Senate Speech: The Case for Using Ketogenic and Plant-Free Ketogenic Diets to Treat Chronic Illness

My name is Mikhaila Fuller. I’m co-founder and CEO of Peterson Academy, an online higher-education platform and host a podcast with over a million and a half subscribers. I’ve spent 14 years researching autoimmunity because I was dying from it.

When I was 2 I started to limp and at 7 I was diagnosed with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis in 37 joints.  At age 8 I was put on injectable immunosuppressants. At 12 I was diagnosed with severe depression and put on antidepressants. At 14 I was diagnosed with idiopathic hypersomnia – a fancy definition for chronic fatigue and could barely get out of bed. My hip and ankle were replaced when I was 17, from the arthritis that wasn’t managed by the medications I was on, and I spent a year on OxyContin limping around on what felt like broken bones trying to stay hopeful and not kill myself. I went to university for biomedical science when it became apparent that nobody in the medical system could help me, and the “lifesaving treatments” I was on weren’t saving my life. 

When I was 23 I completely changed my diet, removing processed foods and only ate whole foods, primarily meat, and my life changed rapidly. I felt like I had stepped out of a hell I didn’t know I was trapped in, into heaven. It turned my world upside down.

Then I had to get off of the medications I was on. Antidepressant withdrawal, that neither me nor my doctors knew existed, was worse than the opiate withdrawal I had been through after I was treated with OxyContin. After I stopped taking the 8 medications I was on and had a baby, my autoimmune symptoms and depression started sneaking back in. Willing to do anything to not be sick, I tried eating only meat, and by that I mean eating beef salt and water only, knowing beef was the one food that didn’t contribute to my arthritis and depression. Eating only meat put my arthritis into remission again in 6 weeks and my depression into remission after 5 months. I’ve only been eating beef and lamb for 7 years now in order to keep my symptoms in remission. I am not on any medication, I have no symptoms of disease, I am in complete remission, after spending 16 years being medicated. 

I’ve spent 9 years trying to get the medical community to take this seriously. The plant free ketogenic diet I’m on, nicknamed the lion diet, has gone viral on TikTok, and has over 500k people following across social medias. The number of google searches for these ketogenic diets has skyrocketed since 2018. I have groups online with over 30 thousand people who follow the exact same diet as me for autoimmunity and mental disorders that they’ve been unable to treat. These people are putting their diseases into remission after decades. This way of treating disease has garnered international attention from the Times to Fox, to SkyNews Australia. 

The problem is, most people don’t know that what they’re ingesting and exposed to is making them sick, and neither do their healthcare providers. When you’re diagnosed with a mental or autoimmune disorder, diet and the state of your gut isn’t even mentioned. If it is brought up, you’re ostracized.

One of the leading theories in understanding chronic illness is increased intestinal permeability, which you can measure with zonulin levels in lab work. In a healthy digestive system, the gut lining serves as a barrier, allowing nutrients to pass through while keeping harmful substances out of the bloodstream. However, because of the high carb recommendations and processed foods we’re exposed to and currently encouraged to consume from the food pyramid and through our doctors, our diet damages the gut barrier, which causes particles from the gut to “leak” into the bloodstream. A lot of the chemicals and preservatives in processed foods we consume are actually illegal in other countries.

The Lion Diet a plant free ketogenic diet is an extreme and limited version of the ketogenic diet which has a well-documented history of success in treating chronic conditions. It has been used for decades to manage epilepsy, particularly in patients resistant to medication. Before medication was available, it was the only treatment for epilepsy, but since antiepileptics were produced research basically stopped into ketogenic diets that treat a myriad of psychiatric and autoimmune diseases. Another infiltration by pharmaceutical companies. 

Given the connection between increased gut permeability – a result from food and environmental exposure in our modern age, inflammation, and psychiatric illness, the ketogenic approach—when stripped down to its most elemental form in the plant free ketogenic diet the Lion Diet—presents an even more targeted intervention. The result of this dietary intervention is not just metabolic stabilization, but a reduction in immune-driven inflammation, which is often at the root of both physical and mental illness.

I spent years so livid at the medical industry that I wouldn’t go into a hospital. How dare I be treated with medications and end up losing joints when dietary intervention works? How dare these medical doctors tell me there was nothing I could do? I would never be where I am today without this diet. I truly believe I would have died. Treating chronic disease caused by the environment and food without looking at diet first should be considered malpractice. 

I am not suggesting the average person does this extreme version of a ketogenic diet. I am specifically suggesting that this diet is researched as a potential treatment for autoimmunity, and psychiatric disorders, with the goal of eventually healing the gut and reintroducing more healthy low carb fruits and vegetables, and that the ideological war on meat needs to end. 

I’ve seen tens of thousands of people see complete remission in as little as 6 weeks. Most drugs don’t work that fast. No drug fixes the root cause.  

Approximately 1 in 5 Americans are on psychiatric medications for psychiatric illness, and approximately 1 in 10 has an autoimmune disorder. I believe all these millions of people could be symptom free with proper dietary interventions ranging from low carb, to ketogenic, to plant-free ketogenic diets like my diet depending on the severity of the illness. Dietary intervention is what doctors should suggest before putting people on medications that do not treat the underlying problem, some of which cause horrible dependence making them nearly impossible to get off of. 

My request, shared by millions of people using these diets to treat themselves, is for the government to fund studies on ketogenic and plant-free ketogenic diets as potential treatments for autoimmunity and psychiatric disorders. There are only a few studies out on this because of the lack of funding. One study shows remission and treatment of Crohn’s disease which is a terrible intestinal autoimmune disorder that can result in people using colostomy bags for the rest of their life.  Another study shows remission of anorexia. 

Unless people start being treated with dietary interventions using these ketogenic diets, and the food pyramid prioritizes meat and low carb whole foods so that people can avoid becoming chronically ill in the first place, America is going to get fatter, sicker, more mentally ill and more expensive. If the government funds these studies, America could be at the forefront of these scientific discoveries. Thank you very much for your time, it’s an honor to be here.