To begin understanding how the ketogenic diet helps with seizures, we first need to understand why seizures happen. But to understand the underlying neurological dysfunction in seizures, we must first understand how the same systems operate when we are healthy.

We begin by examining how neurons get excited. You could use this lesson as a general introduction to neuronal excitation or to neuroscience 101 even if you are not interested in epilepsy, but we will be using it to understand epilepsy in the lessons that follow.

In this lesson, we cover the profound importance of ATP and energy metabolism in neuronal activity; the minerals sodium, potassium, chloride, calcium, and magnesium; the neurotransmitters glutamate, GABA, and glycine; and how these all interact to allow the transmission of information in the nervous system.