Nutritional Psychiatrist Shares Diet Mistakes that Cause Depression and Anxiety | Dr. Drew Ramsey

and the number one cause of disability according to the world health organization worldwide and now in the us as of 2020 before the end pandemic is depression this episode is sponsored by north one to learn more about business banking with north one visit north one dot com slash impact now enjoy the episode hey everybody welcome to another episode of health theory i am here with dr drew ramsey who's an author and one of my favorite things in the known universe a nutritional psychiatrist dr ramsay welcome to the show thank you tom i love that nutritional psychiatry is one of your favorite things we're finally calling it that we're a real field and it's really great to be here dude man my pleasure and as i look around and think about what's going on right now especially but just in general the mental health epidemic really terrifies me and as somebody who's an active clinician what are you seeing right now like is this a time where things are ratcheting up or do i have a delusional view you're absolutely right there's an epidemic i mean everything's going up depression is up we've posted some statistics on our instagram about a study recently showing a male depression up 60 70 percent whoa over what time period that's over the last year so what can we do to keep ourselves mentally fit and what can we do to stave off depression and that's where nutritional psychiatry comes in because really to date along with exercise but really the nutritional psychiatry it is the most compelling and the strongest because like you're already eating and in terms of an intervention from public health that's awesome because we can shift that but but food and nutrition there's a study that came out of vietnam that looked at over 10 000 people cross-sectional studies you know that strongest data but but strong data in terms of looking at a correlation between nutrition and depression for people who went into quarantine and they found that the risk of depression during quarantine if your nutrition is bad or the worst compared to the best it went up over one thousand percent oh my god so exactly so this gets to an interesting intersection that drives my fascination with this which is all right as somebody who struggled with anxiety i can tell you diet exacerbates it but i still need a trigger of some something of an emotional nature so it becomes really hard to tell is this something that i ate or you know have been shifting my microbiome over the last month in a direction that's not very useful or is it i'm just freaked out about this thing how do you help people begin to tease that out i think that's the question that we're in and that nutritional psychiatry tries to help people sort out because it can be all of those things i am first and foremost a therapist i love long form listening to people's free flow unconscious and helping them find the meaning in it and the purpose in that so when you tell me there's a your your home of anxiety i would say one that's probably one of the reasons you're quite successful it's a i wrote a piece for men's health called your anxiety is your superpower and and and i think that's true for a lot of people and then when it perks up as you know i would say part of you taming or mastering or say riding your anxiety is you find the meaning in that and so that's one reason it goes down then there's that what i consider more biological anxiety you wake up in the morning with a panic your heart is racing now again that can be psychology there are things that do that to us that freak us out whether it's grieving or loss or parenthood or intimacy i mean that that happens but there's something when it's biologic that we really feel and that's where i think food really does play a role if you think about your brain as the lens through which you're filtering all this data right is is the line on the screen a line on the screen or is it actually in the room with you about to eat you your your brain is very good at sorting that out um and and if we think about the quality of that lens really being influenced by a few things or a few processes one you mentioned like the microbiome that's really talking about inflammation right how's this word of inflammation affect the brain if we think about it in terms of my favorite concept these days neuroplasticity right brain growth and brain change over time uh definitely food influences that there are a bunch of specific molecular mechanisms where we can see that now and so that's how i think about the way that we try and sort that out is thinking have there been changes in your diet sometimes it's easy people like oh my gosh my anxiety's so much worse it's because i'm just i freaked out i'm just eating comfort foods i've eaten pasta for three days i haven't had a vegetable i'm just drinking soda again or i've had a bunch of one of my patients having a problem sleeping and really nervous and she's scolding me she's like you know you say your nutritional psychiatry haven't asked me with my food in a while and i was like touche that's a good point and she's drinking like six cups of coffee a day and and not that like bad bad you puffy's bad i don't believe that's not nutritional psychiatry that's what separates us from everybody else in the food advice business you love coffee great i'm going to figure out how to make coffee work for you tom i mean but but moreover do you ever try a little limits on that though