Welcome to feel better live more bite-sized, your weekly dose of positivity and optimism to get you ready for the weekends. Today's episode is brought to you by a G1 from athletic greens. One of the most nutrient-dense Whole Food supplements that I've come across, it contains vitamins, minerals prebiotics, probiotics, digestive enzymes and so much more and I myself take it regularly.
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A truce book, Eat to beat depression and anxiety, is a powerful prescription for optimizing your mental health, through diet. And in this clip, he provides some helpful tips on the changes, you can make right now to improve your brain and mental health.
What I think is really interesting for many first, is this idea that what we do to our bodies can affect our brains. So this idea that, if we can reduce inflammation in our body, that can also reduce inflammation in our brain, or certainly help symptoms in our brain.
There is a real strong link instead of evidence. Now linking inflammation and pain
Inflammation to depression and anxiety. And as well, as brain fog, inflammation is very tightly linked to our food because the largest part of our inflammatory immune system is our gut. And so you think about food is really a set of signals and is a way to really Fuel and nourish your immune and inflammatory system and also to regulate it, it's a really shift, we all need to make to think about
Mental health, and mental Fitness and our own mental Fitness at how do we prevent these conditions and then if we have them really use everything that we have to treat and I think what's exciting is for me, you know, a lot of times it's mental health or trying to take something away, from a patient in a certain way, right? A bad habit or defense or a toxic relationship or substance. What I liked about food is one patients, who are already doing it, you're already eating three, four times a day and so it was like it's a much easier pivot already in the
Restore. If I can help you look right. Instead of look left, wow, to make a massive outcome in your health and your mental health. Particularly
you do focus in on these 12 nutrients, these 12 nutrients that can help us all build healthier more vibrant brains. And so I wonder whether we could spend a bit of time on what some of those nutrients are. You can talk about how they fit into certain patterns
that work specifically with them, Laurel the chance. And we
And trying to create a manual of nutritional Psychiatry of a for had a clinician to do this to created the antidepressant food scale, we really asked a simple question, all right? With all these nutritional information, what nutrients matter for depression and we found it or 12, that had significant levels of scientific evidence of they could help prevent depression and help treat depression, things like the sink and magnesium and b12, and omega-3 fats and folate and iron. And and then we said what foods on planet Earth, did
Actual whole foods have the most of these truck nutrients per calorie. Really simple question in that led to list of the top plant foods and the top animal foods. And and well I don't love listing foods like that because everyone says you know, what's number one Watercress? I was like oh I should eat more Watercress / depression in what really led me to understand is these are called nutrient profiling systems in the antidepressant food. Scale was the first nutrient profiling system that was ever created specifically for mental health.
'The and what? Dr. Le Johnson I understood is that if you looked at food in terms of food categories, and there's what nutrient profiling system is really encourage you to do. And what you see is, what's in the top five animal Foods, you know, three of them are bivalves, mussels clams and oysters. Why is that? It was the one of the most important nutrients for mental health. It's vitamin B12, the largest bedroom, we eat. You'd think we'd all know what is the top source of vitamin B12 in the natural world?
I certainly didn't, it's clams. I mean, who's called clam a superfood? All right. It's like, who said like, oh, you know, going out tonight? I want to make sure I cover my hangover. I'm, you know, getting a B12 injections. I can't know. I'm having pasta vongole my B12 levels of. I mean, it's so, yeah. I remember the dietary pattern I think is a really brilliant shift, the researchers made and you've had fleece jacket on. She's really one of the founders of the field of she's done.
Um, some of the best research and led I think Willie our movement. Dr. Jeckyl had actually, the first real nutritional Psychiatry paper ever published in the American Journal of Psychiatry one of the top journals and mental health which was a correlational study showing that dietary pattern. So it's not about just B12 is that but a dietary pattern? So the pattern of all the foods you eat a traditional dietary pattern. So those are the foods, everybody's going to recognize where the everyone's heard that phrase, you know foods like Grandma a trace of potatoes.
NATO's, okra salmon beef right stuff. That is real food compared to a modern or Western dietary pattern and a traditional dietary pattern was correlated with significant decrease in depression and anxiety. So they just a correlational study, really fascinating. And I like the shift because it allows us to eat pizza, and chocolate cake and have the occasional beer and, and not freak out because we have a dietary pattern that's consisting found.
As a foundation on really were called nutrient-dense Foods. Again those Foods on the antidepressant food scale like leafy greens, you're always have a lot of nutrition. Not a lot of calories, and that's what we look for in nutritional. Psychiatry, and there's a lot of foods that I think we've lost a lot of us have lost the tradition of Sea Foods are nutrient dense foods or held leafy greens or used. A lot of us don't have that knowledge of how to prepare and cook foods at home and very simple ways.
