Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - BITESIZE | Eat These Foods to Improve Your Mental Health | Dr Drew Ramsey #305

Starting point is 00:00:00 Today's Bite Size episode is brought to you by AG1, a science-driven daily health drink with over 70 essential nutrients to support your overall health. It includes vitamin C and zinc, which helps support a healthy immune system, something that is really important at this time of year. It also contains prebiotics and digestive enzymes that help support your gut health. It's really tasty and has been in my own life for over five years. Until the end of January, AG1 are giving a limited time offer. Usually they offer my listeners a one-year supply of vitamin D and K2 and five free travel packs with their first order. But until the end of January, they are doubling the five free travel packs to

Starting point is 00:00:51 10. And these packs are perfect for keeping in your backpack, office, or car. If you want to take advantage of this limited time offer, all you have to do is go to drinkag1.com forward slash live more. Welcome to Feel Better Live More Bite Size, your weekly dose of positivity and optimism to get you ready for the weekend. Today's clip is from episode 212 of the podcast with the leader in the field of nutritional psychiatry, Dr. Drew Ramsey. Drew's 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. to improve your brain and mental health.

Starting point is 00:01:51 What I think is really interesting for many of us 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 and set of evidence now linking inflammation and chronic inflammation to depression and anxiety, as well as brain fog. Inflammation is very tightly linked to our food, because the largest part of our inflammatory or immune system is our gut. And so you think about food as really a set of signals and as 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

Starting point is 00:02:40 make to think about mental health and mental fitness and our own mental fitness and how do we prevent these conditions and then if we have them really use everything that we have to treat them and i think what's exciting is for me you know a lot of times mental health we're trying to take something away from a patient in a certain way right a bad habit or defense or a toxic relationship or a substance what i liked about food is one, patients were already doing it. You're already eating three, four times a day. And so it was like, it's a much easier pivot. You're already in the grocery store. If I can help you look right instead of look left, wow, I can make a massive outcome in your health, in your mental health, particularly.

Starting point is 00:03:20 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 for sure you can talk about how they fit into certain patterns i worked specifically with laura lechance and we started trying to create a manual of nutritional psychiatry of how do clinicians do this. We created the antidepressant food scale. And we just really asked a simple question. All right, with all this nutritional information, what nutrients matter for depression? And we found there were 12 that had significant levels of scientific evidence that they could help prevent depression and help treat depression. Things like zinc and magnesium and B12 and omega-3 fats and folate and iron.

Starting point is 00:04:08 And then we said, what foods on planet Earth, just natural, whole foods, have the most of these 12 nutrients per calorie? Really simple question. And that led to a list of the top plant foods and the top animal foods. And while 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 to fight my depression. And what really led me to understand is it needs to call nutrient profiling systems. And the antidepressant food scale was the first

Starting point is 00:04:38 nutrient profiling system that was ever created specifically for mental health. And what Dr. Lachance and I understood is that if you looked at food in terms of food categories, and this is what nutrient profiling systems really encourage you to do, what you see is what's in the top five animal foods. Three of them are bivalves, mussels, clams, and oysters. Why is that? Well, if you look at one of the most important nutrients for mental health, it's vitamin B12, the largest vitamin we eat. You'd think we'd all know what is the top source of vitamin B12 in the natural world. And I certainly didn't. It's clams. I mean, who's called clam a superfood, right? It's like, who said like, oh, you know, I'm going out tonight. I want to make sure I recover from my hangover.

Starting point is 00:05:21 Oh, getting a B12 injection. It's like, hell no, I'm having pasta vongole my b12 levels up i mean it's so you know i remember the dietary pattern i think is a really brilliant shift that researchers made and you've had felice jack on she's really uh you know one of the founders of this field i mean she's done some of the best research and led i think really, really our movement. Dr. Jekka had actually the first real nutritional psychiatry paper ever published in the American Journal of Psychiatry, one of the top journals in mental health, which was a correlational study showing that dietary pattern, so it's not about just B12 or this or that, but a dietary pattern. So the pattern of all the foods you eat, a traditional dietary pattern. So those are foods everybody's going to recognize. Everyone's heard that phrase, foods like grandma ate, right? So potatoes, tomatoes, okra, salmon, beef, right?