because i when i hear you in particular talk you are so kind and so like hey you like uh ice cream and coffee like we're going to find a way to make ice cream and coffee we're fine that's like one of the best desserts the espresso vanilla ice cream oh i love that isn't there a point though where that like makes it so hard to to actually address the problem that you without judgment i'm not saying they're a bad person for doing it but that it's like if somebody comes to you and is like man i'm really tired of having a broken hand and you're like yeah no judgment on you hitting your hand with a hammer but maybe we should stop that like that's how i really think about even in my own life for instance dude you can't imagine how much i love those white monsters they're calorie free and i used to drink three a day plus two diet cokes and it was glorious lost a lot of weight i was so lean you can't imagine it was amazing one of the most successful periods of your life perhaps it actually was one of the most successful periods of my life but it was my anxiety was through the roof and i didn't at the time like correlate the two so now that i can see literally if i drink a monster i can feel that the sense of anxiety start in my belly it's so weird it's weird that i didn't notice before but like the thought of trying to eliminate my anxiety without eliminating the drinks seems next to impossible can i help you change via kindness via being a hammer please yes and i think that it's a really good question i think some people do need the hammer i think in in the wellness and food world that's fear that i'm going to get you to change because i'm going to tell you about the toxins in your diet i'm going to tell you how you're shrinking your brain i'm going to tell you how you're in some ways broken i just think that's probably what you're sensing is i'm a i'm a clinician and i just sit with real people and real patients or you see somebody who's come in and they're on a bunch of strange supplements and eating really weird food and they have a lot of bad anxiety i do hear what you're saying and you're right there are foods that people do need to cut out of their diet diets need to drastically change i don't want my kindness to anyway [Music] anyway obscure the laser-like disdain i have for the modern foodscape for how much it's crippling our health and mental health for how ridiculous it is that we focus on the healthcare crisis without the food crisis there's definitely things that i want people to do but i want it to come from them because that's what i believe i believe creates lasting change that's in some ways what the new book is really i feel what's different is really asking people will you please take us take a step back from whether kale is right for you or not or whether you should take a fish oil or supplement or whether you should eat keto and just look can we think about you as an eater like what is like where are you from like what does that mean to you what do you like are you trying to get something emotional there or are you trying to get at um like a lot of people will say whatever your ancestors ate you're gonna have a microbiome that's tuned to that of a feeling you're talking more emotionally here you know i'm talking to both of those things our ancestors had different microbiomes because they led a more dish natural lifestyle both in terms of food in terms of sleep and you know lots of lots of good things for your microbiome in in the ancient world and in the modern world on the right types of farms i think the emotional part is really important because it's why diet culture fails and it's why diets fail it's because while people look towards advice and expertise over time natural psychological maturity and development requires us to create our own stance so you tom are your own eater you're your own kind of searcher and explorer of a culinary space based on your values you know i hope um part of people moving beyond some some of the symptoms of depression and anxiety and how those end up relating to food it really comes to people giving themselves a more accurate diagnosis and instead of motivations okay so let's go through then some of the things that are actually triggering that and what i want to do is say okay that we're beginning to in your field of nutritional psychiatry we're developing for people old enough to remember this reference in wheel of fortune there was a final puzzle that you had to solve and nobody wants to look like a jerk so everybody started guessing the exact same things r-s-t-l-n-e those were the letters everybody picked it so finally the show cottoned on to the fact that everybody picks the same letters so let's just give them the rst lne and then now we're gonna let them choose a few extra things we're going to pick a puzzle that we know they're going to get all of the rst lne so it better still be difficult so i want people to that's sort of the basics right cut out the sugar don't excessively drink you're getting most of your protein from fish lots of veggies eat the rainbow that's sort of our rst lne now one first before we go on to the additional things that we're going to add why does that matter why is that our sort of the the main thing that most people in your field are going to agree on we're going to agree on that because it's going to do a few things that we think are going to help in terms of mental health and brain health specifically eating in that what you're describing is a dietary pattern and