medical treatments available to combat it. What's even odder - your doctor may not know much about them, either.
Could he be right? I think so, but partly because it doesn't take much to clear a low bar-there haven't been many exciting drugs for alcohol addiction. The last one was approved twenty years ago, and it was really just an injectable version of a medication that first came on the market during the Reagan Administration. Meanwhile, alcohol-related deaths in the U.S. have roughly doubled in those decades.
The ketogenic diet (KD) is unique in improving symptoms for many conditions, from epilepsy to addiction, according to a recent JAMA Psychiatry article. It's a high-fat, very-low-carbohydrate nutritional therapy that shifts the body's from glucose dependence to ketone production as the primary fuel source. Increasing evidence implicates metabolic dysfunction, neuroinflammation, and neurotransmitter imbalance in psychiatric and addictive disorders-domains directly influenced by ketosis.
I was addicted to alcohol for more than 15 years. What started as binge drinking in high school and college became a pattern of blackouts, emergency room visits, regret and shame.
