Something You Should Know - Where Great Ideas Come From & How Diet Affects Your Mood and Mental Health

Episode Date: August 6, 2020

If you have blue eyes, you are related to me! That is just one of the fascinating things I discuss as I begin this episode with a fascinating look at your eyes and how they work so well to help you navigate and see the world. http://www.buzzfeed.com/acuvue/impossibly-cool-facts-you-may-not-know-about-yo#.kjpwxlkvO Where do new ideas and innovations come from? Often, they seem to strike like lightning with no real pattern or explanation. But that is not exactly right according to my guest Matt Ridley. Matt is a journalist and businessman and author of the book How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom (https://amzn.to/2D6syWe). Matt has studied how great ideas are created, developed and accepted and he joins me to explain it all. Social media is a great way to let people know about your latest accomplishments. And people sure do it a lot. However, it may not be such a great idea – at least not too often. Listen as I discuss how self-promotion on social media can actually have the opposite effect you think it does. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/05/150512104037.htm How does your diet affect your mood and mental health? In a lot of interesting ways – good and bad – according to Dr. Uma Naidoo, a board certified psychiatrist, director of nutritional and lifestyle psychiatry at Mass General Hospital and author of the book This is Your Brain on Food (https://amzn.to/3fejgo0). Uma is here to discuss the fascinating connection between what goes on in your gut and your mental frame of mind and what foods to eat to help you improve your mental health.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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You can now make the first move or not. With opening moves, you simply choose a question to be automatically sent to your matches. Then sit back and let your matches start the chat. Download Bumble and try it for yourself. Today on Something You Should Know, if you have blue eyes, you're related to me. I'll explain how. Then, where do great new ideas and innovation come from? Sometimes it's predictable, but many times great innovations come in strange ways. I tell the story of the pill camera

which is a thing you swallow and it takes a picture of our insides for your doctor to look at and it came about after a conversation over a garden fence between a gastroenterologist and a guided missile designer. Also, why less is more when it comes to bragging on social media. And did you know what you eat can affect your mental health? The best way to understand this is that all these different foods, whether they're good for you or they're bad for you, can impact your gut bacteria.

And this then impacts the effect on your brain in a good way or a bad way. All this today on Something You Should Know. People who listen to Something You Should Know are curious about the world, looking to hear new ideas and perspectives. So I want to tell you about a podcast that is full of new ideas and perspectives and one I've started listening to called Intelligence Squared. It's the podcast where great minds meet. Listen in for some great talks on science, tech, politics,

creativity, wellness, and a lot more. A couple of recent examples, Mustafa Suleiman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, discussing the future of technology. That's pretty cool. And writer, podcaster, and filmmaker John Ronson, discussing the rise of conspiracies and culture wars. Intelligence Squared is the kind of podcast that gets you thinking a little more openly about the important conversations going on today.

Being curious, you're probably just the type of person Intelligence Squared is meant for. Thank you. advice you can use in your life today something you should know with mike carothers hi you know this part of the podcast i think i've mentioned this before in a previous episode this part of the podcast of me talking to you right now is actually more or less the last thing i do before an episode is finished so although it's at the beginning of the podcast, it's the last thing I do. And so I already know what's coming in the rest of this podcast because I've already heard it. And I think you'll agree it is a particularly good episode. And let's get to it. We start today by talking about your eyes. They are truly fascinating. And here are some things about your eyes you probably didn't know.

According to studies, defined limbal rings can make you more attractive. The limbal ring is that dark, round line around your iris, and apparently you're more likely to develop a crush on somebody who shows them prominently. The eye muscle is the fastest reacting muscle in your entire body. It contracts in less than 1 100th of a second. There are approximately 7 million cones and 130 million rods in your retina that respond to light. They help you determine color and detail. Around 6,000 to 10,000 years ago, everybody had brown eyes, and then the first blue-eyed baby was born. And all blue-eyed people since then are related to that first baby and to

each other. Your eyes can see about 10 million different colors, but if you're part of that 1% of women with a rare genetic mutation, you're able to see 100 million colors. Both sides of both parents' families can all have brown eyes, yet still produce a child with blue eyes. And your eye color isn't set until you're two years old. And that is something you should know. When it comes to innovation, we live in exciting times. It seems like new ideas and improvements to existing products and services come out at a rapid rate, and often from unexpected people in unexpected places.