i think we should just call it a traditional dietary pattern because mediterranean i think is i think it's in some ways like not being woke and i don't mean that about you i just mean that in all of us like every healthy diet or like mediterranean and it's like okay like that's the one well studied but the same data at least in mental health exists for the japanese diet for the norwegian diet for a traditional diet oh then give me how are you defining traditional is it whole foods in the way that your ancestors ate it and then thusly whatever that is across all cultures should be relatively good or is there something else lurking in the word traditional i think there are few things lurking in the word traditional i think traditional foods one had to be grown reasonably closely and you didn't do much with them besides cut them up and like saute them right or or or boil them together you were more efficient you valued your food more i mean anybody listening who's grown their food i i try and grow some of our food you walk out and like wow that that crop was there yesterday then the bugs ate it all you know i it just it was this moment of like wow to not to fail at this and then go hungry is something that none of us really experience anymore so i think the things that exist though your question the traditional diet is one let's just talk about what's not there all that you know those dietary principles that you talked about they're not there uh they are lacking of course ultra processed food so everybody says these are evil just quickly because i think everyone knows the reason i think they're evil is in the way that they tend to increase inflammation and inflammatory markers that's bad and when we think about things that people put in food that we have a response to like i don't know carrageenan or food dyes or preservatives or pesticides has just stuff that we've never eaten before in mass quantities and there is some physiological artificial sweeteners okay it's not sugar but your body is like wow sugar kind of right i don't think that's probably good for your pancreas and so so traditional diets are missing all of that stuff they're missing seed oils and vegetable oils and the ways that we eat them the major we say the most americans eat fat and sugar what that means is glucose liquid sugars right which again leads to an insulin spike that leads to us adding on visceral adiposity and fat that is not just storage energy that is metabolically active tissue that also produces and creates and makes inflammatory factors by going traditional you cut a lot of that out you cut out trans fats there are no all trans fats there's vacinic acid and there's cla which are two kind of trans fats that are really interesting and probably healthy but in terms of an all trans fats like we have in partially hydrogenated cottonseed and sunflower and safflower all these oils you don't find those in nature so you don't find those in traditional diets and so that's that's the stuff that gets cut out the stuff that gets in there you just mentioned all of it right you just get more nutrient density you get more phytonutrients you get more diversity of plants you get more diversity of animal proteins sure you get more seafood but you also get more bone broth and you get more marrow and um so i think those are all the reasons traditional diets tend to win and then there's the part i talk about this in the book it's the last step i'm just going to give it away of our six week plan or my six week plan because i have to make a plan right um it is not about a food it's about you connecting to your food roots your food community because the other thing that changes in traditional diets is you know who makes your food and you share your food i mean tom you tell me why you think that matters like what's the difference for you when you sit around with a group of people and you cook something together or a farmer gives you a box of food or throws in something extra versus eating alone like slamming slamming your monster drinks okay well so let's not let's not quite go there because that one i will say is i could sit down with all the people in the world we all share a monster and it's still going to be problematic so i'll go to the beginning part of that question which is really interesting and this is somewhere you and i differ and that's why i want to ask you about your horses because i'm incredibly intrigued all right there's two types of people in the world 98 of the world are forest bathers they love to go walk in nature oh my god it's amazing and it really does something to them psychologically then there is two percent i'm obviously making these percentages up but there are city bathers now nothing makes me feel more creative or alive than a big city i love being in new york i love being in tokyo um so i may find that what you're trying to explain to me is the missing piece of my puzzle but i don't have the intuitive connection i don't seek out farmer's markets that doesn't hold any interest to me i don't care who the farmer is that gave it to me i don't care where the food came from if if it tastes good and it's good for me at a cellular level i'm all about it so it is interesting to me yeah tava i mean i'd love i'd love if i could be a part of a piece to uh or missing piece of a puzzle for you i can tell i can tell you some of my associations and i'd love to know more about you because one i think it's important to honor that there are some people who just for whatever