Eat to Beat Depression and Anxiety with Drew Ramsey, MD

Hello everyone, welcome, my name is Jeanne Rosner, I'm so excited to have everyone here. Let me tell you a little bit about myself and Soul Food Salon and then I'll do the introduction with Drew. We started Soul Food Salon around seven thirty. For years, our mission has been to educate and empower us all to be healthier and I do it through different ways. We do these monthly events where I feature different health and wellness experts. I have a website soulfoodsalon.com that shows everything we've done. the past is available we have past recipes past presentations we have a health and wellness newsletter that we send out digitally several times a month called moving ideas all of our past posts are there we actually published one today or published one today um with the title

anxiety

from another psychiatrist called alex dimitrio who introduced us earlier, so you can go to our website.

It's all there, a huge amount of information. I'm very active on social media predominantly Instagram so follow us at Soul Food Salon, one more word. The message is to inspire us all to be healthier. Everything is based on science and evidence, so you will learn a lot. I hope that by looking at all my information each year we will partner with a different nonprofit and basically when you come and attend my Historically the events were in person and now since Covid we have been doing them virtually but I ask to you as an audience to help support this nonprofit that I'm associated with, so this year we partnered with off its plate, which is a national organization. a non-profit organization that was started a year ago, on March 29, 2020, by a third year medical student at Harvard and what happened was that greed hit the closed cafeterias in their hospitals and she was seeing that the Restaurants in the area were also closing and so he married the two and kept the restaurant workers employed preparing meals for the hospital workers and they are now present in nine cities.

We are helping the Bay Area effort and now it's not just for healthcare workers, it's really for the community in need and essentially a donation of 100 helps employ a restaurant worker for three hours and provides 10 meals to the community in need so they can donate to them. I would appreciate it in any of the media I published. and it's also on my website, under the main page, there's a little bit of information about uh off its plate and there's a little video and then there's a specific link that was created just for soul food salon for donations if you go to the website off your plate and you make a donation we don't get the credit, not that it matters, it will still go to a great cause, but to get us counted for the credit, go to my site and make the donation please, so our next event It will be Wednesday, April 14. and it's with a dark owen, he has a doctorate in conflict resolution and his salon is called peace at home.

Adar is being carried out for the last 20 years. She has led conversations in family rooms in conflict zones and other places where people need to listen and be heard. It will be a fascinating event. I will send the email with her information shortly and those who want can subscribe to my email list again on my website soulfoodsalon.com. At the top of all the pages there is a little link that says. Sign up for our Soulful Ideas newsletter that actually gets you on the email master list, so this event is virtual. I'm going to hand it over to Drew in just a minute.

Drew will do his presentation and then we will have time for final questions so put your questions in the question box we will do our best to answer those questions and then it will also be recorded and will be on our youtube channel also on soul food salon, probably sometime later today or tomorrow I will also send an email to those who are on my email list who receive my emails with moving ideas, so stay tuned for that, so today I have the honor to present to you to Drew Ramsey, he wears a lot of hats that, honestly, I don't.

I don't understand how he does it all, but he's a psychiatrist, a book author, and he just released this latest book. Eat to be

depression

and

anxiety

, hence the name of our salon. Today, he is a farmer and is also the founder of the Brain Feeding Clinic in New York City. He is a leading advocate for using dietary changes to help with mood, brain function, and mental health. and I can't even imagine a more pertinent time for Drew's message in the situation we've had covid for the last year where there has been tremendous isolation, anxiety,

depression

and uncertainty.

I think Drew's message where we can take control of some of this through diet will be a big help, so I'm going to mute myself and stop my video and Drew. he's going to take it off thanks gene hello everyone, how are you? I'm going to share my slideshow and I'm so excited. That was very nice. Thanks for everything you said. I'm in the middle of launching the book. I just have to do this, it's like a reflection, but I've been waiting for this event to be able to really communicate with an exciting audience. Gene has been talking to me about the group and that we can really delve on a deep level. to the science between food and mental health, so I brought my big slide deck.

The caveat is that I'm going to go over it quickly so that Gene has time for questions and answers. Gina said that I'm a nutritional psychiatrist, so I'm really interested in the second intersection between food and mental health and I'm interested in how we can employ food in a clinical aesthetic, there we go and that's why I said this talk that feeds your mental health because that's really my hope. This talk isn't just about a bunch of interesting science for you or some recommendations you've heard before. Eat seafood, eat green leafy vegetables. I'm not even sure that a lot of the foods are that amazing, but I hope that you really take away from this a reorientation on how you should think about nutrition because we really have done quite a bit of damage to ourselves in the way that we do it.

We think now, we just went over 30 thousand, we are not in good shape. as most of us know at a population level and a lot of that has to do with the foods we eat and not prioritizing our brain health to quickly disclose because I'm a doctor, I'm on the Medscape Psychiatry Editorial Board. on the advisory board of Men's Health magazine, which if you're on Instagram right now, I've taken over the Men's Health magazine Instagram account and their stories where there's a brain food challenge, mh food challenge for the brain, if you want to participate today, wild salmon day.

I'm an author, so you should probably be a little suspicious of everything I say, so I'm going to try to present a lot of evidence to support this idea that diet and mental health are related. I'm not going to talk. about any off-label medicine, except that I personally consider cocoa bean medicine. These are the books I've written before on nutritional psychiatry and then this is my farm. In fact, I'm talking to you right now from here. This is in a rural area. indiana crawford county we are famous, we have several, we have one of the largest cave systems in the world here, 26 miles, we are also the poorest county in Indiana, but I left that farm to eventually become a New York City psychiatrist , which um, like jerry garcia said, what a long, strange trip it's been and especially now that i've been quarantined on my farm in indiana as an internet psychiatrist, which we can talk about later, um, so this is the new york city, this is brooklyn grange farm.

It's been fascinating for me as a farmer to see us get so interested in food, so interested in this farm-to-table movement and even see places like New York City start to have farms. I love being a farm kid, why should I? We talk well about nutrition and mental health when we think about the economy, when we think about disability around the world, the number one cause of disability, which means that the fact that we are not our best selves is our health disorders mental and the same in the US in 2020 before the pandemic. was going to come or come 2020 was already the projected year that depression would be the leading cause of disability in the US and I think disability is a really very interesting concept, especially applied to mental health and nutrition because we often focus on mortality.

I want to know if this kills you or not, and what's particularly pernicious and challenging about mental health disorders is the way they cause disability, not necessarily the way they cause mortality. This has become my least favorite mental health statistic, one in five of you. Look has a mental illness uh I think it's horrible because five out of five of you have a human brain and I don't know, I've been a psychiatrist for a while, we're all at risk for things like anxiety and depression, even more serious disorders. bipolar psychotic breaks addiction 50 of men have a substance use disorder in their lifetime, so I really like the idea look, five of us five of us have one of these super wonderful, fragile, moody things called human brain and we need to learn how to take care of it and how to feed it because we don't really take care of it when it breaks down sixty percent of adults with mental illness don't actually get treatment, this goes up to about 80 if Talking about men who have health problems seeking treatment, half of our children who have major mental health problems do not receive treatment, so there has been this trend as we think about mental health over the last 10 years to start thinking about food.