So just how does innovation work? Where do great ideas come from? And what's the difference between innovation and invention? These are all really good questions that can help us all better understand how great ideas grow and prosper. And one of the best people to talk on the topic is Matt Ridley. He's a journalist, writer, and businessman. He is a member of the House of Lords in the United Kingdom, and he is author of the book, How Innovation Works and Why It Flourishes in Freedom. Hey, Matt, welcome.

Thanks for having me on the show. Sure. It seems to me that when you look at innovation and where new ideas and products and services come from, that one of the things that makes it so fascinating to look at is because things often seemingly come out of the blue or they come from places that you would never expect, which I would imagine makes it also difficult to study innovation and find any kind of common thread or guiding principles on what makes innovation work. That's right. I tell the story of the pill camera, which is a thing you swallow, and it takes a picture of our insides for your doctor to look at. And it came about after a conversation over a garden fence between a gastroenterologist and a guided missile designer. That's quite a nice example of a very unexpected combination of talents coming together and doing something something different and interesting. Yeah well that's the perfect example two guys talking across a fence they come up with a great idea

but but just coming up with a great idea isn't enough, right? There's also the important difference between invention and innovation in the sense that a lot of the hard work is turning a bright idea into something that's practical, affordable, and reliable and that people actually want to get hold of. What I call that innovation, essentially, is turning inventions into practical realities. And that's often neglected. People think that all you have to do is design a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door. Doesn't happen that way. You've got to make that mousetrap reliable, affordable and available. But again, when you've got, you know, two guys talking across a fence and they come up with this great idea, it is so random. It is so who would have thought that it seems almost impossible, if not, frankly, pointless to try and figure out innovation. It's not that random.

I mean, after all, it happens a heck of a lot more in Silicon Valley than it does in the middle of Central Africa or somewhere like that. And a thousand years ago, it happened a lot more in the Yangtze Valley than in Silicon Valley. So there's something about certain places at certain times, the Renaissance Italy, the city-states there, ancient Greece, modern, I mean, Victorian Britain. There's something about each of these places that they get together the critical mass where the innovations happen. They attract the right people. The people have an opportunity to share their ideas in a way that they don't in other places. There is money available. There is energy available. there is talent available to help them. So it's non-random in that sense. It's also non-random in terms of which sectors get innovated.

So the last 50 years have seen extraordinary changes in computing and communication, but very disappointing changes in transport. And you get a feel for that if you go back to the 1950s and look at their ideas about what the 21st century would look like it's full of routine space travel supersonic flights personal jetpacks gyrocopters for all um there's very little about mobile telephones and things like that um so you know for some, we've hit limits that make it very hard to innovate in transport. Well, we've made it more reliable and affordable, but we've not made it faster. Whereas we've made communication and computing much, much faster as well as more affordable over the last 50 years. And so there are things you can say about why that happened, about what's

going to happen. Well, there's not much you can say about what happens next, because it's also surprisingly unpredictable. Well, it is interesting that I imagine that there are new innovations in all kinds of industries and all kinds of technology. But I think when most people, when I think of innovation, I think of computers, electronics, digital innovation seems to be what I think of. And I think most people think of when they think of innovation. That's partly because digital innovation is permissionless. Whereas if you want to build a flying car, you've got to go out and get licenses from pretty well everybody. And there's a very heavy regulatory hurdle to get over, which makes it very expensive. Whereas if you're building a new social media platform, there's really almost

nothing you have to do to get permission. Is the point of talking about innovation, writing books about innovation, to just shine a light on it that, ooh, isn't this interesting? Or is it to come up with a recipe? I'm more interested in the former. I just think innovation itself is a very interesting topic. It's the reason we are living lives of extraordinary prosperity compared to our ancestors. It's the reason we have technology and rabbits and rocks don't have technology. It's one of the huge themes of the modern world.

And so I just want to understand it. But I deliberately set out to do something rather sort of bottom up here. In other words, to tell stories about innovation, about many, many different kinds of innovations, high tech ones, low tech ones, no tech ones, you know, virtual ones, and all these kind of things, and then see if there were common themes. So to let the evidence speak for itself, rather than sort of go in with a theory and try and make the evidence fit my theory. And so what are some of those common threads?

