How To Conquer Depression Through Diet | Dr. Drew Ramsey | Big Think

For about ten years we have had very strong correlational data showing that, for example, when you eat poorly, the risk of

depression

and diseases like

depression

increases by 70 to 80 percent. And when you follow a more traditional

diet

, such as the Mediterranean or Japanese, the risk of suffering from an illness such as depression can be reduced by up to 50 percent. And that has now led to the first clinical trial just reported showing that a Mediterranean

diet

augmented with some red meat can actually treat clinical depression, major depressive disorder. And it's a very exciting time for nutritional psychiatry.

It's a time when we have more science telling us that food really should be part of the conversation when it comes to our mental health. We are looking at an incredible mental health academic. I've been in New York as a psychiatrist for 16 years and the amount of distress and mortality we're seeing is like levels we've never seen before and we need as many tools in our toolbox as we do food. a lot there, both just common sense. We all know that to feel good we need to eat well, but it's also now backed by an incredible amount of science showing that a core set of nutrients actually has very clear data that can help in the prevention and treatment of disease, again. . , such as depression and dementia.

So we want to encourage people to eat those foods that have the most of these nutrients and then help them do that, that's really part of a mental health care plan. We

think

about many diseases when we eat, heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and it has always struck me that really the disease that we should worry about or the organ that we should worry about when we eat is the brain, because that is by far its greatest asset. You consume more energy in food than any other organ you have. And so focusing on the nutrients your brain needs will guide you toward a slightly different set of foods than if you focus just on things like calories or saturated fat or preventing something like cancer.

That's why it's an exciting time when data starts to catch up with common sense. The diets that seem to work best in terms of brain health are traditional diets. So, for example, most of the science refers to the Mediterranean diet. The Mediterranean diet is a plant-based diet. You'll see lots of nuts and seeds, whole grains, you'll see seafood, you'll see meat and dairy treated differently. I mean, it's interesting that all Mediterranean diets, Greek yogurt, for example, have some dairy and fermented dairy products and meat, but they're used more as flavorings. You don't see what we see in the Western diet of a giant steak and a baked potato.

You see a lot more spices and fresh herbs in the Mediterranean diet; They are very, very powerful medicines that have always been used to treat diseases. So one of my favorite interventions is to help people make even a small pot of herbs on the fire or in their front yard an escape because they can go out in the morning, grab some chives, grab some basil, chop them and eat them. with yours scrambled eggs. It just increased the nutrient density of that meal and made it a little more like the Mediterranean diet. What you will see in Mediterranean diets is mainly monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats.

You'll see, again, lots of crunchy vegetables, lots of rainbows on those plates, and lots of seafood. I mean that's really one of the main differences if you look at the Spanish diet, all those tapas with a little bit of anchovies and a little bit of squid and a little bit of octopus where we get these very, very nutrient-dense seafood that, again , we know how these molecules work that are so important for brain health.