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Today’s Health Upgrade

• Beyond the headline: diet and mental illness

• Your dog’s meal might not be what you think

• How to override your stress response

• Hate cardio? This might change everything

Beyond The Headline
The Keto-and-Mental-Illness Study Everyone's Misunderstanding

Over the next few weeks, you'll probably run into a version of this headline: a ketogenic diet eased schizophrenia and bipolar symptoms. The study was innovative and posed new research questions. But it’s also overstepping what was discovered.

The controlled half of this trial found one thing: a keto diet improved metabolic markers. However, the mood, symptom, and thinking changes everyone's mentioning came from a separate study that had no comparison group, so it can't tell us the diet caused the improvements.

Researchers ran the first randomized trial of a ketogenic diet in adults with schizophrenia-spectrum or bipolar-I disorder, most of them on antipsychotic medication that tends to drive weight and blood sugar up. Half of the participants were on a ketogenic diet, the other half ate as usual. 

Over that month, the keto group lost weight and saw their blood sugar and insulin levels move in the right direction compared to the comparison group. On psychiatric symptoms, there was no controlled advantage to report.

Then 25 people stayed on keto for four more months. Everyone was on the diet, and there was no control, and thus no basis for comparison. 

And that's where the depression scores, symptom ratings, and cognition all improved.

Even the researchers admit that one month was too short to judge mental-health effects, and the four-month results need re-testing under controlled conditions. 

The study is fascinating. And it’s possible that keto could help. But at this point and based on that study, we still don’t know. It’s a promising hint, but not a proven treatment.

Together With Sundays For Dogs
What 300°F Does to Your Dog's Dinner

We've gotten pretty good at side-eyeing our own food. We read labels, know "ultra-processed" is a red flag, and mostly accept that a thing cooked hot and fast in a factory isn't the same as a thing cooked at home.

Then we scoop a bowlful of little brown pellets and don't think twice. But the science suggests it might be worth thinking twice about.

Most kibble is made by extrusion, a process that blasts ground ingredients with heat and pressure, pushing them through a die like Play-Doh. The temperatures involved can top 300°F.

At that heat, food undergoes chemical changes. Protein and sugars react to form compounds, and researchers have found that their levels in commercial pet food fall within the same range as those in heavily processed human foods.

That same heat quietly damages the protein itself. Some of a food's lysine — an essential amino acid — gets chemically locked up in cooking, so the body can't use it, and kibble tends to lose more of it than gently cooked food does.

One 2026 analysis of 41 dog foods found that fresh options carried roughly twice as much usable lysine as kibble — partly due to better ingredients, partly to gentler processing. Cook protein hard enough, and you get something like a steak left under the broiler until it's a hockey puck.

Research on these compounds is extensive in humans and still catching up in dogs. The picture's messier than the marketing — wet and canned foods actually test highest for these compounds, not kibble — and nobody's proven your dog's kibble is making them sick. If that's what you feed, your dog is probably fine.

But you can feed your dog without turning mealtime into a project.

So we went looking for real food that skips the high heat without becoming a raw-handling project. The best we found was Sundays For Dogs.

Sundays is air-dried low and slow from human-grade meat, fruit, and veggies. Not extruded, not blasted at 300°F. The gentle drying holds on to nutrients the way raw does, and every batch is third-party tested for pathogens like Salmonella and E. coli and run through a full nutrient analysis — so there's no thawing, no mess, no food-safety tightrope. It's vet-founded, and its beef and turkey recipes are AAFCO complete and balanced for all life stages, including large-breed puppies.

Dogs picked the Sundays chicken recipe 39-0 over premium kibble in an independent taste test. No fridge, no prep. Scoop and serve.

Sundays for Dogs gets our stamp of approval.

Use the code PUMPCLUB for 50% off your first order, and give your dog the same attention to their nutrition that you'd give your own.

Instant Health Boost
The 5-Minute Reset That Beats Meditation

Next time stress hits, the way to settle your mind could be as simple as taking longer to breathe out than you breathe in.

In a head-to-head test, five minutes of slow, exhale-focused breathing lifted mood and reduced physical stress more than the same five minutes of meditation.

In a randomized study out of Stanford, people spent 5 minutes a day for a month practicing one of three breathing styles or mindfulness meditation. The winner was "cyclic sighing" — and it beat meditation for both mood and a slower breathing rate. 

A long, complete exhale is the body's own brake pedal. When you extend the outbreath, you shift the nervous system out of fight-or-flight. The double-inhale first reinflates little collapsed air sacs in the lungs so that exhales can be as full as possible. You're not overriding your stress response. You're using the off switch built into your body. 

Here's the move: inhale through your nose, then take one more small sip of air on top to fully inflate. Let it out slowly through your mouth. Five of those take about a minute. 

Do it before a hard meeting, in traffic, or the second your chest tightens. No app, no cushion, and it’s low-key enough that nobody around you will even notice.

Mindset
Want To Make Cardio A Habit? A Great Audiobook Can Help More Than You Think

The next time you find an audiobook you want to listen to or a podcast you can’t wait to hear, you might want to think twice about saving it for a quiet moment. 

Saving something you’re anticipating for your workout could be the best way to help you become more consistent. 

Researchers ran an interesting field experiment on gym behaviors. One group got a free audiobook and was coached to save it strictly for the gym. Another got the audiobook with no rules. A third got nothing. 

When they were told to save the book, the odds of a weekly workout climbed nearly 15%, but that might not be the most interesting detail. Those who worked out and saved the audiobook were able to maintain the habit for nearly four months after the program ended. 

The audiobook-only group moved more too, but their bump faded within about a month.

And it doesn’t have to be an audiobook. You can save your favorite podcast for the treadmill. Or even cue up your favorite show, depending on the intensity of the workout. 

Researchers call it temptation bundling, which means pairing a want with a should, making the should easier to do consistently.

It’s a simple swap that flips the psychology of gratification. 

Exercise pays off later. Your show pays off right now. Combining those two means you get some instant reward during your workout, so the gym stops feeling like pure delayed gratification. 

It’s not a guarantee, and it didn’t work for everyone. But when it did, it appeared to stick. 

So give it a try if consistency with any type of exercise is a struggle. Pick a book or podcast you actually want to listen to and let yourself have it only during the workout. And see if that helps you get going.

The Positive Corner of The Internet
About Arnold’s Pump Club Editorial Standards

We do things a bit differently here, starting with transparency.

1. The Content: All APC emails are researched, written, and fact-checked by the APC editors (see bottom of the email), with written contributions from Arnold (noted with “Arnold’s Corner”). Links take you to original studies (not second-hand sources).

2. Does AI play a role? Not for the primary content, but it is used in two ways. The main items are original content written by the APC team. The summaries at the end are AI-generated based on the human-written content above. We also use an AI tool to review our interpretations of the research and ensure scientific accuracy. We don’t assume AI is right, but we use technology to hold ourselves accountable.

3. Yes, we have partners (all clearly noted by “Together With”). Why? Because it allows us to keep the APC emails free. We first test products, and then reach out to potential partners who offer ways to help you improve every day. The bar is set high, and to date, we have turned down millions in ad deals. (Example: we will not partner with any non-certified supplements or those without evidence in human trials). If we won’t buy the product, we won’t recommend it to you. And if there’s no evidence it works, then there’s no place for it here.

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Publisher: Arnold Schwarzenegger​

Editors-in-chief: Adam Bornstein and Daniel Ketchell