reason don't like these things and and and and i think we pathologize that you put yourself in the two percent right it's almost like the one percent like the people who don't like nature like i don't like the forest bathing what i always think is interesting as a psychiatrist i think that the tone that you're noting is my curiosity of like what what that means to you like when it started and also like how you've learned about it and so i'd be really curious for you of any of those experiences like in nature that are good and i think also we make this artificial i love that thing you're talking about too the city has been amazing for me i've written four books in the city i've become a psychiatrist i've i have friends i love to stay out lead into the night and watch all of what happens as you mash people up without any of the inconveniences of nature and i wonder part of why it's not appealing to you is it's inconvenient i've been living on a farm for the whole pandemic i look like i have some issues i'm covered in cuts and scrapes and and scars i've been attacked by a rooster i've um struggled with the new tractor um i i it's it's very inconvenient it's very hard to grow food it's very hard to be close to nature but by not caring at all about where the calorie comes from you're really kind of in that alpha predator status in some ways that i just i i mean that's true about us and i think there's probably some argument by not caring and just eating in the most efficient way like simplest calories and i think you i think there are interesting arguments around the efficiency of that but i think from a mental health perspective there is something to the nature be really interesting as you think about this piece of the puzzle for you like like what what enhances and allows you to enjoy nature it's interesting it's where like these new treatments are coming on my line in my field like psilocybin mushrooms like one of the things that really often happens when people have psilocybin mushroom trips there's now research about that coming out of multiple major academic centers about how it influences depression and anybody who's ever taken those things like one of the things they talk about and experience is this powerful feeling of being in nature right of being connected and the number one cause of disability according to the world health organization worldwide and now in the u.s as of 2020 before the end pandemic is depression and so if you don't have a brain the goal my work is really to get people as a psychiatrist back into grow mode right where you're connecting whether for you i wouldn't focus on the country in the nature i'd keep that in my back pocket but the way the food relates to this is the brain is not really in grow mode and there's not a ton of data behind this time i mean there's some right bdnf is like a new popular molecule everyone listening should know about it's this idea your brain grows in adult life like when i tell people i'm a psychiatrist people think they think my favorite molecule is serotonin it's like actually it's like i don't know like serotonin's fine brain molecule right but like why serotonin dopamine like what about gaba what about glutamate it's like okay bdnf rules them all because it makes your brain produce new brain cells so what i want to understand is what's going on either in the brain or the gut or elsewhere that makes going to the farmer's market knowing the guy that gives you the food knowing the farm that your food knowing not even just that hey it was close actually knowing those people so it seemed like such an interesting insight i wanted to see um what's going on neurologically or at the gut level that makes that matter you know all the loneliness data how loneliness is like the new heart disease the our new surgeon general vivek murthy wrote a book on loneliness that i think that food connects us and as i said earlier there's a really simple lesson in biology one-on-one everybody in college had this lesson structure equals function you look at a cell under the microscope and its structure tells you something about itself so what's the structure of a brain cell structure of a brain cell's about making connections the idea being if we take this lesson of connection i think farmers markets and knowing where your food comes from is one aspect of eating for improved better better mental health and i think it does help people connect i see this a lot i was shrinking i'm drinking new york city people move in all the time from out of the city and it's a really lonely scary place you go and if you can go to the farmers market and you're with people and you're interacting with people it's not like it's a panacea but i think it gives people uh one option to connect i think what's much more important than that is focusing on the foods and the nutrients and the way of shifting people's eating away from calories towards nutrient density and traditional dietary patterns and i hope influencing them with this new science so we think about around how food actually helps treat clinical depression or can help treat clinical depression allows us to really talk about this in a much more definitive way because you know a lot of people listening i mean 40 million americans have uh clinical anxiety something like 18 million americans have depression but let's just say you know the lifetime incident of depression uh pretty high i mean at one point if you looked at data like uh i always want to get the study right but i remember