This is one of the first types of popular articles of 2016 that really talks about the science of nutritional psychiatry and since at some point it's going to be like the rubber hits the road, you're wondering what I'm going to say about eating. I just wanted to. Putting this here is not my recommendation yet, but as you listen to this data and this evidence, I would like you to think with me about these foods, these were the powerful players in the diet to defeat depression and anxiety, because when you write a book you have to recommend food and although I like to recommend categories of foods and I'll tell you that in a second I just wanted you to see what are the foods that I ended up with like you're looking at I don't really love the idea of ​​superfoods but if you're looking for great foods for your brain, this is where I think the data is really directing us to eat more of these foods and, more importantly, the food categories that they're in now quickly in your brain.

It's a hungry, hungry beast, hungrier than any other cell in your bodies, those neurons to sip up nutrients 420 calories a day when I used to run at the gym and get on the treadmill, it took me a long time for that little calorie counter to get to 420. about 20 of your daily calories, certain nutrients like folate, vitamin C, omega-3 fats become quite concentrated in the brain and then your brain houses a source of these polyunsaturated fatty acids, so that's what They contain omega-3 fats and Omega-6 fats are which means they are very long fats and have a lot of energy stored within the fat, so they are highly oxidizable.

That's why when fish starts to smell so quickly, there are so many omega-3 fats. at that moment your brain has a lot of cholesterol I just like to say that because cholesterol is like the villain of the story so far and that's really I think cholesterol is misinformed like you like sex I like sex everyone likes sex your sex hormones are made of cholesterol vitamin d we all agree it's great for your mind vitamin d is made of cholesterol focusing on dietary cholesterol i think you're missing the point in terms of how to feed the human brain, nutritional psychiatry is just how I defined it because we didn't really.

I have a definition, I think it's the use of nutrition, some of my colleagues say nutrition and supplements and I just want to say that, but I only say nutrition because I'm like a farmer, I like foods to optimize brain health and treat and prevent mental health disorders prevent my favorite word in that sentence because we're not in the mental health prevention business yet and I think this is, in some ways, the promise right now. I want you to listen to this if you eat. these food categories, do you understand my wife started doing CrossFit during the pandemic, so this is a picture of her arms in my brain.

Do you end up with more and by stronger I probably mean a brainmore resistant? We believe you can do this. If you focus on some of the new science about the brain and brain growth, many of you will have heard this idea of ​​neuroplasticity or neurogenesis, the birth of new brain cells, the creation of new brain connections, neurotrophins are the hormones that They control that and the one in the center. First on the list is brain-derived neurotrophic factor, it's everywhere in the brain and is associated with low levels of bdnf or bdnf expression with depression and many other mental health disorders, but also what's interesting is a number of nutrients For example, if you have anemia. you stop making as much bdnf and if we give people iron, they make bdnf, so now there are six nutrients that are closely linked and linked to the expression of bdnf.

Here's one of them, zinc, one of my favorite brain nutrients and again, as much as I talk about nutrients like well, I don't want you running out and taking a zig supplement. I hope what this talk forces you to do is really translate the science into food on your plate so the main source of zinc for me is going to be pumpkin seeds pepitas and oysters neuroplasticity quickly these are some of the illustrations of eat to conquer depression and anxiety because I want us all to think not only about serotonin and chemical imbalance it's like I don't know like 1996 how let's think about 2021, let's think about brain growth, let's think about how each of us has a certain capacity, you can do all this well and still get depressed or anxious, you still have bipolar disorder, I'm not one of those who think that food is the magic solution for everything I am, I'm a psychiatrist so I've seen it all and I'm very honored .

I use medications, I use therapy. I love both, but if we can think about neuroplasticity, that's one way to get involved. our brain health and then also thinking about neural inflammation, so I guess now I just want to like before we get to the data, high level concepts that I think are new in terms of thinking about depression and anxiety, it's I mean, we can make the brain grow, we've been talking about inflammation, right, that's like on every blog everywhere right now, what is that? And also, hey, it's not just your body, it's not just joint pain, what's really concerning about inflammation is the way it affects your brain.

And I talk about that in the book. I interviewed Roger Mcintyre, a real expert in this area, and I was very surprised how clear he was about the way that inflammation affects cognitive circuits, affects our mood and affects and increases anxiety and then we think. You know again what causes inflammation and a central causal factor is what we eat because it's one of those important environmental signals. You can do something to control environmental toxins. You can certainly do things to control microbiome issues. You can sleep better. You can stop smoking. You can engage in stress reduction, all of this will help inflammation, but if you eat a lot of sugar and fast food and things full of fillers and omega-6 fats, you're probably going to have more inflammation and that's important now.

You can't talk about brain health in 2021 without mentioning the microbiome, so there I said it and I have a complete illustration for you because these are all bugs that live primarily in the gut, in the colon, and they're not just bacteria. . viruses and all kinds of things down there do a lot for us they extract about 20 of the calories we get from our food the microbiome extracts they feed the insects the colonocytes in the lining of our colon and then they communicate with the brain, so This is really on the frontier of a part of nutritional psychiatry, which is how the type of bacteria that lives in the gut affects brain health and we can create a microbiome and it seems like, based on the research, it's possible.

We're going to promote greater stability, better cognitive functioning, and less anxiety, but you know we all face some obstacles because we made a huge number of human foods over the last hundred years. My first book, The Happiness Diet, I got a big dose of. of education on this and it's really depressing, I would say probably one of the most depressing things I've ever read, that really looks at how the food supply in some ways really got radically altered and human food was destroyed when we started focusing on cleanliness. , uh, we started to be, you know some good ideas, proper hygiene is important, but you know the idea of ​​live, living foods that is again becoming very popular 100 years ago, I thought, let's kill all the bacteria, let's do this. stable, let's get off the farm, stop eating lard and in doing so we change the basis of our food supply from a kind of omega-3 like a grass-based system to more omega-6 it's a more vegetable oil based food . in a second we also added things food coloring preservatives trans fats Remember when I was like Bloomberg banned trans fats and I had all those moments where I was like, yeah, with trans fats?

It's like waiting, what are trans fats? Where do they come from? And then when you do a little research, you realize they came from us. In 1912, Edward Kaiser, a German biochemist, crossed the Atlantic with a small vial of trans fats because he had hydrogenated cottonseed oil and we introduced it into the human food chain and food supply without really testing, I mean, the only thing that Procter Gambling did before that was like soap, so this is what happens, then we process the food and, hey, look, we end up not really, this is old data, new data is too. depressing but we end up not getting these key nutrients for brain health is the key this is the percentage of people this is not deficiency for the percentage of the US population that does not meet the gdr and then just in terms of just to illustrate, ya You know, a change in the food supply we started eating soybean oil, we integrated it, I estimated here that these researchers increased it a thousand times, so what's the problem with it being a cheap oil?

Who cares? The problem is that soybean oil has these polyunsaturated fatty acids, essential fats that are more pro-inflammatory at least this is one of the theories and how inflammation and inflammatory factors have changed that we went from eating a paleo diet maybe the proportion of one was like one to three like we were eating more omega-6, but we used to eat a lower ratio and then you can see you know it's a human fatty tissue, so they just take a little sample of fat and measure how much linoleic acid doesn't It is the main omega-6 fat and you can see that we have doubled the amount of this fat in our body, so I want to jump into the nutritional psychiatry data now and make sure that I don't burn up all my time just talking about soybean oil. to illustrate, it's not that omega-6 fats are the worst just to illustrate, I would say the argument for olive oil and against soy or seed oil, this is the first study that really caught my attention . 2009, what we began to see is correlational studies, this is the best of them instead of simply being cross-sectional at a moment in time, this is a prospective epidemiological study that follows 10,000 university students in Spain for four and a half years, it is a trial very well controlled the models that you see in what's left here, uh, wow, these models are like they're looking at their uh, math and modeling differently, as you can see, excluding participants with depression, for example, in the first two years, so they're really trying to say how much.

