From Brain Fog to Parkinson’s: How Metabolic Health Impacts Cognitive Function with Dr. Melanie Tidman

Ruth Soukup: What if the key to protecting your brain and maybe even slowing neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s wasn’t found in a pill, but in what you eat? Today’s guest has spent her entire career studying the connection between metabolic health, cognitive decline, and chronic illness, and what she’s discovered could change everything you think you know about how we age and how much control we actually have.

Welcome to the Feel Better Live Free podcast, brought to you by Thin. I’m your host, Ruth Soukup, and here we’ll talk about everything from the science of weight loss to practical tips for making your health a priority in the midst of a busy life. It is a little bit nerdy, a little bit funny, and a little bit revolutionary.

So buckle up friend, because it’s about to get real.

For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Ruth Soukup and I’m the founder of Thinlicious and the creator of the Thin Adapted System, as well as the New York Times bestselling author of seven books. And today we are chatting with the incredible Dr.

Melanie Tidman, a true pioneer when it comes to connecting the dots. Between chronic illness, cognitive function, and nutrition. With more than 45 years of experience in occupational therapy, educational psychology, and health science, Dr. Tudman has helped thousands of patients improve their outcomes, not just by treating symptoms, but by getting to the root causes.

She currently serves as the director of clinical Research for the Colorado Parkinson Foundation, where she’s led groundbreaking studies exploring how ketogenic nutrition and metabolic therapies can support brain health in patients with Parkinson’s diseases and other neuro degenerative conditions. Try saying that three times fast.

She also chairs the research academy at the Society of Metabolic Health Practitioners, helping other clinicians learn how to conduct meaningful life-changing research. She’s pretty amazing and today she is sharing some truly eye-opening insights. I know what’s actually happening in the brain during chronic illness, how metabolic health plays a critical role, and what you can start doing right now to protect and support your brain for the long haul.

This is such an important conversation, especially if you are worried about aging well or protecting your cognitive health, or if you know anyone who is struggling with any sort of neurodegenerative condition, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s. There’s a lot to get from this conversation, so let’s dive right in.

Thank you so much for being here. I am so excited to talk to you about this topic today. 

Dr. Melanie Tidman: Well, it’s wonderful to meet you, Ruth, and to be, uh, on your, on your program. And I love talking about, uh, this research in Parkinson’s and, and other things that I’m doing, so thank you. You’re welcome. 

Ruth Soukup: So, so I’m just gonna start with the question that I ask everybody who, uh, comes on the podcast.

But let’s just hear the overview of who you are, what you do, and how you got to be doing what you are now. 

Dr. Melanie Tidman: Okay. Thanks so much. Well, I believe everyone is kind of born with a mission. I knew that I wanted to help people with their health since I was six years old. So. I feel very privileged that for 45 years I’ve been an occupational therapist, working mostly in neurological and neurodegenerative disease and neurosurgery intensive care.

Starting in newborns clear through. My oldest patient was 105. Um, and through that journey, uh, I just. Develop such a love for patients and just being able to help them however I could. Well then I ended up being a patient, you know, there’s nothing better, in some ways, harder for a medical professional. I.

Then to become a patient. Yes. And to see what the other side of that feels like. So I went on off after my occupational therapy degree to get a master’s degree in educational psychology, really looking at the mental health needs of my patients, and then decided I wanted to do research. So I got a doctoral degree, uh, in health science and, and.

You know, that was kind of my educational journey. Well, in 2013, after a lifetime of really being very health conscious, I was mostly a vegetarian, very little if ever, red meat. I exercised. I got sicker and sicker and sicker, and in 2013, had developed some rather severe symptoms. And I, I, you know, I’m really thankful for this.

Even though it was kind of the darkest time of my life, I got to experience what my poor patients experience. Mm. Going from specialist to specialist to specialist. Nobody could tell me what was wrong. And my symptoms were just getting worse and worse. And I was on five major medications and I had heart, a heart condition, and I, uh, it was, you name it, it was there.

And I ended up at Mayo Clinic where somebody at, they, they found a small brain tumor at Mayo Clinic, but then they said, you know, look at your diet. Investigate your diet. So I came home and I delved deep into all of the neurological research, which I had worked in, uh, neurology, neurosurgery for years. And then I really felt like I was led to the first low carb summit in South Africa where the research they presented was just this eye-opening experience for me.