i saw a shocking statistic years ago that if something like a quarter of women of child bearing age were taking an antidepressant so you see well this you know it seems high but the regular statistic just of the whole population is about 12 11 to 12 and it seems high right but it's sort of hard as a psychiatrist you see those numbers and some of that says well it's good that people are getting treatment you know like what do those numbers mean and and and what we also know is no matter how many folks are aren't taking meds a lot of people aren't getting into full remission i think that's where food comes in and so you can see where nutritional psychology i think it's really important that if i then ask you hey you're living on energy drinks and diet coke i'm gonna at least hit the breaks before i do anything and say okay like i don't know so have you heard about traditional diets tom let's talk about business banking with north one with north one you can manage your money from anywhere whether you're working from home or on the go everything you need to manage your business finances is at your fingertips with north one north one make sure that you never step foot inside a bank branch again north one can also help you easily save for big expenses with their sub accounts feature that automatically helps you save for things like tax time rent and payroll and all of your favorite business tools are connected to your bank account for easy access shopify stripe square paypal and more with north one you can build and send invoices in seconds from your bank account track your invoices to know when you've been paid and send reminders when you haven't you can use the north one mobile app to send and deposit checks digitally in seconds that means no more checkbooks and no more bank lines and if you need a digital banking option that still lets you do cash north one is the way to go north one lets you deposit and withdraw cash for free through one of america's largest atm networks if you want to learn more about business banking with north one visit north one dot com slash impact that's north o n e dot com slash impact to learn more about business banking with north one take care guys and be legendary yeah that's where it starts to get interesting to me is you can shape your physiology so when i think about what i was doing to my microbiome and what ended up changing my behaviors is like you were saying earlier if you can get people to understand what's happening then you might be able to get them to start making changes and so once i understood like i didn't know at the time i was drinking the um the monsters i didn't know that the microbiome existed i had never heard the word because the one thing life has taught me is that just when you think you understand you realize there's some much larger connection so you do a really good job in the book of giving people exactly the things that they should be doing so we've talked about a big chunk of it already so we know we're going to be focused on whole foods talked about a traditional diet defined what that is which is actually really interesting one thing that um i have never uh that's not quite true i've never heard anybody talk about it as clearly as you with um bivalve foods and yeah some of the the things that we can do that are seafood-based and then also you're sort of putting it in historical context of we probably didn't come up on the grasslands and i'd love to hear more about that and sort of how that led you to realizing that there's potential big benefits to seafood okay thank you that's a great question tom i think quickly it's just the notion of nutrient density meaning what nutrients are you getting for the calories you're eating if calories make us you know fat as a doctor i was confronting that a lot or obese all right we want fewer of those well we still need all the nutrients for our brain then all this data started coming out about the omega-3 fats when i was a resident we're all like talking about fish oil and i was kind of into integrative stuff and i didn't eat fish and anytime i see something kind of like with you i was like and i said where'd all these fish oil omega-3s come from like they obviously come from fish like all right well if i'm going to be like a brain-healthy guy and eat this way and i'm a low-fat vegetarian i need to add in this disgusting food fish seafood so i slowly added this in living in new york because you realize well you're on a coast and i had all these friends who were chefs and i and i really started finding ways that i liked seafood and the reason is that nutrient density when we think about brain health comes down to b vitamins magnesium iron we did a research study a really small study that i did with dr laura lachance who's also a psychiatrist where we just said if we look at all the literature what are the 12 nutrients that are most important for brain health and specifically depression that's the most debilitating disease like does something stand out and there are 12 nutrients that had really as we went through like levels of evidence significant data of both epidemiological studies but also clinical trials we took those 12 nutrients and i think this is the most important thing people miss we turn them into food we ask what foods have the most of these nutrients and you mentioned bivalve so usually with these scales like the andy the aggregate nutrient density index it's all plants because plants always have fewer calories and i didn't like that