Leading Voices Q&A - Inside the first digital platform built for metabolic psychiatry: A conversation with Dr. Shebani Sethi
By Light-it, in collaboration with Dr. Shebani Sethi, MD, ABOM - Founding Director of Stanford's Metabolic Psychiatry Clinic, Psychiatrist and Obesity Medicine Specialist
For most of psychiatry’s history, mental illness and metabolic health have been treated as separate problems, seen by separate doctors, on separate charts. Dr. Shebani Sethi disagreed.
In 2015, she founded Stanford’s first academic Metabolic Psychiatry program and conceived the term itself, building a clinical discipline around a simple premise: the brain runs on metabolism, and treating one without the other leaves patients half-treated.
For our first Leading Voices Q&A, we sat down with her to talk about what that means for digital health.
People with serious mental illness die 10 to 20 years earlier than the general population, not due to suicide as might be the assumption, but largely by preventable physical health problems such as heart disease, diabetes, and other metabolic conditions. That fact alone should change how we practice psychiatry.
Metabolic psychiatry is the clinical practice of treating the metabolic drivers of mental illness alongside psychiatric symptoms. Metabolic dysfunction like insulin resistance, lipid dysregulation, mitochondrial dysfunction and chronic inflammation are not just comorbidities in serious mental illness. They contribute to the development, progression, and treatment resistance of mental illness.
Traditional psychiatry treats the brain in isolation. Metabolic psychiatry treats the brain as a metabolic organ. That distinction changes the interventions, the monitoring and the outcomes we can achieve.
This field needed its own category because it is not nutritional psychiatry, functional medicine or lifestyle medicine. It is an integrative clinical approach that bridges neuroscience, endocrinology, immunology, and nutritional science, conceptualizing mental disorders as disturbances in brain-body energy regulation. I founded the first academic metabolic psychiatry program at Stanford in 2015 to build the research base, and Metabolic Psychiatry Labs exists to translate that research into scalable clinical care.
We are at an inflection point where clinical evidence, metabolic science and digital infrastructure are converging in a way that makes this model both testable and scalable.
Our narrative review in Nature Mental Health synthesizes evidence across psychiatry, neuroscience and metabolic medicine to define metabolic psychiatry as a clinical framework and field of study. It reflects growing alignment across disciplines that metabolic dysfunction is not peripheral, but central to how we understand serious mental illness. The paper highlights the bidirectional relationship between metabolic state and brain function, where changes in one directly influence the other.
This builds on our earlier clinical trial published in the Journal of Psychiatric Research, which studied patients with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia who had not responded adequately to conventional treatments. Within four months of a ketogenic metabolic therapy protocol, 79% showed clinically significant psychiatric improvement. All participants met criteria for reversal of metabolic syndrome, and the group lost an average of 10% body weight in four months.
What matters here is not just the psychiatric outcomes. It is that metabolic and psychiatric improvement occurred together, which supports the core thesis: these conditions share a common metabolic root.
The gap between a clinical trial and a care model is where most innovations stall, especially in psychiatry. We built MPL and our MetBloom approach specifically to bridge that gap.
Our MetBloom model is telehealth-first and built as a coordinated care system. A patient receives a full psychiatric evaluation, comprehensive metabolic biomarker testing, and a personalized treatment plan that may include ketogenic metabolic therapy, medication optimization, and ongoing real-time data monitoring. The care team works together across psychiatry and metabolic medicine rather than in silos.
We treat serious mental illness: major depressive disorder, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia. These are patients who have often tried multiple medications without adequate response. We accept insurance and deliver care remotely, which removes the geographic and access barriers that typically keep people from specialized psychiatric care.
Technology is not an add-on for us. It is the infrastructure that makes metabolic psychiatry scalable.
Traditional psychiatric care is built around episodic visits and limited data. Metabolic psychiatry relies on continuous streams of biological and behavioral information: metabolic indicators, mood, sleep, glucose and medication response, all tracked in real time. Managing this level of complexity requires an integrated system, not isolated clinical encounters.
Our platform gives patients a single interface for tracking their metabolic and psychiatric data and staying connected to their care team between visits. For clinicians, it creates a continuous data stream that supports earlier intervention and more informed decision-making across psychiatry and metabolic medicine.
To our knowledge, this is the first platform built specifically for metabolic psychiatry.
It connects physiology with symptoms on an ongoing basis, which is something traditional psychiatric care has not been structured to do. That is what allows this model to scale beyond a single clinic and function as a care platform.
The short-term path is continued clinical validation and expanding access. We are actively treating patients across multiple states, and the evidence base is growing with publications in journals like Nature Mental Health, Biological Psychiatry, Journal of Affective Disorders, Journal of Psychiatric Research. More clinicians and researchers are entering the field every year.
The longer-term vision is a fundamental shift in how we understand and treat serious mental illness. Right now, psychiatry largely treats symptoms with medication. Metabolic psychiatry offers a model that addresses root-cause biology, and early results suggest this should be part of the standard of care conversation.
From a healthtech perspective, this is a shift from episodic, symptom-based care to continuous, biology-informed care. When you combine real-time metabolic data, remote monitoring and coordinated clinical teams, the model moves beyond symptom management toward stabilizing the underlying metabolic drivers.
At a systems level, this approach has the potential to reduce treatment resistance, improve quality of life and address the excess mortality seen in serious mental illness.
As the evidence base grows, the question becomes how quickly this can be integrated into standard care.
If you or someone you know is living with a serious mental illness, we are now accepting patients and on select insurance plans. Learn more at our website!
Dr. Shebani Sethi, MD, ABOM - Founding Director of Stanford’s Metabolic Psychiatry Clinic, Founder of Metabolic Psychiatry Labs and Psychiatrist
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Great conversation. I think a lot of folks may not make that connection between treating psychiatric symptoms and metabolic health as interconnected, and which could lead to more personalized, proactive care and better long-term outcomes.