When you look at different things being invented and innovated, what do you see that they have in common? There's a really interesting phenomenon called simultaneous invention, whereby the thermometer was invented by four different people independently around the same time. The light bulb was invented by 21 different people independently in the 1870s. The search engine was invented by hundreds of different people independently in the early 1990s. And with that last example, you can see very clearly what's going on, which is not that there is some deity up there in the sky who has suddenly injected the phrase search engine into the brains of lots of different people at the same time, but that the contributing technologies that you need are ripe. They're ready to come together. In the case of the search engine, the internet has arrived.

People are going to be exploring the internet. It's kind of obvious that devices that help them find what they want to look for in the internet are going to be important and possibly lucrative. Well, it's obvious in retrospect, but did anyone in the late 80s say, you know, once we've got this internet thing up and running, I'm going to make a lot of money out of search engines? Almost nobody did that. In fact, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the two people who made the most money out of search engines, didn't even think that's what they were doing. They thought they were cataloging the internet. They didn't realize they were inventing a search engine for a surprisingly long time. They say that themselves. So there's a surprising, there's a phenomenon here where it looks very obvious in retrospect what comes next,

but it doesn't look at all obvious what comes next when you're there in the moment looking forwards. And so from a broader perspective that you have taken, what is it you can say about innovation in general? One, it's more gradual than we think. We tend to think of it as disruptive innovation that suddenly changes the world. Actually, if you look closely, there's a lot of hard work goes in before the disruption and a lot of hard work goes in after the disruption. It's evolutionary in the sense that there is dissent with modification. Each technology gives rise to another technology and so on. You have to go through the steps and it runs a sort of trial and error phenomenon that is very like natural

selection. There are lots of ideas thrown out there. Some survive and some don't. Google Glass was a failure. Google itself was a success success it's serendipitous we've already touched on how you get these strange meetings of ideas that produce new ideas it's recombinant every single idea that every single technology that we have is basically a combination of other technologies it's got this fascinating hype cycle whereby it tends to disappoint in the first few years and then it exceeds expectations after that so um roy amara was a computer scientist in silicon valley in the 1960s who said a new technology um exceeds expectations in the long run, but we underestimate its impact in the long run, but we overestimate its impact in the short run. And I think that's very interesting.

Think about the Internet. By the end of the 1990s, quite a lot of us were saying, I don't know, I'm not sure about e-commerce. It's not really that interesting. It's not quite going to work. I can't make it function. Ten years later, nobody is saying that. So there's a sort of takeoff phenomenon that is quite important. We're talking about innovation and where it comes from. And we're talking with Matt Ridley. He's author of the book, How Innovation Works and Why It Flourishes in Freedom. Hi, I'm Jennifer, a co-founder of the Go Kid Go Network.

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Lining on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. Since I host a podcast, it's pretty common for me to be asked to recommend a podcast. And I tell people, if you like something you should know, you're going to like The Jordan Harbinger Show. Every episode is a conversation with a fascinating guest. Of course, a lot of podcasts are conversations with guests, but Jordan does it better than most. Recently, he had a fascinating conversation with a British woman who was recruited and radicalized by ISIS

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The Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. So, Matt, when you say that innovation has this kind of false start where people overhype it and it's kind of a disappointment, does that tend to be typically more digital kinds of innovation? It seems like if you invent a better mousetrap, it's either going to work or it doesn't. It's not going to get better. This is it. Well, no, I don't think you're right there because what you're talking about is the mousetrap having already been invented and someone coming along and inventing a better one. That's quite late. That's sort of mature technology. But if you think about something like genomics, okay, pretty well exactly 20 years

ago, a month ago, 20 years ago, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair did a joint press conference to announce the sequencing of the first human genome. And if you read their speeches from that day, they are extraordinarily utopian. They say this is the beginning of the end of disease, this is when we start to cure cancer, this is the most important breakthrough in all of human history. In the long run, I think they're going to be right. But if you think about what genomics has delivered in terms of new medicines today, it's pretty disappointing. And that's not an electronic technology. Another example is aeroplanes. By the late 1920s, the idea that you could build planes

strong enough to fly over the oceans had largely been dismissed. Everybody thought, right, well, you can build planes up to a certain size and you can use them in warfare over the trenches and you can do acrobatics in them. But frankly, we're never really going to use them much to get across the oceans, at least not with many passengers or much cargo on board. We're going to have to rely on airships for that, which is why there was a lot of airship building around 1930. It's only, you know, 20 or 30 years after that that we start to say, hang on, we can build aluminum fuselages that enable us to fly lots of passengers across oceans. Don't you think there's some resistance to innovation that, you know, people say they like the new thing, the new shiny object, but people also say they like things just the way they are.