because 98 of people eat meat or seafood and i was curious so we listed all the plants and they're what you'd expect lots of leafy greens and rainbows but in the animals three of the top five are valves muscles clams and oysters and when we were talking about that scale these are things that contain the 12 the key nutrients they contain the most they're the foods with the most of these 12 nutrients so i know that number one on the plants is watercress which is really uh you know kind of leads for leafy greens but so are all lettuces kale uh collard scales like number 12 or 15. red peppers pomelo and so that's the way i get to these foods is through nutrient density that then leads us to food categories and so the biovalves and seafood are a food category because they're the most concentrated and only source of long-chained omega-3 fats the omega-3 fats we make them in our liver a little bit when we eat plant omega-3 fats but there's reasonable data especially when you think things like the pregnancy data like women who eat more fish their babies tend to have like higher verbal iqs um and less behavior yeah nine verbal iq points if you feed pregnant women if you give them salmon um there have been some really i'd love to do a hardcore data deep dive with you because i'm really curious what you think about the studies but there's a variety of data that if you feed kids pregnant moms and individuals more seafood you see lower rates of depression and bipolar disorder actually one of the first studies in nutritional psychiatry looked around the world at intakes of seafood and found that cultures that eat more seafood have lower rates of bipolar illness do you know what the mechanism is going on there is it just the brain and starve for quality fat or no i would well i would say that let's think about the functions of those pets epa structural fat but also like the double o7 fat because it functions to create all these things called resolvins and neuroprotectants which that just sounds good i want more of that like resolving that inflammation and neuroprotectin like that's literally what they do dha against structural fat about seven to eight percent of dry weight of the human brain is dha it's the longest fat you eat and then epa is more functional epa is kind of it is like aspirin when you take a lot of epa you increase your bleeding time as we said in my first book the happiness diet happiness diet it makes your blood kind of silky smooth so less clotting less inflammatory response and epa ecosapentanoic acid gives rise to ecosinoids the cosinoids are they're like the um i don't know the specialist agents in our immune system right where they they're like snipers they they basically regulate the immune response and it's more specific than other inflammatory factors the um that come from the omega 6 fats which are more like the swat team or more like the marines where like we're going to save you but there's going to be a big mess and and so that's where we always say wild salmon right or fish oil pill but part of making this list of foods and other things on there are wild meats organ meats is to kind of create a conversation it's not like you got to eat all these foods and and then to do the shift into what are called food categories whether you eat watercress or kale or arugula or collards eat leafy greens so i don't know how familiar you are with dr alan goldhamer he's probably the most extreme dietitian i've spoken to and he talks about getting people all the way down to a diet that includes he prefers pure vegan and no oil no salt no sugar and he's the first person i've heard sort of be anti um olive oil what's your take on especially olive oil and what what's my take on extreme veganism i think that in terms of olive oil and salt i'll tell you this salt like cholesterol like saturated fat is a real red herring for people who are eating salt from the salt shaker and eating natural foods the only thing you need to worry about is getting enough salt for people who are eating processed foods where 95 of sodium consumption in america comes from right that's where it comes from it's things like tortilla shells it's things um uh you know it's in everything it's in soda so these so that's where i come down on salt and the reason it's an issue is we have so much obesity we have so much high blood pressure and diabetes that and people are eating processed foods in terms of olive oil i just really think the folks who are pushing the extreme low-fat diet probably that thing you're talking about how kind i am i struggle with that sometimes because i think there are a lot of people who aren't clinicians who don't see patients i'm not saying this doctor is one of them and who don't understand the implications of their very harsh inaccurate and not evidence-based advice and it's where i really have always been in a milieu that if you're going to say a food help somebody with a serious illness like depression or heart disease like you need to have some evidence behind you other than just our clinical experience so i think it's hard to prove that consumption of fats is bad for human health i haven't seen that in the data i've seen no data that also olive oil separates out in any way i've certainly seen data that trans fats again man-made fats are bad i think saturated fats are a big family of fats that do a lot of things like they have antibiotic properties how does that affect our microbiome same thing as those phytonutrients like i'm not sure it's just all the