Moment 201: Harvard Psychiatrist Reveals The #1 Foods You Must STOP Eating To Heal Your Brain

Speaker 1 Most people have no clue that diet plays any role in mental illness or mental health.

Speaker 1 95% of mental health clinicians think it's laughable that anybody would suggest that diet can play a role in mental illness. They think it's laughable.

Speaker 2 What do you think?

Speaker 1 I think

Speaker 1 if you do a deep dive into the science,

Speaker 1 all of the science that we have accumulated over the last 100 years and longer sometimes,

Speaker 1 that if you do a deep dive into all of those neuroimaging studies that we've been doing, all of the genetic studies we've been doing, all of the neurotransmitter and hormone studies and trauma studies and adverse childhood experiences studies, if you do a deep dive into the science

Speaker 1 and you understand what is happening in the brains and bodies of people as a consequence of those things,

Speaker 1 or what could be causing those things, if you put it all together, you come to this soundbite that mental disorders are metabolic in nature, and there is no

Speaker 1 questioning whatsoever. It is incontrovertible that diet plays a massive, huge role in metabolism.

Speaker 1 And therefore, I believe very strongly that diet

Speaker 1 might be playing a role in the mental health epidemic that we are seeing.

Speaker 1 And it also

Speaker 1 might provide an avenue of hope. and healing and recovery.

Speaker 1 And I use the word might as the scientist in me,

Speaker 1 as the clinician in me, I know without certainty.

Speaker 1 It can heal and recover people who have had chronic, horrible, debilitating mental illnesses.

Speaker 1 And I know from my own personal story.

Speaker 1 When I was in medical school and residency, I'm still suffering from low-grade depression, OCD, other symptoms. But I also developed what's called metabolic syndrome.

Speaker 1 I developed high blood pressure, high cholesterol, pre-diabetes, and I wasn't really overweight. I was exercising.
I was following a low-fat diet, mostly of processed foods because they're cheaper.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 that was the diet that was touted as a healthy diet. It was low in fat.
And as long as it was low in fat, that was supposed to be good for us.

Speaker 1 And my metabolic syndrome just kept getting worse and worse. And so at some point,

Speaker 1 in order to treat my metabolic syndrome, I changed my diet to essentially a low-carbohydrate diet.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 within

Speaker 1 three months, my metabolic syndrome was completely gone.

Speaker 1 But the thing that just dumbfounded me

Speaker 1 was that my mental health

Speaker 1 was better than it had ever been in my entire life.

Speaker 1 And I just couldn't believe what I was experiencing. I didn't know that I could be that kind of a person.
I didn't know that I could be happy and positive and energetic and confident. I had no idea.

Speaker 1 I didn't think that was in me.

Speaker 1 And by changing my diet, all of those things happened.

Speaker 2 At the level of the mitochondria, are you saying, do you believe that because you changed your diet to

Speaker 2 more sort of natural, healthier foods, at the level of the mitochondria, the mitochondria were able to function more naturally themselves and in a more

Speaker 2 functional way, which meant that they released the chemicals they release and the processes they go through

Speaker 1 were

Speaker 2 more consistent with positive mental health. Is that like the simpleton's way of understanding it? And before then, you talked about man-made compounds in the foods, et cetera.

Speaker 2 I'm assuming you're saying that some of the modern foods that we eat, the ultra-processed foods that have all of these random named chemicals inside them that we see on the labels, the mitochondria don't know how to deal with that.

Speaker 2 So it's causing the same sort of dysregulation and dysfunction that they might see if we'd gone through like an extreme trauma or something else or some other adverse environmental situation.

Speaker 2 It's just this dysfunction of the mitochondria, which is causing the knock-on effects we see. But there's many things that can cause dysfunction in the mitochondria.

Speaker 2 And we went through a bunch of them earlier. Is that like a simple way of understanding it?

Speaker 1 100%. Okay, great.
Perfect.

Speaker 2 Super interesting.

Speaker 2 Okay, so on that point then, we have to zoom in on this thing of diet.

Speaker 2 If you wanted my mitochondria to be perfect, And maybe even give me a case study of, I know patients you've worked with that you've, you've, you've prescribed a certain diet to, what diet, what food would you tell me to eat?

Speaker 2 And what would you tell me not to eat?

Speaker 1 So I actually don't have a one-size-fits-all prescription.

Speaker 1 And so I want to say that up front. So I would want to know who am I working with

Speaker 1 and how is their mental and metabolic health now? Me.

Speaker 1 So you. Yeah.
So I would want more details. Are you having symptoms of any mental health condition?

Speaker 2 I would say no. However,

Speaker 2 I can have moments where I feel a little bit anxious.

Speaker 2 So, you know, I've been through a lot of, I'd say, like stressful events in my life because I was running a big business, we had hunches of employees, paydays all the time.