Does diet really affect the pathogenesis and progression of depression in college students? A really important question what they find is the five, you know, these categories here are basically if you're in the top half, then you eat more like grandma did, so to speak, but Your grandma was like in Spain, so you're following a Mediterranean diet. You see a reduction of, you know, between 30 and 50 in various models of depression over four and a half years. Now imagine if we had an intervention that could eliminate a third. of depression in college, then these are all the epidemiological studies that analyze dietary pattern and depression.

This is the meta-analysis that ends up finding that about 18.2 percent across all studies is the type of effect, that is, if you eat a healthier diet. or a traditional dietary pattern where you end up in that population about 18 less risk of depression. There's also correlational data on the brain size of people who eat a healthy diet and it just shows that you know not only do you have a bigger brain, that's a good thing in general. but you have a brain that shrinks more slowly if you follow a healthy dietary pattern, then we get into the real data, these are the randomized clinical trials, so they are important because everything else is correlation, correlation does not equal causation, but Oh my goodness, if we could do a randomized trial we could start to really think about prescribing foods in a clinical setting this was an accident it was a trial looking at depression in the elderly and they needed a control group their control group talked about foods using leaflets from the government and what I found is that in that group there were people who actually stayed, so 77 completed a two-year study which is a really good retention rate and then I saw this really solid reduction in depression scores that then it lasted so talking about food in a mental health setting led to a reduction in depression but that was just a mistake this trial was really intentional felice jacka is really one of the leading leaders and researchers in nutritional psychiatry michael burke is a renowned mood disorders researcher in Australia I believe, with over a thousand publications to his name, the smile trial added a modified Mediterranean diet to people who were already in mental health treatments, so a 12 week parallel single blind because you can only think that you know it's hard to do a double blind on food, right?

I don't know if I'm giving you wild salmon or lab raised salmon, how would you do that? They will all be blind, unfortunately, a complementary dietary intervention, which means we are adding foods to the normal clinical environment. This is kind of what you come to see. Me, maybe I'll give you medicine, maybe we'll do therapy, but you know, I'll ask him for food. It's not a great essay. What they found were 67 people who were given the Mediterranean diet, a third of them went into complete remission. So if it were a drug, it would cost a billion dollars.

It is very difficult to find remission from depression. The number needed to treat was 4.1. That's significant because when you add another medication to an antidepressant, the number needed to treat in some of those trials is like 10. So I have to give 10 patients a second medication before I get a better one. This is then followed up with a healthy medical child. This is even better. It's not with a dietitian. This is a Mediterranean style cooking class. It would relieve me of depression. Better, I was like, what are you doing tonight? Ramsay is like, oh, you know, we're just going to my Mediterranean-style cooking class with me and all my friends, we're going to do an olive oil tasting and you know, we're going to learn how to cook some food.

Larger test for 152 people. three months and the depression scores improved the low dose of fish oil which sort of normalized things, it wasn't a sufficient dose to be an antidepressant, but again you see the depression scores improve significantly and then they stay the same, so, how does this happen? I don't know exactly, it could be that some of those nutrient insufficiencies are being addressed, it could be again around this idea of ​​neuroplasticity and inflammation which I really think has something to do with this as people who eat more traditional diets tend to to eat more plants, not just be a plant, but more like a plant and with that you get a lot of phytonutrients, sometimes they are called antioxidants, but they are actually more like signaling molecules, that's how I think of them, the microbiome, I mean, this is going to be very exciting for us.

Look at what happens with history, but eating more plants, eating more fermented foods generally tends to promote a more diverse microbiome and so maybe following these traditional diets just makes you forget the fact that, like all the evil of human food modern, all the obesity and diabetes, heart disease and hypertension that tend to be caused primarily is like salt, why do we ever tell people not to eat salt? There is no reason why the only place you have problems with salt is not in your 95 sodium salt shaker. what is consumed in the United States and in the world comes from processed foods, the salt shaker is fine, but I think it is akind of example of the toxic effects of modern food, this is just one of my favorite studies.

It took me a little while to figure this out so I just want to break it down and then I'll go over some foods to eat and then we'll get to our question and answer so this looks at interleukin 6 and Olympic 6 is one of the main ones. blood marker of inflammation is not a perfect marker, but it is the one that researchers use and they are observing people with depression. There are a few things to keep in mind here: Note that people with depression, whether they follow a healthy diet or not, have higher levels of interleukin-6, so researchers face a bit of a challenge: when one is depressed, inflammatory factors increase, but what this study suggests is that even in depressed patients, when they follow a healthy diet, they have lower inflammatory factors, this was over six years. and again, to have this notion that okay, if we think that some depressions have an inflammatory element, the Mediterranean diet in this study, the researchers concluded that it buffered the effect, so you would still have inflammation because you were depressed, but it would reduce it. a lot. maybe that's one of the ways this is working, so we try to apply this in the clinic, let's say we have a chef, a therapist and a social worker who came to my practice several years ago, we have another psychiatrist on our team , but Really, for the last 10 years, we've been trying to just apply foods and think about foods in the clinical mental health setting, meaning thinking about what brain foods are and how we can be really specific to Help patients think about what foods to add to their diet. diet, how can we tell people apart from calorie count to nutrient density?

Can we share some information about neuroplasticity that people might find interesting? When we talk to patients about food, you know, this is what I heard early in my career, right now they count calories. they are very proud they are avoiding cholesterol they are avoiding fat they give me a little mischievous smile as if they were inside they don't eat red meat and then they turn their head the other way and tell me but don't worry, doctor, I'm taking care of my brain with my two glasses of cabernet every night and that's your brain eating plan and you know what?

When I look at this, my main concern is that this doesn't taste very good. For me it is not convincing. I can't impress my wife with a good meal based on these principles. I mean, I guess you can. You don't have to put red. There's meat in there, but it just doesn't seem like much fun to me, so when I think about eating a healthy diet, I wanted to think about how we can add more fun to this. It's also like that, so I started paying. Pay attention to my patients, what they ate in the past, now I'm not a middle-aged kind of person, so these smartphones came out, it's like patients can take a picture of their food and this young man who is depressed, like this is. everything he ate for three days and when you look at this and you know I'm treating him for pretty significant depression, it's like this isn't going to help, the number one molecule on this page is glucose, all pasta is glucose, you know ?

I tell people to eat the rainbow here and he said oh doctor, you know I'm eating the gummy bear rainbows, not the gummy bear rainbow, but no, not a lot of real food, a lot of carbs and , actually, very few plants, besides whatever. This bad lettuce is in your lettuce, it's good in your, you know, chipotle, so let's go to a set of nutrients first. That's my question, what are the nutrients that are most important for depression? Dr. Laura Lynn Chance and I posted this antidepressant food is an open option. access the article which you can look at if you want and we found that there were 12 nutrients with significant levels of evidence that they are involved in the treatment of depression prevention and then from that we calculated that you know which foods, very simply, What foods have the most of those nutrients per calorie?