fiber and all that stuff we're also taking in all these really interesting antibacterial and antiviral compounds when we eat plants and those certainly shape our microbiome that's actually you know we all say blueberries and blackberries work by like um you know anthocyanins are so good for the brain nature published the study that anthocyanins prune the gut and lead to changes in the gut that lead to changing and kind of serotonin dynamic dynamics that lead to the changes in the brain it's not like the anthocyanins are up here it's that they're working down in the gut and so i was going to ask do you do microbiome testing when you have somebody coming to you yeah i do this really really advanced medical procedure where i ask them what they eat and when you tell me what you eat and a little bit about your medical history it's not a hundred percent but it's certainly accurate in the sense that it doesn't change it we only look at tests if it's going to change our recommendation and so i don't test microbiome what i want to hear is diversity of plants and what fermented foods do you eat and if if i don't hear anything about that i'm going to try and add those in gently and then it i think sometimes like a month probiotic supplement is an interesting idea as i say in the book and i say throughout all my work you can't have good brain health without good gut health but i think that again this is the kind of thing that gets a little i always say manipulated right where people as opposed to turning to food and things that they can do there's this idea we need an expensive test and lots and lots of probiotics and i don't know it kind of it goes back to that connection thing like the microbiome of the soil leads to the microbiome of the the plant right like sauerkraut i remember the first time i made sauerkraut it reminded me of this lesson in medical school when they're telling the bacteria was everywhere all over every surface of everything and i looked down and like every medical student looked down and look at our hands and and the you know the professor mark braun sort of smiled and he's like that's right you're covered in a layer of bacteria too it's everywhere and like how you make sauerkraut you just chop up a cabbage and all the bacteria that are naturally on there fermented and you know it's sort of a that's this interesting really interesting cycle between us and the bugs all right so i want to get into that cycle now so you're somebody who was living in new york thriving practice um did does one of your parents have um signs of cognitive decline did i understand that correctly yeah i mean that's yeah both of my parents i mean both my parents are in their 80s and and definitely there's some there's been some cognitive decline on on uh on both ends so you move in to their farm in indiana and now from what i hear you're not going back to new york after years of living on the farm you're now going to wyoming so i'm running this romantic notion in my head if you take the kids out of the big city they're on the farm they're more connected they know the neighbors they're out playing in the dirt they're everybody's feeling better you're feeling more connected to nature yes you're covered in scratches and scarves but man like being there working with your hands being around the animals making your own like you know goat's milk kefir and all that and you're just like we can't ever go back and now we're gonna you know find something maybe that's a little closer to a small city but we still want to keep this lifestyle is that actually what happened because you i think you have to talk about your horse i think what you described is why i moved out of the city is accurate in what i experienced i was living in new york with my uh wonderful wife and two wonderful kids and living in this kind of box to box great urban existence i rode my one speed bicycle at a sprint through central park on my way to work in a beautiful upper west side building where i have a great office and we have a great network of friends and and all the stuff that new york offers and something was just not feeling right i don't know how to describe it i started going back to the farm more on the summers i started really as you try and do that and you're not there every day it's hard to farming garden it's just an everyday thing it's it's a it's a meditative process in a real way that i don't know how to describe it it's just you really like you have to check in every day and there are many things like that anymore than like email and and i think there is also something about the natural rhythm that with the kids and my own kind of stress level again not that there's anything wrong with raising kids in a city it just you know the part that really pushed it for me tom is i got tired of shushing my children because children are supposed to make noise and i love the noise they make i love all the songs i love the screams and the idea that i as a parent was shh guys like some rando neighbor downstairs is upset that i have children i just couldn't handle that anymore it felt oppressive and so i did find all of that in the country and and he asked about my horse and my my horse my daughter started as we moved to the country started riding i'd owned horses since i was a kid i've always loved horses and and um and then as she started writing um it was nice i went to the horse shows and and then when the pandemic hit and it was pretty emotional and i'm seeing lots of patients i my wife started