Speaker 2 So I had this, at one point, I had this constant, subtle stress.

Speaker 1 And so I would want to know, do you feel like you have anxiety for no good reason?

Speaker 2 Sometimes, sometimes it can feel a little bit like that.

Speaker 2 It's very infrequent, I'd say.

Speaker 2 But I can also have moments where I just think of something and then I get the same kind of like, it's almost like the fight or flight response has just kicked in.

Speaker 1 But you think of something adverse or stressful? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so the

Speaker 1 one thing I would say about that,

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 1 we could get into a lot more details, which we probably don't want to do now

Speaker 1 on the podcast.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 my strong guess, based on just what you've said, is that that level of stress and anxiety

Speaker 1 is quote-unquote normal. Okay, because you

Speaker 1 are sensing, I have to go do something that's really scary right now, or I have to go do something that's going to ruin someone's life, or

Speaker 1 that

Speaker 1 might threaten my success.

Speaker 1 It is normal and actually healthy to have anxiety and stress in those situations.

Speaker 1 The anxiety and stress can sometimes be quite helpful and adaptive because it can make you pause and reflect on: is this really what I want to do?

Speaker 1 As opposed to being overly confident and just proceeding.

Speaker 1 Your own personal history almost certainly informs your level of stress response. And again, so if you go back to your own traumas,

Speaker 1 you're going to remember when I'm facing a situation like this, it's helpful to be on hyper alert. It's helpful to be hyper-vigilant.

Speaker 1 And your body and brain will remember that helped you navigate this safely and effectively.

Speaker 2 But if I have that profile, if I have that sort of mental health profile now as I sit here, and then for the next decade, I ate

Speaker 2 process junk food.

Speaker 2 Am I going to send my mitochondria into disarray, which is going to increase the probability that I have a mental health disorder?

Speaker 1 Yes. I think yes.
We've got,

Speaker 1 you know, we, there's no way we will ever be able to do a human randomized controlled trial to test that precise

Speaker 1 hypothesis.

Speaker 1 But we have large epidemiological studies that strongly suggest that people who eat a lot of ultra-processed food have higher risk for developing depression, anxiety, and other mental disorders.

Speaker 1 And based on the science, the granular science,

Speaker 1 based on animal models. So we can do that to mice and rats.
And in fact, that's exactly what we see in mice and rats.

Speaker 1 We feed them an obesogenic diet,

Speaker 1 which is usually high in fat, high in carbohydrates, ultra-processed foods. Some researchers have fed rats and mice cafeteria diets, where they feed them a lot of delicious junk food.

Speaker 1 And those mice develop higher rates of obesity, but also higher rates of

Speaker 1 diabetes and pre-diabetes. And oh, by the way, also higher rates of depression and anxiety, because those are the two things that we can kind of measure in mice and rats.

Speaker 1 We can't necessarily measure ADHD symptoms. It's really hard to actually measure psychotic symptoms,

Speaker 1 but we can measure depression and anxiety symptoms pretty well in animals. And so in animal models, we know that that's unequivocally true.

Speaker 2 And we see the same in humans, though, because I was reading your book and in chapter four, you say. People with ADHD are more likely to develop obesity.

Speaker 2 People who are obese are 50% more likely to develop bipolar and 25% more likely to develop anxiety or depression.

Speaker 2 And weight gain around the time of puberty leads to a 400% increase in the chance of depression by the age of 24.

Speaker 1 Yes. And insulin resistance at age nine

Speaker 1 makes

Speaker 1 increases your chances of developing a psychotic at-risk mental state, which is like meaning you're at high risk for developing schizophrenia or bipolar disorder 500%.

Speaker 2 And Alzheimer's?

Speaker 1 All mental disorders are associated with an increased risk of alzheimer's disease anywhere from the lowest is 50 increased risk and the highest is 2000 percent increased risk and the thread that unites all of these problems is metabolism metabolism

Speaker 1 and at the end of the day you have to talk about mitochondria in order to understand metabolism

Speaker 1 um

Speaker 1 only 7% of US

Speaker 1 citizens

Speaker 1 have no signs of metabolic health problems.

Speaker 1 Meaning, 93%

Speaker 1 or so of US residents will have at least one of the biomarkers of metabolic syndrome,

Speaker 1 meaning they have prediabetes

Speaker 1 or abnormal lipids or high blood pressure or abdominal obesity or abdominal fat, excessive abdominal fat.

Speaker 2 So what do we offer those 93%?

Speaker 1 So those people,

Speaker 1 diet interventions would absolutely be a part of a healing strategy.

Speaker 1 A part of it, not the only strategy. I would want to know about their sleep.
I would want to know about substance use. I would want to know about medications, lots of things.

Speaker 1 But for dietary interventions, I would want to meet them where they're at and just find out, well, where are you at? What are you eating?

Speaker 1 Do you have preferences or demands for what your diet should be?

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