Not that these are the only foods you need to eat, but if you wanted to get these 12 nutrients for the fewest calories, this is what you would choose and we wanted to see what lessons these teach us. lists. because when it comes to recommending things to patients, I take it very seriously and I think a lot of people don't and they love to tell them not to eat this or to eat this and I see that that does a lot of harm. I see a lot of people come in really confused, really struggling, not sure who to trust, so what this taught us was to look at the food categories, look at these top 10 right here, let's see how you view leafy greens, you see rainbow vegetables, so Um, you see a lot of colors and that really led you to this lesson in, for example, depression and anxiety from the book, it's two of the first weeks of the plan or leafy greens and then rainbow vegetables because that's really what this list ends up meaning.

For me, there are obviously a lot of things that I love that are good for the brain that are not on the plant foods list. I love some lentils, some black beans, kidney beans, those are great for the brain, not in my opinion. the list, so again don't confuse this with the only thing you should eat here in animal foods. The reason I want to include animal foods is that there is a real deception in nutrient profiling systems that, because they are based on calories, you are never going to consume. any animal food is in the top 100 because animal foods have more calories and therefore it really skews the results, it makes us think that plants are healthier than animal foods, which probably isn't be true.

Plants are just different than animal foods, so look at our top 100. five here really important lesson oysters clams and mussels so valves bi three of the top five and what you end up seeing on this list overall is a little bit of wild meat some things like fish roe um uh wild fish a little bit where are there moose somewhere? I probably put moose on the list I'm probably just trying to get joe rogan's attention um more none unless I'm joking but again seafood, wild meats, organ meats and bivalves so again the hope is how can we take these nutrients and help patients or help people.

Think of them in terms of foods because very often we hear that you need more iron, we'll get an iron supplement or you'll get a protein powder with iron and again I see my role, I guess, in this food as medicine movement and I guess when it was a farm kid, I think it's great that we get things from food, you know, no, we didn't isolate and identify a single vitamin until 1912. It's been 110 years and before that there was a Many like the smiles of human love, so I think the right nutrients are here for us, but this is one of the downloads from my Eating to Beat Depression eCourse and again, currently the best foods with iron that I don't know about. your plate, but I hope you consider them the liver of this one and we don't eat that anymore, but it really is very nutritious, probably the most nutrient dense part of animal clams.

I bet I'm the only doctor who recommends you eat big clams. fan of clams, the main source of vitamin b12, but also look at all the iron you get and this will be heme iron and these highly absorbable. I'm a fan of non-heme iron nuggets, pumpkin seeds and cashews are those two. interesting sources of iron and of course dark chocolate we will talk more about dark chocolate if I don't run out of time this is a lot I need a cocoa farm where I decided you know this is like a research trip I decided um Wow , when you eat too much cocoa, you have a strange dizzying experience where you watch your child jump on a zip line and you don't know if it's really that good for you.

I just wanted to say this is cocoa flour, it's interesting think that every bite of chocolate you've ever had started with the pollination of that little flower, look how small that little flower is and then this is cocoa, the way it is What makes chocolate is that cocoa fruit inside that has this kind of sweet and slimy, uh. you know, the innards are the cocoa beans here in raw form, then they get flies that come from the rainforest and they do their little magic dance and they put all the bacteria in there, they ferment and then they dry.

This is actually dry from here. It's my favorite way to eat chocolate, the cocoa bean, uh, with this shell is amazing, but there are also some interesting facts about dark chocolate. This was a randomized trial that looked at people ages 50 to 69 who consumed and were given this high cocoa flavanol versus a low cocoa flavanol drink and they found that there is an improvement in both the memory centers in the brain , specifically in the dentate gyrus, as well as in cognitive tests that correlate with gyrus function. Another thing we do is we take ideas like that, like nutrient-dense dark chocolate and we start thinking about how do we get the swaps right, how do we take these things that are like standard American food and how do we not just tell people that eat the Mediterranean diet, but how we increase the nutrient density of these foods.

I like French fries, I like them, I'm sorry, I like them, I even love them, but you know, I can't eat French fries all the time, but I can't eat baked sweet potato fries and I don't know. We're making some pretty healthy oven baked potatoes at home right now that I'd put on par with some great French fries. I'm going to run them at the same time, so I'm going to burn these slides and then Gene's slides. I'm going to ask some questions, but I just want to talk quickly as I go through these slides and sorry to rush, I just want to give you all my slides in terms of information so our brains are made of fat and it's really interesting our brain.

It got bigger and bigger and then after the Neanderthals it got a little bit smaller and more concentrated, also if we look at where the human brain evolved, it was rivers and swamp lands, a place with a lot of small fish and a lot of biological valves, evolutionary biologists. It's actually another great book, so I'm not just promoting my book if you're going to buy it, which I hope you do. I definitely buy Brett's book. This is the story of the human brain. Which is a little selfish because. I'm in this book and let me tell you, I actually got teary-eyed when I saw it in a book that is, uh, Brett is my psychiatry editor at Medscape, but he's a doctor and he's fascinating. a fascinating story about the evolution of the human brain, although the idea is that a lot of omega-3 fats, a lot of minerality, help the human brain evolve and let's talk about an oyster, so the nutrient density, I've used that term a lot, how many calories and six oysters which I love when I'm in an audience.

I was talking to doctors and an elderly doctor stood up and said there's about 750, so there's 60 calories, about 10 calories in a small oyster. Nutrient density again, that principle is correct, just look. how much nutrition you get this is again why oyster is so high on the food percentage scale what do these things do again what's really important is I think to connect foods all the way to their function in the brain we incorporate omega- 3 fats in our neuronal membranes, that's what brain cells are made of, partly also from this bdnf gene, right, I mentioned that six or seven nutrients can lead to an increase in bdnf.

Omega-3 fats are one of them and then when our brain cells touch each other, it's kind of like um, you know, like high school students who dance like they get close and don't touch each other, I guess they're not students anymore. high school, but you know, the synapses they don't touch, that's why we float this little container, uh fatty container. gallbladder through that gap and when there's more omega-3 fats in there, there's an idea that they work a little bit better, so I'm just going to talk about omega-3 fats and just one fish, this is the perfect fish, so that's how it will be. a fish that's high in omega-3 fats that's sustainable and doesn't have a lot of mercury, and actually, as long as you avoid big, old fish and eat seafood, I don't know, three to five times a week, the mercury really worrying, um.

Your body is very good at getting rid of mercury, at the expense, you know, that's why I'm disappointed. I'm actually part of my brain feeding challenge for men's health. I'm making wild salmon burgers with canned salmon, but even frozen salmon, everything so salmon. it's frozen, but you can, you can get great deals on this, this is the arugula pine that you can eat whole. My last bookkitchen was a clam pie because I wanted all my vegan friends to have the option to get all of their vitamin B12 through this delicious pie. it's my happy place when I get nervous this is the largest field of kale in the United States the fascinating thing about our food supply is in the middle of it all kale is a weed called purslane that is even more nutrient dense than kale and it just gets ground up like you already know and thrown on the ground while eating the kale this is the first clinical trial I did giving kale to Yale students you can see it working look how happy everyone is in the middle of winter from your friend I'm just kidding, this is Yell's sustainable food project and I love this image, but I think it shows something about how food makes us happy.