There's even a longing for the good old days. And partly, I suspect, because to adopt new innovation means a learning curve. You've got to learn how to do the new thing when you just mastered the old thing. And all of this acts as kind of a pushback against innovation. Actually, there's a huge amount of opposition to many innovations, and it's often based on spurious imaginary problems that might come out of technologies. And a lot of organizations get very rich fanning the flames of this opposition and just to ram the point home i give the story of coffee which was an innovation that came into europe in the 1500s

and pretty well wherever it went people were furiously against it and rulers in particular kept banning it or trying to ban it they usually failed because people liked coffee but there was there were medical reasons you know this was going to dry up your kidneys or something uh there were uh there was commercial reasons the wine and beer industry didn't like it um and there were social reasons kings didn't like coffee because people would gather in coffee houses and have animated conversations about whether kings were doing a good job and quite often they came to the conclusion that they weren't. And Charles II of England was very explicit.

Is that why he was banning coffeehouses? Because he didn't like people spreading fake news in them. Now, that's all quite familiar when we look at what's happened to genetic engineering in agriculture in Europe, or shale gas in Europe, or nuclear power, where we haven't been able to develop new nuclear technologies in the last 50 years. There is a there's a lot of vested interests and a lot of scaremongering that holds back innovation even today.

In fact, more today, I would say, than in the past. Well, I've certainly experienced that resistance to technology and innovation myself, and I think everyone has in the case of you get a new computer or you get a new cell phone, and in no time there's a newer one that's cooler and better, and you really need to get a new one. And I think, well, this one works fine. It does everything I need it to do. I don't want to get a new one, but there is that pressure to keep up and to get a new one. And I push back and say, no, this is fine, at least for now. Well, that's a very interesting point because if you look at the history of the mobile telephone,

everybody drastically underestimated the attraction, the importance, the commercial significance of mobile phones. I mean, there's a famous prediction from AT&T, I think it is, that there'll never be a market for more than about 4 million mobile phones in the world. Well, the date they put on that prediction, there were already 100 million in the world and climbing so again and again people adopted mobile phones and threw away old ones and adopted new ones at a terrific rate until recently and if you look at what's happening now in the mobile the smartphone market people are no longer changing models so fast because they're finding that the advantages of the next model are not as great as they would like them to be, and it's just not worth the bother. And so the market projections for the number of sales of mobile phones have had to be downgraded in recent years.

And this is, of course, the first time this has happened. Yeah, well, I think that's true for a lot of innovation, especially incremental innovation, because, yeah, you can make the phone a little better, you can make the computer a little better, but you have to weigh that against the huge hassle it is. Like, if you get a new computer and you have to move everything over to the new

computer and reload the programs and set all the settings for your email or whatever it is you have to do, it's a big hassle and nobody's ever figured out how to make that really easy to do. So that's a big pushback, I think, to innovation. Well, I think one of the reasons for that is because people want to keep you trapped on their own systems. I mean, I migrated from Microsoft-based computers to Apple-based computers about 10 years ago, and I was very, very nervous about doing so, and I wasn't sure I was doing the right thing. And to start with, oh, gosh, this is confusing. But quite quickly, I found actually that I preferred the Mac-based system. It's sort of more intuitive. So it can be done.

But you're right. There was a lot of, there's a big transactional hurdle there in changing. And very few people have a vested interest in making that easier for you or me to do. One of the things that's always interested me about innovation is that you would think, well, maybe you wouldn't think, but I would think that if somebody comes up with the next big thing, that there's something special about that person or that group of people that they'll likely come up with more next big things, but they almost never do.

You know, Microsoft came out with what they came out with, but then they kind of fell behind. Apple kind of took off. And we haven't seen any big, huge, the next personal computer kind of innovation from Microsoft. And maybe it's because they're very vested in their old big thing and want to keep that going. But it does seem to strike like lightning in terms of where it comes from. That's absolutely right. And the reason for that is because

success breeds size and size breeds complacency and vested interest in the status quo, and a general tendency not to be innovative. So, you know, Nokia became the biggest mobile phone company out of nowhere. But then Nokia was so invested in voice that it didn't really see the data revolution, the mobile data revolution coming, and it was blown out of the water by basically apple and others um uh and kodak didn't invent uh digital photography actually it did invent it it just didn't see the point of it because it didn't want to cannibalize its own business in film and as you say um you know amazon invented online retail and has been spectacularly successful and has all sorts of devices to keep being an innovative company. And Jeff Bezos' ethos of you have to swing a lot and miss in order to occasionally succeed is an important part of that.