And so being the type A individual I am, I came home, I downloaded like 1200 studies. I read studies. I, I just said, okay, I’ve been mostly pseudo vegetarian for years. I’m gonna swing in the other direction and relate to that. Oh yeah. I mean, that’s just how I do life, right? And so within a month, my symptoms were gone.

Within six months I was off my medications and within a, within a year, I had no brain tumor. I had no medical conditions. I was on no meds. I was lifting heavy power lifting. I was teaching aerobic dance classes, which I still do that. And. It was just one of those miracles that I feel very privileged that I got to experience and then.

Right after that, I think it was just within, you know, just a few weeks. Uh, my mother’s neighbor was on the board of the Colorado Parkinson Foundation and we were talking, and she knew through my mother that I had had all these medical conditions. I was just not in a good place. And then we started talking.

I said, well, they’re all gone. And I’m on nom meds and the conditions they said couldn’t be cured or gone, and this is how I did it. And she and the board at the Colorado Parkinson Foundation said, we, we need help with our health. We’re, we’re all just declining. Well, several of them go on a full blown ketogenic approach.

They’re getting better, they’re getting off meds. They’re starting to do just their life. The quality of their life just changed. And so the board at CPF contacted me and said, we want you to, to research in Parkinson’s using Ketogenics and. How much money do you need? And from 2018 till the present, uh, I have been conducting clinical studies for the Colorado Parkinson’s Foundation using this approach just.

An amazing group of people, an incredible mission that they have to give their patients alternatives or adjunctive treatments to the medications they’re on simultaneously. A student of mine, a doctoral student, joined my research team, she and her husband, and they’re still on my research team, Dr. Dawn White, Dr.

Tim White, and. We are recruiting for our sixth study. Right now. We have five published studies and of course, society and metabolic health practitioners can’t say enough about that organization. Another open door for me because metabolic health is. Really what I do. Right? And so I ha have been working with that organization and, uh, running a small telehealth practice that I do as a volunteer and, you know, it’s all just so exciting.

I teach university students for. Three universities. Uh, and then I volunteer teaching aerobic dance classes and power lifting classes to seniors. So I teach. You’re like a powerhouse. Oh, I tell you. I got way too much to do. Well, I feel like in 2013 I was given a second chance and yeah. I didn’t wanna waste this chance to serve, which is what I really feel led to do.

So thank 

Ruth Soukup: you for letting me share my story. That’s amazing. That’s an incredible story. And so, I’m so, so interested in this. I did share, I shared with you right before we, we started record recording that, um, a close friend of our family’s. Um, it has Parkinson’s and so this is definitely a topic that we’ve talked a lot and we talk, they’re very close friends, so we talk to them a lot about things and treatments mm-hmm.

And what they’re trying. And it, and it’s a, it’s a devastating disease to watch it’s, and to have someone close to you, um, struggling with that. And, and so I, I just, I’m so curious with this foundation that you’re with, they seem so open to Right. Ketogenic metabolic health, like, there’s so much, I mean, and I talk about all of this stuff all the time on, on this podcast, right?

We ta, we talk a lot about low carb and the benefits and all the things from just a general health perspective, a weight loss perspective. So we don’t need to go into all those details of what that is. But what I, I think the part that really strikes me is that. Is, is how much research you’re doing on that topic and the, and the, the acceptance that you’re getting from it.

Because the medical community as a whole is not very accepting to the idea that metabolic health is a foundation of health in general, right? Like it’s all, it’s. Right. Meds. Meds, meds. We’re gonna go to pharmaceuticals. It’s all like, if they can’t patent it and make money off of it, they are not interested.

Right. In talking about it. That’s right. So how do you get around all of that and how have you managed to like really do all this research and why is it, why are people not shouting it from the rooftops either? 

Dr. Melanie Tidman: Yeah. Well that is such a great question and I find it’s really fascinating to me. I find there’s such a disconnect between.

Food and health, I don’t get it because it is our fuel and we know from pediatric development, I was a pediatric therapist for a number of years, that babies need to have just this incredible surge in neuro development and organ development and organ system development and bone development, all of that.