It's not just that you get to know all the delicious nutrients, but also the experience of growing food together, picking it together. and eat together. Kale taught me a lot. I was the king of kale for a while. I launched National Kale Day. I wrote 50 Shades of Kale and in my new book I talked a little bit about how I'm now a reformed kale evangelist. Kale taught me something about brain food: in general, brain foods are nutrient-dense, versatile in cooking, and locally available, which means I'm obviously Indian. I can't find oysters here, but there are plenty. local food i can find here locally raised and grass fed meat.

I can find many organic products. I can support local farms, so, you know, for me, these are some rules that I use while I'm searching. food, quickly some of the other categories and then I'll move on to the questions, which are: I'm really a big fan of nuts, beans and seeds. I know you've gotten negative press recently. I'm not really sure if it's based on In fact, there is some scientific evidence. Look at the almonds. 37 of your vitamin E. There are some nutrients like vitamin E. You just don't find them in many foods. Olive oil. Almonds.

Avocados. An excellent snack. so I guess I'm sure you know these beans and legumes you know whatever the concerns are people have some of those antinutrients when you cook things that disappear and that's why we cook beans and a lot of folate this lentil one of our favorites in our house lentil soup very easy very economical 90 of your folate and again that microbiome needs fiber look at a couple of lentils I mean most Americans don't even come close to getting half the fiber they need today this was the full meat french onion soup because I like France I like cheese I like onions but you know I can't put it in a cookbook for health reasons because it has no nutritional value, he actually added a can of white beans and became an incredibly nutrient-dense version of the soup eat your colors, you've all heard this, the reason these different colors represent different flavanols, again, signaling molecules, there's just one problem, just when you're eating the different colors of the rainbow, you must be careful, you know that there are risks and benefits of each one. medical intervention so I just want to be the person to warn you because no one warned me and when it happened it was surprising let me tell you first it's like a tingling sensation and you guys heard about it it's called rainbow finger and only if you eat a lot of vegetables rainbow can happen to you, I just want you to wait for it, fermented foods feel amazing too and then I'll end with one last category of foods just because as we understand the microbiome, they all live Bacteria and fermented foods are one of the things that sow the microbiome with healthy bacteria.

You can eat them instead of taking a probiotic. That's why kefir is on that list of power players. He has more CFU than your probiotics. I'm sure there are more CFUs than really anything I've seen measured and this is just this. It's the lining of your colon and I think it's important to talk about it, you know, the microbiome is like floating here, but look how beautiful they are. These little villi, their whole job is to be there spinning around to eat and absorb everything we need is really wonderful and, again, this vagus nerve is what connects our brain to our gut and there's a lot we're learning now about this communication. bidirectional, to the point where there is actually this big test. which arose a couple of years ago by giving people with mania and bipolar disorder a probiotic at the time of hospitalization and which led to a 90% decrease in the hospitalization rate at six months compared to placebo, so again it needs to be replicated, but there are some interesting things there, even meta- The analyzes now looking at probiotics for alleviating depression, the bottom line is that it's something to think about.

This isn't a home run yet, but it is something we all need to consider and if we are struggling with our mood or anxiety we need to think about. Alright? Have you taken a lot of antibiotics recently? Haven't eaten plants and fermented foods in a while? Know? Can you do those things and have an effect? So along with my pharmacy, which I hope you appreciate, it's something I employ when necessary. Farm Pharmacy and I ask you to think about these power players. I hope it makes some sense why they are here on this list. Why when they know that doctors like me recommend olive oil for your brain or why there are red peppers, I didn't speak.

A lot about eggs and meat, I go over it in the book, but I hope you hear my message. My little rhyme is seafood, vegetables, nuts and beans and a little dark chocolate, and these are some that I think are a takeaway that I actually think you can eat. to build a better brand, I think the evidence says that I like the idea personally and professionally, that we can put our brains in brain growth mode, that we can do something in our daily life, I like that because I feel that it strengthens me and I believe that empowers my patient and I hope it empowers you, not because if you feel bad, my God, you know, wow, you did something wrong, your brain was reduced to nothing, but that there is an opportunity for you in the new science of think about neuroplasticity and inflammation in some way. these opposing forces like brain growth versus like it's on fire a dietary pattern and nutrient density are just two take home principles from nutritional psychiatry and I hope you hear don't be afraid of fish and remember the clams and remember me as the doctor.

Who prescribes your clams? Especially when you are enjoying vangoli pasta. I think the data in all seriousness points to a whole foods diet or a Mediterranean dietary pattern protecting against depression and dementia and probably anxiety and ADHD. In fact, I'm talking to Felice. Jack about her studies, there's a great quote in the book where she basically says the data was there for depression too and then if we learn from history, if we put the genie back in the bottle, it's not like we want to. stop our evolution as eaters. and I always eat the paleolithic diet.

I like granola. I like it. You know, we've discovered some new things in modern food, but in terms of putting the genie back in the bottle, we ran away and started eating a lot of processed foods. I hope you'll join me in a bunch of brain food challenges I have in Men's Health magazine and the others on my Instagram. The Brain Food Clinic is a digital mental health clinic. We provide counseling therapy, mental health services, coaching and mental status improvement. We have a weekly newsletter on Fridays that goes out tomorrow, so get on our list and then if any of you are a doctor, we created the first community and clinical training in nutritional psychiatry, so we have a 10 hour e-course. -Of course, everything is available on my site

ramsey

md.com, but the course too, if you complete it, you can join.

We have a community of about 50 doctors who meet every month to talk about nutritional psychiatry, do supervision, and have some community. around this great idea that you can feed your mental health, so thank you all so much, I think again, I think we got a lot of questions and that was fun, well, I'm glad you had fun. I finished my slideshow that I've been doing, I told Jean at the beginning and I thought it's a fun way to launch a book, but I've been on Instagram live pretty consistently for hours every day since Friday with these. ring lights and that's how when I close my eyes I see the ring lights now, but you learned you know you can have fun in this digital format, but it's nice to have slides.

I really appreciate that you are encouraged, your passion shows. I love that, so a couple of questions before we go to the audience, one I have is what really sparked your interest in food and mental health, like it's pretty cutting edge. I mentioned that we published a post today about anxiety and that's how it was written. by a local psychiatrist and there was no mention of food, so nutritional psychiatry is pretty new and I love it. I'm just curious what your spark was. I think it was a combination that my family moved to the The country has always been kind of healthy and was ahead of the organic movement and you know a little bit neurotic about eating healthy foods even back then and you know part of it is like you came out of that as a hippie, you know like I ate a lot of tofu when I was a kid, so there's this orientation around food and the relationship of food to health from very early on for me, so in my personal life, when I was in the medical school, I was actually a low-fat vegetarian.

I was a college athlete and I was having a lot of problems with my energy. It was really a bit embarrassing. I fell asleep a lot in class in the afternoon. Then my interest was piqued, I think it was just during residency while I was eating this vegetarian thing. The diet back then was super weird and we're learning about this new science about omega-3 fats and I just remember realizing that, oh, we're prescribing fish oil pills and we're all excited about it. We have this as a natural thing that might help with mood, but where do they come from and what are they made of and wow, like a fish oil pill has like 300 milligrams, a piece of salmon has 4000 milligrams, huh? and he's just kind.