But there will come a time when Amazon is a great big clunky dinosaur and somebody else eats its lunch. One of the interesting things about innovation to me, and you touched on it in the beginning of our conversation, is the difference between invention and innovation. That for an innovation to really work and take hold and get people excited, you have to sell it. Because, you know if if it's a brand new product and we've lived this long without it you're gonna have to really convince me to buy it because i really somehow need it i haven't needed it till now that's that's exactly right no i mean and this is the point about the difference between invention and innovation is that the innovator knows that he's got to go out there and sell the product.

And he's got to get it into a form where people want it. So where Edison was so brilliant is that he saw the need to do the hard grind of turning the pretty good prototype into the very good model. Henry Ford was the same um so these guys were innovators not inventors um and you're right marketing is a big part of that and it has resulted in us missing out on some very good technologies because the inventors didn't know how to how to market them or sell them i I find it so interesting, as you discuss, that we have this love-hate relationship with innovation, that we like things the way they are, we resist the new thing until we stop resisting the new thing, then we love the new thing, and then we resist the next new thing.

And it's this resistance and giving in and adopting and then resisting again that is so fascinating. Matt Ridley has been my guest. He is a journalist, a writer, a businessman, a member of the House of Lords in the United Kingdom. He is author of the book, How Innovation Works and Why It Flourishes in Freedom. You'll find a link to his book at Amazon in the show notes. Thank you, Matt. Appreciate you being here. Thank you, Michael. I've really enjoyed the conversation and some very good points that you've made too.

Hey, everyone. Join me, Megan Rinks. And me, Melissa Demonts for Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong? Each week, we deliver four fun-filled shows. In Don't Blame Me, we tackle our listeners' dilemmas with hilariously honest advice. Then we have But Am I Wrong, which is for the listeners that didn't take our advice. Plus, we share our hot takes on current events. Then tune in to see you next Tuesday for our listener poll results from But Am I Wrong.

And finally, wrap up your week with Fisting Friday, where we catch up and talk all things pop culture. Listen to Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong on Apple Podcasts, Finally, wrap up your week with Fisting Friday, where we catch up and talk all things pop culture. Listen to Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. Do you love Disney? Then you are going to love our hit podcast, Disney Countdown. I'm Megan, the Magical Millennial. And I'm the Dapper Danielle. On every episode of our fun and family-friendly show, we count down our top 10 lists of all

things Disney. There is nothing we don't cover. We are famous for rabbit holes, Disney-themed games, and fun facts you didn't know you needed, but you definitely need in your life. So if you're looking for a healthy dose of Disney magic, check out Disney Countdown wherever you get your podcasts. We all know that food can affect your physical health, but it also seems that your mental health is also affected by your diet. How you think, the mood you're in can all be influenced by what you eat or don't eat. That's according to Uma Naido. She's a board-certified psychiatrist and director of nutritional and lifestyle psychiatry at Mass General Hospital.

She's author of the book, This Is Your Brain on Food. Hi, Doctor. Thank you so much, Mike. It's lovely to be here. So explain what's going on here, because I don't think people generally think about this, about how I eat can affect my mind and my mood and how I think. So explain it, if you would. Thanks, Mike. I think it's a great question, because most people know how to eat to lower their cholesterol or how to worry about hypertension, but many people don't

think about the fact that food also can impact mood and mental health and actually several conditions. And the reason for that is there's a real connection between the gut and the brain. And by understanding that, people then understand that what we eat does ultimately impact our emotional state. Well, I think it's hard for people to imagine that whatever food you choose, some great food to eat, like, I don't know, blueberries, that if I eat some blueberries, somehow that's going to improve my mood or change the way I view the world. It seems a little, it seems far-fetched. So you're absolutely right, Mike. Eating a little handful of blueberries is not going to

immediately make you feel better. And that is because the positive impact of these healthy foods that have things like antioxidants and other good nutrients don't work immediately, but they start to do things like heal your gut bacteria. They start to improve your emotional state over time. An interesting thing to mention here is that when we don't eat good foods, we may say we enjoy ice cream. I'm not saying you shouldn't eat ice cream. Just have it less often, not every night. But when you eat ice cream, you may have a really good feeling.

