This Stuck With Me: Harvard Psychiatrist Reveals The #1 Foods You Must STOP Eating To Heal Your Brain

most people have no clue that diet plays any role in mental illness or mental health 95 percent of mental health clinicians think it's laughable that anybody would suggest that diet can play a role in mental illness i think it's laughable what do you think i think if you do a deep dive into the science all of the science that we have accumulated over the last 100 years and longer sometimes if you do a deep dive into all of those neuroimaging studies that we've been doing all the genetic studies we've been doing all of the neurotransmitter and hormone studies and trauma studies and adverse childhood experiences studies you do a deep dive into the science and you understand what is happening in the brains and bodies of people as a consequence of those things 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 questioning whatsoever it is incontrovertible that diet plays a massive huge role in metabolism and therefore i believe very strongly that diet might be playing a role in the mental health epidemic that we are seeing and it also might provide an avenue of hope and healing and recovery and i use the word might as the scientist in me as the clinician in me i know without certainty it can heal and recover people who have had chronic horrible debilitating mental illnesses and i know from my own personal story 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 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 processed foods just cheaper but 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 and my metabolic syndrome just kept getting worse and worse and so at some point in order to treat my metabolic syndrome i changed my diet to essentially a low carbohydrate diet and within three months my metabolic syndrome was completely gone but the thing that just dumbfounded me was that my mental health was better than it had ever been in my entire life 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 i didn't think that was in me and by changing my diet all of those things happen at the level of mitochondria are you saying but do you believe that because you changed your diet to more sort of natural healthier foods at the level of the mitochondria the mitochondria were able to function more naturally themselves in a more um functional way which meant that they release the chemicals they release the processes they go through were 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 etc i'm assuming you're saying that some of the modern foods that we eat the ultra processed foods that have all these random named chemicals inside them that we see on the labels the mitochondria don't know how to deal with that so it's causing the same sort of dysregulation dysfunction that they might see if we've gone through like an extreme trauma or something else or some other adverse environmental situation 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 i mean we went through a bunch of them earlier is that like a simple way of understanding it 100 okay great perfect super interesting okay so on that point then we have to zoom in on this thing of diet if you wanted my mitochondria to be perfect and maybe even give me a case study of any patients you've worked with that you've you've prescribed a certain diet to what diet what food would you tell me to eat and what would you tell me not to eat so i actually don't have a one-size-fits-all prescription and so i want to say that up front so i would want to know who am i working with and how is their mental and metabolic health now me so you so i would want more details are you having symptoms of any mental health condition i would say no however i can i can have moments where i feel a little bit anxious so you know i've been through a lot of i'd say like stressful events in my life because i'm running a big business and i'm just employees pay days all the time so i had this at one point i had this constant subtle stress and so i would want to know do you feel like you have anxiety for no good reason sometimes sometimes it can feel a little bit like that um it's very infrequent i'd say uh 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 response just kicked in but you think of something adverse or stressful yeah yeah so so the so the one thing i would say about that and we could get into a lot more details which we probably don't want to do now but my my strong guess based on just what you've said is that that level of stress and anxiety is quote-unquote normal okay because you you 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 that that might threaten my success it is normal and actually healthy to have anxiety and stress in those situations the anxiety and stress can sometimes be quite helpful and adaptive because it can make you you you you