I was curious, well if we're going to start talking about food, what do we do and then I started doing it in my practice and I guess the other thing is that for the first time these atypical antipsychotics came out and I was working in the mental health community. . The center prescribes a lot of them and that leads to a lot of weight gain so it's good to be like a young doctor and I'm helping people with schizophrenia but they're gaining 50 pounds and getting diabetes and then when I went to tell them what to eat , it was like, oh yeah, don't eat the egg yolks and I was like this is super anemic nutrition advice that's not going to change anyone's behavior and it wasn't helping anyone, so I think all of that converged and I was really interested and then I came up with that cute little title, the happiness diet, I couldn't get it out of my brain, finally my wife told me you have to keep quiet about it or read a book about it and then I don't know, like that It was how it happened amazing, my wife my wife told me to cheat and that's how it happened.

I love that those wives are good at motivating their husbands. They are good, so I have a question. Do you have resistance from your patients to try food? And if so, no, how do you overcome that resistance? I think I'm not a very aggressive guy. My foodie promise is that I'm a light touch. with food because people come to me with so many deep mental health concerns that I evaluate it, but you know I really try and it's a time where people don't feel the pressure, where people don't feel the pressure, yeah people don't want to eat.

You know, they say I'm not going to use it on these things, but I don't push too hard at first. I treat a lot of young men, so I encounter a lot of resistance and I find that the resistance is a bit like caffeine headaches, like there's a narrative that we're also addicted to caffeine and if If you stop doing it, your brain will explode and you'll never wake up again, and then there's the simple reality, if you take care of your sleep, you don't need it. another cup of coffee probably never again and I just know from personal experience I have my coffee right here, but there is a kind of narrative that we create sometimes around how things will be, so I approach resistance as really just small things, I always focus on food, people like pasta, I love pasta, how can we make your pasta more plants, you like seafood, any seafood, mussels are great, so I look at how we can trythings and then you meet someone who are picky eaters or like young men who can't take care of themselves, they're angry about it on some level, they want to go out for sushi, like everyone else, they seem to have fun with it and thus help them motivate themselves. and interested and then I was a very picky eater, like I didn't even have a farmer, I didn't want to be seafood, now I like shucked oysters at people's parties, so I really think there's this evolution or diet in our palate that can happen um and that's how I approach some of those things.

I have a lot of sympathy because people don't like food or don't want to try things, but then all you know is why people resist. Oh, it costs too much. like I'm going to make wild salmon burgers between this talk and another live talk from my kitchen. I'm not a very good cook it's like this costs a few dollars and it's an amazing source of omega-3 fats so um and then cooking skills like one of my patients like I don't know this stir fry thing you keep talking about I was. like what do you know how to do?

He is like I know how to fry an egg in olive oil. I'm like him Okay, imagine. you're sautéing the egg and that's how sautéing works he's like really yeah so you know sometimes it just helps people I think that's my um I think the reason I like to bring food into the living room. clinic is also because it allows us to form alliances and have more fun when we teach doctors about this, there are a lot of difficult things that we talk about in mental health and and when that room becomes that place where you are struggling with your marriage or struggling with your depression or struggling with your self-esteem, I mean, that's good, that's where those things should be, but it's also good that you know this other part, where we can talk about something that we both do well, we both eat, right?, we both We are fighting. finding healthy foods to feed our families and yeah, great, that's how I deal with resistance.

I am a psychiatrist. As if it were all. Everything is resistant. People arrive on time. to the session um, so let's say it's the end of your day, you've been working and you come home, what would be an easy, healthy meal for your brain, uh, what would you do, what would it be, what would you choose. I mean, I can tell you what we see. Generally at that time we try to plan it early in the day so that it isn't too much chaos. When it's chaos like this for us, we usually end up with some type of gluten-free meal. pasta with pesto and white beans we're a big white bean pesto kind of family a skillet with vegetables the olive oil goes in the oven right away that could be anything we've been on recently it's been like cabbage fennel potatoes like fingerling potatoes, uh , onions usually, so just a bunch of roasted vegetables and olive oil, as a snack.

I'm like a hummus or nuts or well, I don't know, I'm probably into a little bit of this from the book. a little bit of a fasting state too, it's just a lot of time sitting here, so this is my oatmeal and peanut butter from this morning. I had like two bites, but I don't know, I've been at work here all day. in front of the screen and drink a lot of Earl Gray tea. Those are my senses. I'm trying to think of guacamole. I made a big batch of guacamole. Oh, and then the mango, ginger and shrimp ceviche.

I can do it in five. minutes um and I really love a type of protein, delicious seafood, type of tapas for an afternoon, so that's another thing that would quickly be great, um, would you have mentioned bdnf if you actually measured those levels in a patient or is that more. as research we don't have any of that yet, but it's very difficult right now, we're at this point where, because we don't have good biomarkers, we don't have good genetic tests in psychiatry that are really useful. I've been doing genetic testing on patients that I started maybe five years ago and it's a real mixed bag in terms of clinical outcomes, like this gene is wrong, this is my treatment, the evidence doesn't really exist, so bdnf is also like a fascinating molecule.

True, I would love to measure levels, but it's not clear that measuring a level tells us much at this point, one probably because levels vary and two, it's not one of those lab results that we have a good baseline for. I don't think so, so it's not used clinically at all, although it is used in research and then I've seen an inflammatory index used in research, so I wouldn't doubt that some of that will appear online and can be measured. . your bdnf gene, if you did 23 and me, you can take that data, the raw data from 23andme, go somewhere like geneticgini.com, where I have no affiliation with you just enter your raw data and it will analyze all the genes in your methylation cycle and it will tell you if you have any bdnf mutations or not, but even that, what exactly does it do?

Um, so great question, this is my hope. My hope in 10 years, if Gene gets me back, is that I will be able to talk about the clinical approach that we have in mental health and I hope that we help contribute and that it really gives more to people. information and more data and allows us to associate in a different way. Psychiatry is still very hierarchical and I think it's really going to change and needs to change, it's doctor to patient rather than who we are. We're committed to this together, so yeah, okay, so we have a lot of questions.

Hopefully we can respond whenever we need to stop, we will stop. Well, one of the questions, and I have heard this. I have seen it. This question a lot, so for omega-3s and vegetarians, algae supplementation is recommended, since yes, I would say that if you have mood problems and you don't want to take a fish oil pill, then fish and oyster are bio- concentrates the omega-3 fats of some species of algae for us, so you know that an algae supplement is one way to go if you don't want to get involved in any animal cruelty or you don't like shellfish or you generally know seafood.

Allergies are protein, but I find that a lot of people just want to avoid anything that has fish in it if they've had anaphylactic shock or have algae like which I certainly appreciate, so algae oil is the way to go, most of those supplements are dha only, while in trials that are positive in mental health it is always a mixture, it is usually more epa than dha, so I think just being aware that some of the algae oils are dha only and you want a good balance, even a fairly uniform mixture. of epa and dha is one way to think about it, you can also find epa, uh, and I suspect almost all of them are fish oil derivatives, maybe someone, I bet some smart person who takes supplements now is, as you know, reducing the production of some epa, yes, but yes, you want. to try to get both of them right and two, by the way, the dosage in mental health settings is like two grams, which for me translates to a teaspoon of fish oil, so when I give fish oil to my patients, I say take a teaspoon as I only want. you have a teaspoon every day, let's increase your levels and see if there is an effect on mood, do you know and remember?

