Psychedelics for weight loss or weight management? How about for fighting our growing rates of obesity?  One researcher studying it thinks it might be possible.

There is a renewed interest in how psychedelics might be used to treat and/or prevent various health ailments. It’s getting less and less taboo to talk about the health benefits of psychedelics, a long way from our “Just say No” and “Drugs are bad” reductive, mainstream taglines. Much of this renewed interest coincides with greater political and cultural acceptance. It has to.

If you follow my podcast you’ll know that I’ve had a couple of experts discuss psychedelic medicine. Dr. Dave Smith described the history of the psychedelic medicine revolution, as in his eighties now, he’s been there since the beginning. He talks about the prevailing culture and how that impacted psychedelic research, politics, bands like the Grateful Dead and even the CIA. The clinical director from Mindbloom, a company that combines psychedelic treatments for depression and anxiety with at-home telehealth, also came on my podcast to discuss their recently published study involving Ketamine. I invite you guys to check those out.

In my most recent episode on psychedelics, I chat with Dr. Christoffer Clemmensen about his research on the psychedelic drug, psilocybin, and its connection to weight and energy balance.  Basically our discussion will revolve around the potential to use psychedelics for weight loss. This podcast will mostly cover his animal study published here in Translational Psychiatry. He breaks it down in an easy-to-digest manner, so if you read the article and feel confused, don’t worry. The podcast will help you understand the science.

Specifically, he will discuss psilocybin, how it works in the body, its relation to “cognitive flexibility”, and how it might be used for obesity. He will explain the results of his animal study involving psilocybin, the dosing riddle, and why he feels it should next be studied in humans.

Dr. Clemmensen heads the Clemmensen Group studies at the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Basic Metabolic Research. His research focuses on the biological regulation of body weight and aims to develop new therapeutic approaches for obesity and its metabolic consequences. You can learn more about him and his lab here.

Tune into the podcast here! 

In addition to the podcast on psychedelics and weight loss, I invite you to check out some of my blogs on scientific communications, a hot topic today. I do a lot of work in scicomms and figured I’d share my perspective with readers here.