Did you know your diet can not only affect your physical health, but also your mental health?
There are a lot of discussions these days about the benefits of a healthy diet. Eating well has been shown to improve mental clarity, physical energy, and overall health. But what many people don’t realize is that diet also affects mood and can play a role in preventing or managing mental health issues like depression and anxiety. By making some simple changes to your diet, you can enjoy better mental and physical health for years to come.
Friends, welcome back to The School of Greatness. My guest today is Dr. Uma Naidoo. She is described by Michelin-starred chef David Bouley as the world’s first “triple threat” in the food and medicine space for being a Harvard-trained psychiatrist, a professional chef, and a highly-trained nutritional specialist.
In this episode, we discuss the best and worst foods for your mental health, the benefits and negative effects of different types of foods, how to optimize your brain health, how to develop strong nutritional habits and drop the unhealthy habits, and so much more.
Who Is Dr. Uma Naidoo?
Dr. Uma Naidoo is a well-known nutritional psychiatrist who founded the first hospital-based Nutritional Psychiatry Service in the United States. She also serves as the Director of Lifestyle & Nutritional Psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH). As a faculty member at Harvard Medical School, she was considered as Harvard’s Mood-Food expert, and she was even featured in the Wall Street Journal.
Dr. Naidoo is also a national bestselling author of the book This Is Your Brain On Food, where she shows the cutting-edge science on how food contributes to our mental health and how a sound diet can help treat and prevent various psychological and cognitive health issues from anxiety, OCD, depression, ADHD, and others.
I really love this episode, and I know there’s so much we can do to prevent the stress, anxiety, and worry that could potentially come into our future. A lot of it comes down to the nutritional optimization of the brain foods that we eat on a daily basis. This is fascinating stuff on how our brain is constantly being affected by the foods that we eat.
The Benefits and Negative Effects of Different Types of Foods
If you’re like most people, you probably think about the food you eat in terms of taste and how it makes you feel. What you may not realize is that the food you eat has a profound impact on your health. No matter what your dietary preference may be, it’s important to have a general understanding of the benefits and negative effects associated with different types of foods so you can make more informed choices about what to eat, which will help you stay healthy and feel great.
“The food we eat impacts our mental wellbeing. [It] is newer science that has come forward. … I do think that environment, genetics, psychosocial factors, and many other things also play into one’s emotional well-being, but … by cleaning up a certain amount of how we eat, … I have seen people show significant improvement, and really the path to this is[by] understanding [that] it’s not a quick fix. It’s not an overnight thing. It’s really a … lifestyle change.” – Dr. Uma Naidoo
Making a change to your lifestyle is just as important as making changes to your diet when it comes to improving your mental health. Adding regular exercise and getting enough sleep are both crucial aspects of maintaining good mental health, and they’re habits that can be hard to fit into a busy schedule. However, it’s worth making an effort because both exercise and sleep have been shown to have positive effects on mood, stress levels, and overall mental well-being.
How to Optimize Your Brain Health
We all know that we should be taking care of our bodies, eating right, exercising, and getting enough sleep, but what about our brains? Just like our other organs, our brains need to be taken care of in order to function at their best.
“Some of these answers are also dependent on understanding the science of the microbiome because each of our microbiomes is a psycho thumbprint. So a response a person has to the food is also dependent on their quota of microbes in the gut, and therefore, the response times change. So I’ve seen people start to feel emotionally better, and the condition that I see, probably the most robust change, is either depression or anxiety. People do, when they start to make those shifts, start to feel better.” – Dr. Uma Naidoo
What’s going on in your gut is intimately connected to what’s happening in your brain. There seems to be a complex relationship between the microbiome and the brain, and it’s clear that keeping your gut happy is essential for keeping your brain healthy too. When we eat unhealthy foods, our bodies often respond with negative symptoms. By limiting the number of unhealthy foods we eat and replacing them with healthier options, we can start to see healing in our bodies. So drop the unhealthy eating habits and start developing strong nutritional habits to stay healthy and strong.