Well. The good Lord knew we needed to be born with good fat sources to grow our brains and protect them. So guess what? Babies are in ketosis when they’re born and they stay in ketosis if they’re breastfed primarily. And so. Working in pediatric development and then segueing into neurodegenerative disease diseases.

It was just an easy transition to see, well, biochemically, this makes a lot of sense for the brain. The problem in Parkinson’s is the meds help a little. They primarily are used to try to manage the motor symptoms. Mm-hmm. But there are so many other symptoms to Parkinson’s than motor. Yeah. In fact, I think it’s the non-motor symptoms that interfere with quality of life almost more than the motor symptoms do.

And the meds don’t touch that. Yeah, that’s Can you talk about some of those? Sure. So because of the problem with dopamine production in the brain, dopamine, I call it our feel good neurochemical. It’s the one that motivates us. It’s the one that, you know, gives us, um, more emotional stability. It gives us kind of.

That pleasure response? Well, it’s very downregulated in Parkinson’s, so a large majority of patients with Parkinson’s have depression or will develop it, have anxiety, or will develop it. Have cognitive issues, memory issues. They have apathy, huge apathy. They just don’t feel like initiating anything. They also have mountains of fatigue.

It’s like walking around with a huge boulder on your shoulders all the time for them, they have sleep dysregulation. Dopamine is a huge, uh, regulator of our sleep and circadian rhythms and brain rhythms and REM rhythms. And then our, uh, sleep quality, our sleepiness during the day. That’s very debilitating.

Then with the tremor, they don’t wanna be in public, in social settings. If you can appreciate that. Most of our social lives are developed around food, right? So we’re going out to eat and they don’t wanna do that because many of them, the tremors so bad, they can’t keep the food on their fork, they can’t drink.

It ends up all over them. Many of them have swallowing and chewing problems. It’s very debilitating, very socially isolating, which feeds that, that depression. Simultaneously with dopamine not being, uh, very well regulated. They have a huge sugar and process carbohydrate addiction because the brain is dysregulating that glucose anyway.

Yes. So it’s almost like they feel like they have to get it in the brain is craving something right. And sugar and sugar 

Ruth Soukup: will trigger a dopamine response that I absolutely that together before. But yeah, absolutely absolute sense. And all of the food. That are in engineering all the food to, to release dopamine.

That makes sense. Right, exactly. Yeah. 

Dr. Melanie Tidman: So many of my patients with Parkinson’s come to me with full-blown diabetes that they’ve had for years because they just can’t regulate their glucose. They’re very insulin resistance, many of them. It’s like a, a comorbidity that I see. All the time have metabolic syndrome.

They have high blood pressure. They’re overweight or obese. They, their glucose is dysregulated. Their HDL, the good guys are very low. Uh, so they have both things and I believe and have studied that metabolic syndrome. Really affects their Parkinson’s symptoms in a very detrimental way. So if you can make them metabolically healthier, you can start influencing those symptoms in Parkinson’s as well, which makes sense.

Ruth Soukup: Can you talk about that a little bit more about what this Yes. You had done now five, five published studies and you’re working on the six right? So what have your studies shown and indicated, or, I don’t know what the term is, but No, 

Dr. Melanie Tidman: that’s absolutely it. What have they indicated?

Because we know that studies show trends, they help you generate hypotheses. It’s rare that a study will prove anything, but you use studies to build new studies, and I can say that I am. Honored and privileged to stand on the shoulders of former research that’s being done in this space. Dr. Matthew Phillips in New Zealand is one of my, I, I’m kind of like a fan girl.

He’s one of my idols. I think he’s just phenomenal in his application of low carb approaches and fasting approaches in Parkinson’s and other diseases. And then Dr. Steven Coane work in Canada on the use of. Blood ketones and its effect on not only memory and cognition, but protection neuroprotection, especially in Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

So I get to stand on his research and then Dom Dino’s group and the research they’re doing with nasa. In terms of blood ketones and their protective qualities to present, prevent seizures in Navy seals and astronauts in high oxygen environments. I mean, there’s so much out there that I get the privilege of basing my studies on, so.

I have published a 12 week study that’s three months and a 24 week study. That’s six months on using this approach in Parkinson’s, primarily for symptoms of Parkinson’s, anxiety, and depression. I. And of course in all my studies being a metabolic health practitioner, I’m looking at metabolic markers.