This is where people were really bad at mental health, all of us, including myself, were very impatient, right? like antidepressants take a month, psychotherapy takes a few months, you know, brain food takes a month, and that's where I think sometimes it's hard, you know, to really stick with something as eye candy because you wonder like after the third day. I feel better? It is working well? This is a good question. Your opinion on resveratrol? In other words, is red wine really considered healthy for the brain, since ethanol is not necessarily a healthy ingredient to drink with wine?

As I would do it? you juggle the two, I think resveratrol, unfortunately, you know the big headline about resveratrol, I think it's what a Glasgow Smith Cline was who spent like 780 million dollars to buy the rights or buy some of the science and had quite a negative essay, so, um, Think about if you have depression, alcohol is really complicated because I think a lot of us, myself included, are comforted by a glass of wine or relax. We can all use it as a way to convince ourselves that we are relaxing and you know. nice and it's self care in a way, we're having a nice conversation with our spouse and you know alcohol is a central nervous system depressant and so it's one of those things that I think is a hindrance to mental health. in general, the resveratrol data. in resveratrol it's like a lot of phytonutrients, they're interesting, they do a lot of interesting things, the concentrations in the vespera trials were like, you know, two thousand bottles of wine or something, so I'm mostly skeptical. things are resveratrol is what tends to generate those headlines and that excitement tends to be marketing campaigns that are usually some type of supplement company or a motivated player in that space, so I understand you, if you want to breathe, you should eat some grapes, good, good answer, um, okay.

My son experiences depression when he eats gluten. What do you think is happening with that and what is your opinion on gluten? By the way, I'm sorry your son is experiencing depression, but I'm so glad you mentioned that great find, so sure. One to two percent of people have celiac disease, so you should get tested for celiac disease right away. You can do it at your doctor's office. You're looking for trans transaminases, uh, and now they do a couple more things to see if they have celiac disease. They are now also testing for gluten sensitivity. What happens there is when people have gluten sensitivity or have celiac disease.

You know, there's a lot of buzz about that and the nice thing about the gluten movement is that it's a really good concrete example of, uh, something. like there's over a million people in America that have celiac disease that haven't been diagnosed and basically your body has an immune response, you get all the inflammation that we've been talking about for the whole hour and if you cut out gluten, it's over. As necessary, I have discovered this in a couple of patients. It's like a miracle. They stop him. The mental confusion disappears. Depression disappears. The skin lightens and then that spreads.

You know they are celiac. Then it's final. There is a world of gluten sensitivity where I have gone through periods where I felt quite sensitive to gluten in periods where I digested well, but there are certainly people with real gluten sensitivity, so for your child I would focus on see what gluten... the free diet does and the important thing about that, what I like is that it is the first step in a month or two weeks, but I would say a month, you know, if the depression does not improve, if it gets worse, that somehow allows You know there's more than just a gluten problem, usually, and what I like about that intentionality is that you're not sitting around for six months wondering if it gets better, it's like in a month you they did an evaluation, but uh.

It's very easy nowadays to go gluten-free, but also be careful with all the gluten-free junk food, you know, because gluten-free food doesn't make it good for you, right? What is your recommendation for vegetarians regarding iron? Let's see. If you monitor your level correctly, you can get a CBC because if your level is good, what you're doing is working, a lot of vegetarians and vegans, you know, end up with some fortified foods in their diet, so even people who you like it, don't you? I know all vegans should be taking B12 for sure, but many people don't and don't end up being B12 deficient, although about half of the vegan men in one study were downright B12 deficient, but as for iron, let's see what I like it.

Well, I like cashews, I like seeds. You know all your iron is going to be bound to heme, it's going to be heme iron, non-heme iron in plants, so it's a little bit less absorbable, so that's where, like cooking, your iron sources. really helpful um and then the iron becomes more easily absorbable. I know if you add yes, you can put lemon juice. I would cook if you want iron in your vegetarian. What I do is just cook all my plants and the iron skillet. Everything I eat has some extra iron in it because, and then on this, you can see me searching my memory banks because I get these questions all the time and I'm in middle age.

I can remember most things, but no. all that and so, for each essential nutrient, I created a uh or actually katrina, why the technician, who is an illustrator, but he created an illustration that also has the best sources, that's how the book is supposed to really help you, it's so spinach with dark chocolate, but usually red meat oysters clams those are the sources of iron that I recommend because I find a lot of vegetarians and vegans, you know, some of their thoughts are that they don't want to consume things that, for example, have a mother's face or some kind of The rules not that I'm trying to bend the rules, but clams are kind of interesting and theMuscles are kind of interesting because they are not so much an organism for some people, I am not suggesting that to whoever asked this.

You already know that, but just for example, one time I was treating a vegan woman who is from Belgium, we were talking about her vegan diet and then she was a little nervous, you know where she will be at 12 on her iron and then she said oh . but you know I eat a lot of muscle at least once or twice a month because I'm from Belgium and I thought, you know that's kind of the kind of yeah, reasonably ideal? A lot of plants and a lot of buy valves, okay, um, it's the antinutrients and the cooked whole grains like you mentioned with beans, I think so, I think so, that's the data that I've seen, you know, I think there are some anti like me. .

I don't think of gluten as an antinutrient, but I don't want to deny the existence of antinutrients, so a lot of times things are called in quotes antinutrients, they're just plants that are smart like you're a plant and you spend all your energy reaching for this little one. thread up to a rock and then you suck up a little bit of whatever iron, zinc, magnesium, pull it down into your plant, you're really going to hold on to it. strongly and that is what those molecules join together, the other thing is many times like in the seeds, those are united because they cling to them until there is germination and then the protein relaxes and that is why we see many sprouts is another one way to deal with antinutrients, okay, okay, have you looked into a pure epa isocompent ethyl?

It's a prescription pill, just a potent anti-inflammatory approved for the reduction of major adverse cardiovascular events, but it's clearly been shown to decrease inflammation of the central nervous system and many others. other things I've noticed this was from a doctor by the way yeah I know thanks for the question and for the information it sounds like this is an epa compound or formulation um and I think you know I haven't seen that study , but I think there will be more and more data. There have been a lot of mixed trials on fish oil mental health, just to say that, but it seems like this is what we're seeing.

As the stress is paid to these natural molecules that we're looking at like psilocybin, right, psilocybin has been around forever, but now psychiatry is like, oh my gosh, psilocybin, so I think we get back to how we can understand more of you. epa is epa stuff in your blood, just like aspirin, epa is a powerful anti-inflammatory and so you know we're giving people high doses of bpa, we're actually thinning their blood in some ways. and making it anticoagulant, promoting anticoagulation. so there's um, but yeah, thanks for the question, I don't know that specific formulation, it's exciting, although I remember when I was, it was after residency where we would like to prescribe fish oil pills for the first time and it seemed to me that I was okay, there's a little bit of progress right, um, if you're allergic to olive oil, is there another better oil to use?