The truth is that that feeling is very real. It is the ongoing and more lasting effect that is negative for your brain. So I think that sometimes we feel a little trapped by this because we think that if we eat something bad for us, supposedly, as the doctors say, we have a good feeling. So that doesn't make sense. The best way to understand this is that all these different foods, whether they're good for you or they're bad for you, can impact your gut bacteria, and this then impacts the effect on your brain in a good way or a bad way.

Another thing to say is that when you eat a food that is more fun but less healthy, it kind of gives you a good feeling, but it's very short-lived. It's much more the long-term effect that we worry about as doctors. And generally speaking, is what people think of as a, quote, healthy diet, is that what is a good mental health diet? Some of the principles are the same, but what I try to do is really look at the research around specific foods that were linked to specific mental health conditions. And what I found is that there was, not only for my clinical work,

but there is not a lot of research to back up some of these interesting foods. So a lot of people may know things like eating omega-3 fatty acids in fatty fish like salmon are good for you because they are good brain food ingredients. But it goes beyond just those healthy so-called foods. There's a lot more to it. And a lot of the nuance is around the foods that may negatively impact you because by disrupting the microbiome and feeding the bad bugs in our gut, what happens is inflammation can get set up, and that can lead to problems with your mental health conditions. So what I hope people will understand is that there's more to it than just a few healthy

foods. I think the second thing to mention there as well, Mike, is that many doctors tell you to eat a salad or to eat more fruits and vegetables, but they don't often explain why. And the biggest issue is that those foods, beans, nuts, legumes, seeds, fruit, and vegetables have fiber. They have natural fiber. And the fiber actually fuels our gut balance in a good direction. So when you make those recommendations, it's also based on improving your health. But very importantly, from a mental health perspective, it really can improve other symptoms too. And so explain and maybe pick a specific food.

Explain how it works, how it's going to help your mental health, how long does it take, how much do you have to eat? Just take an example and explain that. Sure. So I'm going to choose something that people may be aware of, which is, I'm going to choose salmon because it is very rich in several substances, but one of the leading substances is omega-3 fatty acids. Why do we suggest that? Because omega-3 fatty acids help different aspects of how our brains function in a better way. They reduce inflammation, they have a rich antioxidant effect, and they help ultimately to lower anxiety and improve mood. And research studies in human subjects have shown this quite in a repeated fashion. And so you might eat, you know, one to two servings of salmon,

which is about a four to six ounce fillet, healthily prepared, at least say twice a week. And that is a source of a good lean protein for you. Well, the richness of how you are feeding your brain with omega-3 fatty acids is part of a regular healthy diet as well, because there are nutrients in everything that you eat that can either work for you or against you. So something with high sugars will work against you. After consuming a diet like this over time and making healthier choices like, say, including salmon twice a week in your diet, you will start to notice that your mood will improve possibly over a period of time.

It could be one to two months. It's not the same effect as a prescription medication because the mechanism is different. It's not a pharmaceutical. Food is really meant to be an additional strategy that people can use. They should not be using, you know, eating salmon only if they are severely depressed and suicidal. In that case, it would be something they can do as well as seeing a doctor for medication. But where these strategies work really well is when someone is not feeling good, they have mental health symptoms, they want to feel better, they may or may not be seeing a doctor for medication, but it's a way that they can really boost their own mental health

through something that they can do on their own quite safely through the use of foods and the appropriate foods for different conditions. I would imagine people are thinking, listening to that, saying, okay, well, but two servings of salmon every week for the rest of my life seems like an awful lot of salmon. Maybe they don lot of salmon. That's going to be... Maybe they don't like salmon. I think it's more that I'm conveying a principle of how to include a healthy food that actually

is brain healthy as well. I'm not saying it's going to cure depression, but it is something that can completely augment and improve symptoms of both mood and anxiety. So when you ask for, you know, pick a food, I suggested one that I think most people would know, and most people may have heard, whether they eat it or not, that it can be brain healthy. Now, there are things like fruits and vegetables that people often overlook, but some of those are very high quality foods that feed you in a good way because they help your gut balance, which ultimately helps your brain. So, you know, it may not be someone's first choice, but there are more options that one can break down for people as well. Give me a sense of like how much and what I mean by that is like if so if you're feeling on a scale of one to ten if you're feeling a two and you eat salmon for six weeks twice a week