Mm-hmm. Your glucose and your fasting insulin and your triglycerides and you know, your inflammatory markers, which frequently in my folks are way off the charts. Mm-hmm. The brain is exquisitely sensitive to inflammation. It’s very protective of itself, and if you have systemic inflammation from one of these metabolic conditions, you are gonna really tax your brain in terms of its ability to protect those delicate neuronal pathways and networks.

So. 12 and 24 week studies both showed a significant reduction in depression and anxiety. Wow. And significant improvements in all health biomarkers across the board. Now, as a researcher, I expect, well, maybe one variable improve, or maybe two, I didn’t expect, like all eight. Yeah. To improve in those studies, and they did.

One of the most significant ones that illustrates this metabolic health foundation for declines in Parkinson’s was a gentleman case study I published who was morbidly obese, well over 300 pounds had. All the markers for metabolic syndrome, high blood pressure, and he was diabetic and his, uh, HDL was very low, high waist circumference.

And then addition to that, he was basically bedridden on. Many medications for pain, for depression, for anxiety, for his blood sugar, you name it. He was on it. He, uh, long story short, he started my study bedridden. I. And diabetic and 300 pounds. Ended my study 24 weeks later, walking around his neighborhood, working out at a local gym.

He’d lost over 60 pounds. Wow. And returned all of his biomarkers to normal Wow. And was off all or most of his medications now. That’s incredible. That’s powerful. It’s.

So you just, the connection between food and health, we’ve got to break through the bias that food’s not that 

Ruth Soukup: powerful because it Yes. Really is. It’s everything. I mean, it really, yes. It really, really truly is. So do you find, now you’ve done two of these studies at the 12 week and the 24 week, do you find that the, the, the people that you’re working with.

Seeing such significant results that they continue even beyond the study do, like, is it, is it almost a no brainer for them or do they kind of slip off? What do you have, what have you found? Do you follow up? 

Dr. Melanie Tidman: That’s such a great question and it’s amazing to me when they fall off, especially after the benefits that they’ve seen, but I’ll tell you why that is.

Mm-hmm. It’s this. Poor dopamine regulation and our toxic food environment. Mm-hmm. So one of the problems that my patients find is, yeah, they’re seeing benefits, they’re getting off their meds, they’re able to function, but their family, their friends, their social environments, our food environments are so.

Um, detrimental to their maintenance of this approach. Yes. Some of them stay on it and they’re on it and they’re convinced and they’re, they’ll never change. Yeah. And others they just, and, and I’ve experienced it myself. Yeah. Of course. I’m the type of personality that hey, doesn’t care. Yeah. It brought me back from a place that I don’t wanna go back to.

Right. I mean, I’m getting to live the life life now that I always wanted, that I’m not gonna go back to where I would try to work out and end up in bed. I. Right. ’cause I couldn’t hardly move and I’m not gonna go back to where I was having these seizure-like activities and ending up unconscious on the floor.

And I’m not gonna go back to being on CPAP for eight years with severe sleep apnea, which I hated. I never felt like I slept great with it. I am not going back there. Right. You know, I was 40 pounds heavier, I had high blood pressure and three heart meds. You know why? That’s insane to wanna go back to that kind of life.

But I recognize that a lot of my patients do have food addictions and I’m gonna call them addictions ’cause that’s what they are. They are a biochemical. Addiction. 

Ruth Soukup: Yes. Yes, yes. And then on top of that, there’s the, there’s the social factor like you were talking about, right? That if you don’t have that support and you don’t have people in your life, it’s so easy to, I mean, I, I, like, I, I would say I eat this way, you know, the bulk of the time, and I control a lot of it.

But I, there are times where you’re just kind of, you have to go with the flow or whatever, and, and it’s easy to. To fall off or to, and, and if you don’t have that constant reminder and constant support, and, and I, I get, ’cause I see this all the time in my program, right? People will, will say, oh, I listened to your podcast and I follow you on Instagram and, and I kind of get what I, you know, and I I’m doing it.

I can, I can do it on my own. And I think, yeah, you can, like what I talk about is actually not that complicated. You are right. Getting rid of sugar, you’re getting rid of, of processed foods and you’re eating more. Protein and more fat. Right? More healthy fat. Like it’s Right. I can say it in two sentences, what you need to do, but knowing it in your head and actually implementing it in your life.