Oh boy, I'm so sorry, by the way, I just want to send some empathy and sympathy that really sucks, um, I've never done that. I heard that, I think it's good for all of us to hear just because you can have an allergy to almost any food, um, and with olive oil I think the closest thing is funny, it's not in the new book. I just uploaded a piece. with my green friend I like main fats because I usually again try to keep really simple olive oil, coconut oil and grass fed butter, but I would say avocado oil has come into my life a little bit more, um by There are a couple of reasons why I don't really fry a lot of things or over fry food, but sometimes I like to give something a little crunch and avocado oil has a higher smoke point and heat than olive oil, so I.

I think avocado oil would be an interesting replacement at first to try, I think all the others lead to, you know, concerns, I mean, some people would say they like olive oil, well, there's lard, 50 of lard is oleic acid and people don't. I don't use lard anymore, but if you've never cooked with lard, it's really a fascinating fat to cook with, especially for sautéing vegetables, where it gives a very small amount of lard which gives it a really umami-rich haze or rich in umami. sautéed vegetables, so if you're an animal-friendly person, I would think that if you want really clean lard, the lard that bakers use might be something to think about, but again, in very small quantities , those would be some of the fats I would use.

I think it could be a good replacement for olive oil. Well, someone asked me. Is raw kale harder to absorb than lightly cooked or cooked kale? It's been like, you know, I put kale up here in the top corner, for the reason that collards were taking a

beat

ing recently because there's been an anti-kale movement, um, my kind of feeling about improperly cooked foods is. yeah, when you don't cook your spinach, you're going to get more folate, you're going to get more certain heat-sensitive phytonutrients, you're going to get more of that kind of stuff, where when you cook it right, anything is going to be denatured. from the protein you'll probably get a little more minerality from that you'll get a little more digestibility, especially if you know that some people digest raw vegetables and kale well, some people get super gassy and uncomfortable.

I think sometimes that's often a chewing factor, you know, when people like to swallow. his kale is like you know there's a reason it doesn't feel good afterwards is because it really needs to be chewed and chewed. I like my green stir fry. It's interesting. I'm not like some salads. I'm not a big salad guy. and I think part of it for me is almost like quantity because when you saw once you start sautéing vegetables it's like, oh my gosh, yeah, I can eat as a whole, I can eat as a whole, whatever I myself and um and that's how I like it.

That's because I find it with a lot of oil, olive oil and garlic, it becomes an abundant part of my plate. I don't know what I like. That is what I want. It's olive oil, vegetables and garlic, oh my goodness. I wonder if they are other people's olive oils. The other one thought about that, so I did an olive oil tasting. I put it on my I think it's on my IGTV, but it's an olive oil tasting and I'm wondering if it's olive oils too. They vary in the type of spiciness of the polyphenols and I'm wondering if you are allergic to some of the polyphenols in some way and if different varieties of olive oil might because oleac acid, which is the main fat, it would be strange to have an allergy. to a fat.

So I wonder if there are actually other things in olive oil. I don't mean you want to try this. I don't know if you don't have a serious allergy. After consulting with the doctor, it might be interesting to see if. As you know, Spanish olive oil is different from Italian olive oil. It's interesting to think like that. Do you think supplements can also lead to a noticeable difference in depression and anxiety or should you mainly look at changing your diet first? I'll have to say yes to both. I think so, you should look into changing your diet.

You know, first, if someone comes to see me and they are suffering a lot and they don't feel like changing their food and they want to drink. a multivitamin, I'm all for that because the data on treatment and mental health, like if you take an antidepressant and you give it with folate and b12, people get better faster, if you take an antidepressant, you give it with magnesium , we really don't. that in clinical practice so much, I think the downside of us being able to do it just through supplements, not that that's exactly what this person is saying, but that you lose some of the antidepressant effects of foods, which are things like Instead of staying isolated at home even though you're feeling really anxious, upset, depressed and depressed, you take a shower, grab your duffel bag and go to the farmers market and while you're there you have a good time or see someone or something happens or a farmer gives you something that just makes you smile, so there's that way that one of those pernicious symptoms of depression is feeling isolated and not part of the people in a community, that's very difficult right now. , since we are all digital, so food allows us to. to participate like I said I have never had a hot date with a plate of supplements and I have had some great dates in my life let me tell you they were always while eating and I bet your best dates always end. food too, so there is more than just nutrients anywhere in this chapter on the eater, heal yourself and part of the plea is that we start thinking of ourselves as eaters within a food system that is designed for our values ​​and our intentions where it really allows us to think that you know if you want to be keto or carnivore or whatever dietary pattern you want to eat, we do that in a way that brings more joy and connection to our lives, whether it's cooking and eating with other people having a potluck once you know that people are vaccinated and this pandemic is under control, you know, that's why I'm a big fan of foods instead of supplements, certainly, if you take, tell if you are not getting enough zinc. and magnesium or iron or b12 and you take a supplement of that, it will be good for you.

I just think, on top of that, how do we like to have something really fascinating, like the coolest thing in the universe? You have everyone watching. has one right it's like you can never buy something as cool as a human brain does everything right dreams like it chases things creates feels thinks and sleeps and all we have to do is feed it is and so I think we should feed it right and I don't think Have supplements ever been part of the plan for that, cool, I like that, I'd like to end that, um, I think that's a really positive note, there were a couple of questions about shopping lists and food, um, you .

I know specific recipes and I think whoever is asking those questions should go to Drew's website buy his book because there are a lot of great recipes in his, yes there are 30 30 recipes that must be for depression and it is for the plan, for What The plan is for leafy green vegetables, then I give you five of my favorite leafy green recipes, like I give you a pesto formula, because if you know if you are green leafy, if you think about salads, I say salads like the ones that you have to come try. my pesto is going to blow your mind so I want to go get your pesto because I bet your pesto would blow my mind um gina, I bet you make a good pesto and then eat the whole thing, which was my lab book before this. this has a hundred brain food recipes, 50 of them have beautiful photographs, so it's like a real cookbook with scallops and you know, seafood meat, it has tons of vegetarian recipes and then, um, 50 Shades of Kale it's 50. kale recipes, so it's not like you'll ever think you need them, but you might need them, and they are, and then we have free recipes on my website and on my Instagram, we've been posting some recipes and if you really just need a recipe right now for the wild salmon burger, if you go to the men's health Instagram story, I posted it a few hours ago and after this, I'm going to make it so nice that I posted um, uh, of Drew. uh, coconut and avocado, pudding from the other day, which is really delicious, I added a little cinnamon, which is good, cute, little, oh, go ahead, this was fabulous, keep going,

drew

on all your stuff on the interwebs social check out their website buy their books um follow soul food salon on all of this will be on our youtube channel probably tomorrow or maybe later today and you can access a lot of this through my website things will be drawn that will be there forever with all your contact information again website soulfoodsalon.com thank you very much have a beautiful day and I wish you lots of luck and love and all support for the launch of the launch of your book, which is fabulous.

Thank you so much. It was really nice to spend time with everyone. I appreciate that many of you stayed until the end. It means a lot to me. I do a lot of these and having a nice group like this is a really special gene. Thank you. It's really a pleasure at the middle book launch to connect with another person. Doctor who cares about this. I can't wait to cook some great brain food with you and Annie. I hope everyone watching comes along when we get it. I can't wait for that day. I'm looking forward to it and everyone, please don't.

It doesn't matter what you have heard and resonates with you. I hope you feel inspired to fuel your mental health and I hope some of this talk helps you. Thank you so much. Great, bye guys.