are you going to get to a three are you going to get to a nine? Sure so the science is not there yet Mike and we don't have food doses for mental health, but what we have are research studies that show that including these in your diet are going to boost your mood or lower your anxiety. And it is difficult to capture this type of information in a nutritional science or nutrition epidemiology study because many of these use questionnaires and they rely on people letting us know what they ate. So unlike, say, a test for fluoxetine, which is Prozac, which can be done in a lab, which can be done through a capsule,

food is quite different. So, you know, there's a lot of evidence behind people eating these and showing improvement on mood scales, on anxiety scales. For example, a study of medical students done many years ago looked at giving them omega-3 fatty acids and a real lowering of the anxiety levels. So I would be leading you astray if I said, well, it's two ounces of something, but there are general guidelines that we provide as part of a nutritional psychiatry treatment plan for people. And it's highly individualized because everyone's gut is so unique.

Yeah. Is it the case that these foods that you're talking about, and I want to get into more specifics in a minute, but these foods you're talking about, these are good for your mental health. Are there foods that are bad for your mental health, or are they just bad in the sense that if you eat those, you're not going to be eating these, and therefore that's not so great? But are there foods that have been proven to actually turn your mood sour? Yes, there are.

And what I've done is looked at different mental health conditions and tried to provide people with actual lists of foods they should, what I call them is foods to embrace and foods to avoid. So for example, people don't realize that cured meats, things like bacon, salami, sausage, and other cured meats have nitrates in them. And nitrates have actually been shown to worsen mood. And, you know, they may be taking something in a sandwich to work every day. And, you know, they may not realize that if they're struggling with their mood, this could in fact be worsening it. So there are actually more things beyond, you know, the things that we know as general health principles,

like fried foods, for example, that we should be eating in moderation or try to avoid for certain health conditions that we know as general health principles. So there are some of those, but there are also very specific things that people should be avoiding because they drive mental health symptoms

in the wrong direction, depending on the condition. So in addition to processed meat, what else? In terms of depression, nitrates is one of them. Then we have artificial sweetness, which have been shown to be problematic and worsen things like mood as well as anxiety. And so there are a couple that, you know, we suggest that if you really have a sweet tooth and it's hard for you to give that up

to try those. One of them is erythritol and the other is stevia. But in general, a lot of the everyday sweetness that we get have been shown to be on multiple levels not helpful. Things, you know, in anxiety, things like moderating, there have been studies that have shown that avoiding gluten actually beyond individuals who just have celiac disease is actually helpful for people with anxiety. And then, you know, there are things like glutamate in certain foods, MSG, as people know it, has been linked to worsening symptoms of PTSD. So, you know, I think that when people put the specifics together with symptoms they might be having, that they would understand the things to avoid a little bit better. Is there a general diet prescription or is everybody, if you're not having mental health symptoms, if you're not overly concerned that you're depressed or whatever, is there just a general maintenance diet that is recommended?

So that's a great question. And even though it is highly personalized because each person's symptoms can be quite different, what I do like to suggest to people is a generalized healthy diet and always including a treat day of the week. And so the way that I say that to individuals is whether it's pizza, ice cream, or your favorite food that you know is somewhat unhealthy, make sure that you enjoy that at least once a week in moderation, you know, using appropriate portion control, but enjoy it. And start to correct your healthy diet by the very next meal.

And, you know, healthy foods to include are the basic principles, which include lean proteins, well-sourced proteins, fruit, vegetables, beans, nuts, seeds, legumes, prebiotics, and probiotics, all of which will really help you in the best direction forward. But it's not just mental health. My focus is mental health because I'm a nutritional psychiatrist, but the truth is by embracing those foods and that type of diet, it's going to lower things like inflammation in your body. Inflammation is linked to mental health conditions,

but it's also linked to several other disorders in the body. Secondly, these foods will bring back a high level of natural fiber, which is not found in meat or seafood, but is found in the fruits and vegetables and the other items I mentioned. And those help your gut in a positive balance. By doing that, again, you are helping every other condition that could be inflammatory in your body. And then the third thing is that there are also antioxidants in these foods, which are going to help your brain and help your body. And fourthly, there are also an innumerable number of nutrients, vitamins, minerals, and especially phytonutrients,

of which I think at last count, there were 25,000 in different foods. So every food that you consume that is generally a healthy food has so many more ingredients that are healthy for you. Most importantly to me is that it is going to improve your mental health symptoms. If you follow a generalized healthy plan, include a treat day so you don't feel deprived, and then, you know, you might also help other conditions in your body. An example of that, Mike, is someone during COVID who is a businessman, a patient of mine, who noticed that by not traveling as much, eating in airports, eating fast food, and having to be confined at home, had a skin rash. So he has mental health symptoms which are improving, but he also had a skin rash which had started at the beginning of COVID and he really didn't have a chance to see a dermatologist.