Those are the two different things. That’s where a lot of times, and everybody’s different. You like, you’re, you’re the kind of person who was able to like, do it, stick with it and be like, this is how I live now. No problem. That’s right. Not everybody has that personality ability to kind of fight the fight the, because it’s.

It’s not what the rest of the world is doing. And so if you, if you need that support, like don’t be ashamed of that. Find right your community. Find the people that are gonna help keep you on track and, and find the thing that’s going to help you keep, stay on track so that. You can be successful because it does get easier.

The longer you do it, the more it becomes that’s habit. And that’s just, I mean, I can’t walk through the grocery store without, and, and look at a wall full of breakfast cereal and not think poison. Who would eat this? Right? Like, I don’t know. I don’t even get it. I don’t, I, like, there would, there’s not a world in which that enters my mouth, but that doesn’t mean that I’m 100% perfect all the time either.

And, and it didn’t happen overnight. But, 

Dr. Melanie Tidman: right. 

Ruth Soukup: Yeah. It makes me sad for people to experience the amazing results and then, and then fall off and slide off and, and yeah. Wonder how do you, so I know it, so I just got 

Dr. Melanie Tidman: an E just this morning. Got an email from a former patient that I’ve worked with over the years and, uh.

I call her my magical disappearing patient. So she’ll come and we’ll work together and she’s doing amazing. You know, when we worked together, started working together two years ago, she totally embraced the lifestyle. She went from having diabetes to no longer having diabetes, having severe fibromyalgia to no longer having.

Severe IBS that she had suffered from for years to no longer, she had lost all this weight. Her blood pressure was perfect. She had started hiking and biking. You name it, she was doing it. Her blood markers were perfect, and then she went away and disappeared. And I unheard from her until this morning and she said.

Oh my gosh. I agonized about emailing you. I am back to where I was two years ago. I totally went off everything she said, but my husband was telling me that you don’t need to eat Dr. Ted men’s diet. It’s very unhealthy. And I said, okay, unhealthy, you cured your diabetes and your IBS and your fibromyalgia and your high blood pressure, and you went from sitting on the couch to hiking and biking and, and your blood markers were fine and it was unhealthy.

I said to her, you know what you need to do? Yeah. And she emailed back and said, you are absolutely right and I do know what I need to do and thank you, you know, for, and I said, you know what, this is what I tell my patients all the time. Don’t do this to please me. Right. But also don’t get off what works for you to please somebody else.

Mm-hmm. It is not about you pleasing others, it’s about you. Valuing the life, the incredible gift of life that you have been granted, and I believe. Taking care of this wonderful vessel that you’ve been given to meet your calling in life. ’cause we all have one. It may take us a while to find out what that is, but I feel like we all have to value our lives, ourselves, our health, more than we value the opinions of others or pleasing.

Others. So you know that. And that’s easier said than done. I get it. I really do. But support, you’re right, Ruth. Support having people around you. I mean, I have friends that I’ve known for years that love to joke about how I eat, but they’re in walkers and. Kanes and I, I’m 68. I love telling how I old I am because I feel like at 68 I am in so much better shape than most of my friends who were 68, 70, whatever.

Yeah. And. And I just, they’re not teaching aerobics classes, that’s for sure. That’s right. And the ladies in my classes are in their seventies and eighties and we dance for a solid hour without stopping. No, that’s amazing. Can these naysayers around me do that? No, no. Can they power lift this morning? I power lift 80 pounds.

Can they power lift? I just did my workout. So, um, but you know, if one thing anybody hears from this interview, try to really think about am I going to not do what’s good for my health to please somebody else? Or should I value my health and my ability to be of service and to meet my calling on this earth by sticking to what works for me?

Yeah. You know, that’s so, so important. I. 

Ruth Soukup: Yeah. Yeah. It, I, I mean, it’s, it’s huge. It’s, it’s everything. And I mean, when you talk about all the things that this type of eating, basically creating metabolic health for you yourself, will. Fix almost everything that ails you. Like there’s, there are very few things, especially in modern medicine because we’ve all already figured out a cure for typhoid, right?