Starting point is 00:06:14 Stuff that is real food compared to a modern or Western dietary pattern. And a traditional dietary pattern was correlated with a significant decrease in depression and anxiety so it's just a correlational study but really fascinating and i like this 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 that has a foundation on really we're called nutrient dense foods again those foods on the antidepressant food scale, like leafy greens, you're always going to have a lot of nutrition, not a lot of calories. And that's what we look for in nutritional psychiatry. And there are a lot of foods that I think we've lost. A lot of us have lost the

Starting point is 00:07:00 tradition of seafoods or nutrient-dense foods or how leafy greens are used. A lot of us don't have that knowledge of how to prepare and cook foods at home in very simple ways that are very easy and economical but that 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 there 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 yeah yeah you're not that's so the the i think the best trial in that is is back to a prospective correlational trial which was an epidemiological study of 10,000, I think it's like

Starting point is 00:07:45 930 some odd, university students in Spain. And what that study showed is that if you look at them at the beginning of college, and you look at how Mediterranean their diet is, so it's a nine-point Mediterranean dietary pattern 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 about who gets depressed and what they're eating, they found that there was between a 30 to 52% reduction in the risk of getting clinical depression. 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

Starting point is 00:08:31 two years of the trial and just took them out of the data set to really try and see, we're really looking for people over the span of their college career eating a poor dietary pattern versus a Mediterranean dietary pattern. 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 really love working with young adults at 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 freshmen that had poor eating habits and had depression. And they did a very simple intervention. This is, I sort of joke with

Starting point is 00:09:12 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 a week later, one week later, so two weeks after the video, another five-minute phone call. And the five-minute phone was like, hey, Bronco, how are you? Like, you eating some veggies, man? How's dorm life?

Starting point is 00:09:32 Like, you using the turmeric? How about the nuts? And so they gave people a little box of nuts, nut butter, olive oil, and then cinnamon and turmeric. So they send these into the college dorm. 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 cinnamon and turmeric, there's a little bit of data about

Starting point is 00:09:54 those being good for brain health and brain growth. What they found is that just with that minimal intervention, individuals significantly shifted their diets there was a significant reduction in anxiety depression and stress rating scales at three months and at 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'd like to help your patients put their brains in grow mode. And I thought that was a really interesting way of thinking about it. So what is grow mode and how do you help your patients get into that state?

Starting point is 00:10:41 I encourage my patients and really 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, it may be dopamine. And I think that really above all of these players is BDNF. And BDNF is a neurohormone you brought up connection earlier and it's really a for me a driving core principle of my own personal life of how i think about my mental health and my happiness and in my family's happiness and uh but also i think about my patients when i value them

Starting point is 00:11:18 is the kind of tentacles of your 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 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 where our memories like live in these connections between our neurons it's really just uh fascinating to think about the brain is this, not what even I learned in medical school 20 years ago. I'm sure you learned the same thing, right? Hey, you get like 90 billion brain cells.

Starting point is 00:11:52 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 Felice Jacka study, a great study showing that between 60 and 65, individuals with a healthy diet, you could see a significantly bigger brain, like a couple cubic millimeters more brain in the left hippocampus compared to individuals who were eating a very unhealthy dietary western dietary pattern right that's a lot of brain cells like two cubic millimeters i mean so that's

Starting point is 00:12:32 exciting to me as a clinician and and i try and bring that hopefulness and enthusiasm because often when we are struggling with our mental health we really feel badly about ourselves we feel very down we feel very stuck um so the idea that you know this brain that i'm lugging around that's not really serving 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 um eating well connecting with loved ones, and playing, playing, I've got my hands up, I was feeling nervous for that, playing a little instrument, playing a little music. All those things support my brain making more connections in a very intentional way. And so I love the idea of neuroplasticity.

Starting point is 00:13:20 It's really the most powerful way that food and lifestyle medicine can work for us. Literally giving us more brain resilience more brain repair and more brain power hope you enjoyed that bite-sized clip i hope you have a wonderful weekend and i'll be back next week with my long-form conversational wednesday and the latest episode of bite science next friday Wednesday and the latest episode of Bite Science next Friday.

Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - BITESIZE | Eat These Foods to Improve Your Mental Health | Dr Drew Ramsey #305

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