Just by eating at home, eating home-prepared meals, eating more healthy foods than fast foods, restaurants, on the go, and drinking less alcohol because he also admitted that when he was traveling, he was so stressed and his sleep was always disrupted that he needed a glass of wine to go to bed. He noticed that the skin rash improved. So this was an example of inflammation being set up in his body that was probably largely related to the diet that he was consuming.

And it improved as COVID has continued. That rash has now gone away. So I think that, you know, I think there are more than one example of this type of thing that I've seen in my practice, and I would just therefore encourage people, if they can, to start to move toward a healthier diet, because the diet that is called the SAD diet, the Standard American Diet, you know, is mostly full of unhealthy ingredients for our brains. Are there any foods beyond just the standard prescription of eating a healthy diet and what you've talked about so far? But are there any real standout foods?

Like if you do anything, at least eat blueberries. Is there anything like that? Sure. So blueberries is definitely a good one. But where I go to with this is actually to spices because spices are calorie-free, salt-free, easy to add flavor to your food, and easy to transport for people who travel. And some of the best spices that have been shown to actually have a positive mental health effect, as well as other physical health effects, so things like turmeric. And the trick with turmeric, which is a spice that, you know, if someone doesn't cook with

it, they can add it to a smoothie, they can add it to a soup and still get the benefit. Studies have shown that a quarter teaspoon a day is all that you need. But the trick is that to make it more effective, you always add a pinch of black pepper because that makes the active ingredient in turmeric more active. So I say, if there's one tip you take with you, because it will help so many different conditions in your body, but it really impacts anxiety and depression in the brain. That would be something that people may be taking it for inflammation, but not know that. So foods like that have, you know, spices, and there are other spices that have actually stuck out

in terms of their positive benefit for mental health as well. So while clearly diet is not a first aid approach to mental health problems, it's good to know that what you eat and what you don't eat can really have an impact on your mood, especially now, I think, with people being stuck at home and not going out much, maybe being lonely and anxious, that this is another arrow in the quiver to help stabilize mood. My guest has been Uma Naido. She is a board-certified psychiatrist, and the name of her book is This Is Your Brain on Food.

And you'll find a link to that book at Amazon in the show notes. Thank you for being here, Doctor. Thank you so much, Mike. It was a pleasure to talk to you. Social media allows anyone to tell the world about their latest accomplishment. But does the world really care?

Well, not as much as we like to think. In fact, self-promotion on social media often backfires. In an article in the journal Psychological Science, the humble brag is often not well received by others. Posting a photo of your brand new car on Facebook or bragging about your promotion to co-workers not only doesn't get the reaction you might think, it gets the opposite reaction. Think about it yourself. You've probably experienced emotions other than pure joy

when you're on the receiving end of someone else's self-promotion. Yet when we engage in self-promotion ourselves, we tend to overestimate others' positive reactions and underestimate their negative ones. The idea that by telling others about our accomplishments we improve how people view us might seem right, but in fact, it often has the opposite effect. And that is something you should know.

And oddly, after saying what I just said, I'm going to engage in some self-promotion. You've heard a lot of interesting things in this episode of the podcast, and I'm sure there's someone you know that would find it interesting as well. So please share this podcast with a friend. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. Welcome to the small town of Chinook, where faith runs deep and secrets run deeper. In this new thriller, religion and crime collide when a gruesome murder rocks the isolated Montana community. Everyone is quick to point their fingers at a drug-addicted teenager, but local deputy Ruth Vogel isn't convinced.

She suspects connections to a powerful religious group. Enter federal agent V.B. Loro, who has been investigating a local church for possible criminal activity. The pair form an unlikely partnership to catch the killer, unearthing secrets that leave Ruth torn between her duty to the law, her religious convictions, and her very own family. But something more sinister than murder is afoot, and someone is watching Ruth.

Chinook. Starring Kelly Marie Tran and Sanaa Lathan. Listen to Chinook wherever you get your podcasts. Contained herein are the heresies of Rudolf Bantwine, To be continued... that ours is not a loving God, and we are not its favoured children. The Heresies of Randolph Bantwine, wherever podcasts are available.