Like whatever people used to die from 150 years ago, they’re not, we’re not dying from those things anymore. We’re dying from heart disease. We’re dying from. From diabetes, we’re we’re, we’ve got inflammation, we’ve got leaky gut syndrome, e, everything that doesn’t feel good in your body right now or is not working in your body right now.

It’s almost all a result of this metabolic syndrome of not being metabolically healthy. And so try it. Just what, like what is the worst that can happen? You can go back to eating sugar at any time. You can go back to eating crap at any time, but. Right. If you don’t feel good, there is no reason to not try this lifestyle because it’s, that 

Dr. Melanie Tidman: is the 

Ruth Soukup: truth.

It’s so that. 

Dr. Melanie Tidman: Yeah, what did you say? What? It’s really so easy. It’s really so 

Ruth Soukup: easy. It really is. And you can eat as much as you want. You don’t have to count calories, you don’t have to be deprived. You could eat delicious food and yeah, it really truly is. It’s, you know, 

Dr. Melanie Tidman: I really blame, right? I really blame, um, modern medicine on the shift from something.

Which was the way we practiced medicine for hundreds of years. Yes. This approach, people are going, oh, it’s such a fad and keto. No, no. The ketogenic approach has been around since the early Greeks and you know, it’s been used to handle disease. Consistently throughout history, the keto, the formalized ketogenic diet.

Which is not the internet keto, you see? No, because the formalized ketogenic approach has been used in epilepsy. The first documented cases were a hundred years ago. This is not new. It’s not a fad, it’s biochemical. Another problem is that modern science, there are really two theories, two main theories of illness.

The traditional one. The old theory was that you gotta fix the soil, you gotta fix the environment for our cells so that our cells don’t mutate and develop, you know, terrible things like cancer. So it’s the soil and, and then the other. More modern. Let’s just say the current uh, scientific, medical approach is big pharma theory.

That is big pharma approach. Big pharma. Right. Can we fix it with a med? Yeah. So let’s fix it with a medication. A medication can fix it. We’re gonna do that. Yeah. The tragedy is in oncology especially, that’s cancer care. 

Ruth Soukup: Mm-hmm. 

Dr. Melanie Tidman: They were using the ketogenic approach for. Decades and decades to augment any other treatments that they were doing for cancer.

And we know that blood ketones floating through your bloodstream are toxic to cancer cells. They need glucose. In fact, your listeners will know if they’ve ever had a PET scan for cancer. What are they inject into your bloodstream. Huh? Glucose because cancer cells will wake up and go, pick me. I need it. I need it.

Mm-hmm. Well, if we use sugar, if you will, to identify cancer cells because they wake up and light up and I need it. So doesn’t it make sense? I mean, this really isn’t brain surgery that if you weren’t giving those cells any sugar. But you were giving them ketones, which are actually toxic to cancer cells.

Isn’t that, isn’t that the approach we should move towards? Should we fix the soil? Should we fix the environment for our cells first? And how do we do that? Well, we eat the diet we’ve been created to eat. Yes. Back to where our great-grandparents were who didn’t have fruit all year round. You know, fruit was right ripe in maybe September, October.

Maybe November. Why was that? Because the good Lord knew we needed to put on fat for the winter. What does fruit do? It puts on fat. No. Fat doesn’t make you fat. Sugar makes you fat. Yes. And. They didn’t have greens all year round. Well, I just planted my spinach here in New Mexico, and so yeah, I’ll have spinach until about, well, in New Mexico I’ll have it through to maybe late September.

But our ancestors didn’t eat gr, you know, vegetables all year round either. Right. So what did, what did they eat? Protein and fat. That’s what they ate.

Ruth Soukup: you lay it out so, so clearly and so. And no nonsense like that. It just, it does make perfect sense and it’s so infuriating that we’re in a system that is, I mean, you even talking about your own story, right?

Going from specialist to specialist to specialist to specialist, right? They all treat one little piece, give you a med for that thing, right? Give you a med for that symptom, give you a med for that symptom. And there’s no holistic approach. We’re not dealing with the soil, we’re just dealing with the branches, right?

And Right. It just, it’s, it’s like, why is this our world in 2025? This should not be how we are approaching it. So it does, it, it doesn’t be crazy every time I have these conversations. ’cause I think I know why, why are we in this? And then, and yet we get called like the, the crazy extremists who are Right.

Promoting a dangerous thing. Yeah. And.