Very easy and economical but the support our health. And so the hope is to translate those nutrients. Get people excited about these nutrients and what they do in our brain but really translate them into Foods.
You mentioned, that was another trial which is showing that changing the food that we eat or certain dietary patterns can help reduce the likelihood of developing depression in the future.
That's really I think the best trial in that is is back to a core prospective.
Well trial which was an epidemiological study of 10,000 is like nine hundred and thirty some-odd University students in Spain. And what that study showed is that if you look at them at the beginning of college or and you look at the how Mediterranean there is their diet. Is it was a nine-point Mediterranean dietary patterns scale. If you look at people in the top half of that so they're eating a fairly Mediterranean diet in their freshman year and follow them over four and a half years kind of checking in
But who gets depressed and what they're eating, they found that there was between a thirty to fifty two percent reduction in the risk of getting clinical depression and and they ran this as a really interesting study, they did a number of different models. For example, they looked at anybody who got an antidepressant in the first two years, the trial and just you know, take took them out of the data set to really try and see really looking for people over the span of their college career, eating a poor dietary.
Pattern versus a Mediterranean dietary pattern that the trial that I was thinking about, in terms of prevention. It's because I think a lot about college depression, and I treat a lot of college, students, who love working with young adults, such a challenging time. I think, for me, it was a challenging time with my mood. There's a trial in Australia, really fascinating. Heather Francis led the team. They looked at College freshman that had poured eating habits and had depression and they did a very simple intervention. This is
I sort of joke with clinicians. Like, if this can work boy, we've got to be able to be effective. This was just a 13-minute video and then a five minute phone call week later. One week later is a two weeks after the video another five minute phone call, and the five-minute phone is like a Bronco and how are you like, you eat some veggies man, house dorm life like you using the turmeric. How about the nuts? And so they give people a little box of nut, nut butter, olive oil and then cinnamon in
turmeric. So they send these into the college dorm and and and with like a lot of encouragement in the video like you can improve your mental health with food. Eat more vegetables. Eat more plants. The similar in turmeric was a little bit of data about those being good for brain health and brain growth. What they found is that we just wrote that minimal intervention individual significantly shifted their diets, there was a significant reduction in anxiety, depression, and stress, reading skills, at three months, and six months.
There's like 23 minutes and there's no actual face-to-face human intervention. So very, very, you know, cost-effective intervention in terms of potentially preventing College depression.
There's a concept in the book I really liked which was you like to help your patients, put their brains in grow modes and I thought that was really interesting way of thinking about it. So what is growing mode and how do you help your patients? Get into that
state?
I encourage my patients and Emily everybody with the brain to think Beyond serotonin, our beloved, serotonin a wonderful, wonderful neurotransmitter, but it feels like the conversation about depression gets reduced, like that's the brain molecule that's involved with mental health, that one, and maybe dopamine. And I think that really above all of these players is b d and f and b d and f is a neurohormone runner. You brought up connection earlier and it's really a for me a driving core principle of my own personal life. How I
Think about my mental health, and my happiness and my family's happiness. And but also I think about my patience, when I valued my ways, it's kind of tentacles are in life reach out like where do they go? And what are the qualities of those connections as a psychiatrist? I love this notion also that I think that's exactly what our brain cells do you know, when you're learning your brain cells are reaching out and you know like making making new connections and that's what memory is that's wearing our memories like live in these connections between our neurons. It's really just
Fascinating to think about the brain, is this? Not what I, even, I learned in medical school, 20 years ago. I'm actually feeling the same thing, right? Hey, you get like, 90 billion brain cells. Like don't mess with them, bro. Like, don't mess up. Don't do bad things because you don't get any more. And then we know that's wrong that your brain is always not a lot, but making some new brain cells. And another fleece jacket steady, great study. And you're showing that between 60 and 65 individuals with a
Feed diet. You can see a significantly bigger brain like a couple. Mm3 more brain in the left hippocampus, compared to individuals. Who are you eating a very unhealthy dietary Western dietary pattern, right? That's a lot of brain cells, like, to mm3. I mean, so that's exciting to me as a clinician and I try and bring that hopefulness and enthusiasm because often when we are struggling with their mental health, really feel
Badly better selves. We feel very down, we feel very stuck. So the idea that, you know, this brain that I'm lugging around, that's not really served me so well right now in this moment,
I have the power to change that and those things that I know, help me feel better, exercising sleeping. Well, eating well, connecting loved ones and playing link feeling nervous for that playing little instrument, playing a little music but all those things support my brain making more connections and very intentional way. And so I love the idea of neuroplasticity. It's really the most powerful way that food and lifestyle medicine.
Can work for us and literally giving us more brain, resilience more brain repair and more brain
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