Dr. Melanie Tidman: Or fed, right? Yes. 

Ruth Soukup: I’ll take the fringe baby. If that’s, I know if that’s what it takes. I’m on the fringe. Exactly. That’s why we, that’s why my health rebels around here. That’s what we call ourselves. 

Dr. Melanie Tidman: That’s right. Well, I have to tell you that there’s, there’s hope on the horizon because not, you know, it seems like not a week goes by that I don’t get a call from a friend or a friend of a friend.

Or a friend of a friend. Of a friend who says. I just saw a cardiologist who told me I need to avoid carbs and just do meat and fat. And I went, oh my gosh, who is this? Finally? And just this morning, got a call. Friend’s husband has had two heart attacks. He’s needing more stents. He went in, cardiologist said, well, I’m not gonna do the stents.

You need to change your diet. You need to avoid carbohydrates, you need to exercise. You know you need to go low carb. And I’m. And she goes, that was a cardiologist. I said, you know, since the American Academy of Cardiology has decided yeah, this is a a viable approach, the American Diabetes Association says, yeah, you want a fast way to get off your insulin.

I. Go low carb or ketogenic. I mean there it’s building 

Ruth Soukup: coming 

Dr. Melanie Tidman: and we’re starting to see it more and more coming in. Well, that’s good 

Ruth Soukup: news. That’s good news. Yes. I do have hope for the future and people gotta keep speaking that I am impressed. I am I. No, we have to go, but I am impressed when, from the part of your story where you said that the Mayo Clinic told you to.

Yeah. Look at your diet, which I don’t know if they, that’s not ne necessarily an approach that most doctors and clinics are taking, so that, that gives me a little bit of hope too. And that was the one. Well, it’s 

Dr. Melanie Tidman: interesting that the ketogenic diet was first researched at the Mayo Clinic, Mayo Clinic. So, you know, the fact that I didn’t know any of that.

Research shows how indoctrinated I was into, oh, low fat. I ate low fat for. 30 years. I don’t know. I, you know, avoided fat like the PLA plague and I was one of those Snackwells people. Oh yeah. Okay, great. I can have my sweetss, but they’re low fat. Right. Uh, didn’t matter that I was pre-diabetic, had the straight to diabetes, didn’t matter.

But yeah, there is hope. And the current study I’m recruiting for quick plug is really testing three. Nutritional approaches in Parkinson’s disease, I’m having them add in the second first phase. They do their regular junky, old, whatever, diet for eight weeks and I do some testing. Second phase, they do their regular junky, old whatever diet, and they start adding MCT oil every day.

Building, trying to build those ketones in their bloodstream. It’s crossover trial, first one of this type ever done. And then the third phase, they’re adding their MCTL to a full blown ketogenic diet. So, you know, I’m, yeah, I’m, it’s gonna be fabulous because crossover trials compare you, Ruth, to you through all three approaches, right?

I’m excited about the approaches and I finished recruiting. I’m gonna end recruitment in May 25, so hopefully get this data analyzed and published in 26. So, 

Ruth Soukup: oh, I love it. I love it. Yeah, I’m excited to hear all about it. And then, this was just so fascinating and thank you. If people wanna look at, look into you more or look into the Colorado Parkinson Foundation, which you represent, um, where can they, where can they find you?

And we’ll make sure to link in the show notes as well. 

Dr. Melanie Tidman: Wonderful. So Colorado Parkinson Foundation, notice there’s no S in Parkinson. When you go to their website, click on study at the top and you will see every research presentation that I’ve done for them and the recruitment presentation for the current study.

And of course you can find, uh, my. Our, my team, our five published studies, you know, uh, on the internet, they’re all out there. They’re all open access, so you can read ’em for yourself. So we’ll see if we can get those added to the show notes as well. That sounds 

Ruth Soukup: great. Thank you for having me. I’ve enjoyed our chat.

Yeah. This was fantastic. Melanie, or Dr. Tedman, I should say. Thank you so much and um, yeah, just thank you for the work that you’re doing and, and, and continue to do. It’s so important and, and I’m just so thank you, grateful to you for being here. Well, I am 

Dr. Melanie Tidman: blessed to be able to do the work and to speak with people like you who are also out there fighting the good fight for, for health, and I appreciate what you do as well.

Thank you so much.