writing and really and she hadn't ridden much and was i would say nervous and scared and it really did something for her and just emotionally and then i started writing and i'd ridden as a kid but i've never been like with a like a real trainer to really teach you how to ride a horse within a few months i'm like jumping a horse over two two and a half feet like jumps and you go from this like being scared to having some i wouldn't say mastery but just being challenged and then it's like a lot of things i do like surfing and snowboarding it it really is this feeling kind of a flying where you hit this really altered state where you and this animal are kind of in this space and where you're thinking i love it it's like you're thinking about how much your little toe is cramping and hurts or that the canter is like a little bit like wonky and you don't know why you know i don't think we can discover that without time outside of the city we both love so it was a place i put myself to go between these two contrasting worlds as i i guess i wondered that question you're wondering what if it's great for me what in my family what of it what what does it feel like what do i learn there yeah it's interesting man um i've really enjoyed getting to know your work and your thoughts and now certainly getting to ask you things directly there's i see you as a vanguard of what i think we may have to do to unwind uh where people are mentally right now and i'll lay it out as i see you and you tell me if i'm sort of on the path here um obviously i love cities and cities have brought us both a lot of things i love modern living it's brought us a lot of things i even love social media it's brought me a lot of things including um tremendous business success but i also see that there's a downside to that and that social media can be outright dangerous that city living has so obscured a historical or traditional way of life where we have literally developed genetically to be in that kind of environment and we're now once removed and you look at skyrocketing depression you look at skyrocketing anxiety you look at um you know a lot of the sort of pathologized things that that there is a beautiful side to but there's also the potential for it to spill into the pathological and seeing people who are successfully unwinding that sounds a lot like what you do whole food first and foremost um making sure that you're eating diversity managing for the microbiome steering what you eat by how you feel psychologically which is something that i think until this movement of nutritional psychiatry came along was such a disconnect and people had no sense of how the two things come together and so when we before we started rolling and you joked and said that your psychiatrist was a little jealous of your horse and you were joking of course but saying like you know i get more out of my horse and i thought there's probably truth in that joke of just your you're doing something that makes you to use your words feel more connected to use my word more grounded tom i really i think it means that we want to continue the conversation i'm really curious about i feel like we have a similar set of questions because i think there is there is going to be a revolution i think in how we're living i think uh in terms of really people who are wanting to optimize their health not wanting to squeeze in a two-week vacation someplace nice in the sun but to live a life where there's more nature and more exercise and more groundedness and connectedness and i think the pandemics really accentuated that i think food is one of those pieces of it that we have a lot of control over it's why i like it as a factor in mental health i think it's where it's different than our other treatments right whether prozac works for you or zoloft or lithium like we're both crossing our fingers when i prescribe those that that they work and they do for a lot of people and they don't for some people same thing with psychotherapy uh and you don't really control that too much a little bit but whether food can work for you whether there's nourishment or whether there are certain nutrients that your brain needs that really most americans aren't getting and i think that's one of the things that connects we're talking about a rural city you know kind of urban divide one thing that's interesting is both of those places have horrible mental health crises it's not like country living is like free of depression and anxiety and another thing that connects that is as much as there is a wellness movement the general american diet in both of those places is just really atrocious and damaging to brain health and so um but i like that we're ending with unanswered questions that's always the sign of a conversation interesting thing is i think there are a lot of remaining questions but what i see in you and what i hope people will take away from this interview is that there is like there is you can't just give people a pill right for the sort of ultimate solution here but you have very prescriptive things that people can do you know we've walked through what they can do with the food we've walked through some of the things that they can do with lifestyle and until you have tried all those my hope is that people don't lose hope i mean i think that's also the most important point and it's just that people don't lose hope i mean i i i've treated people with every type of mental illness and it's actually what gives me hope it's what gives me strength and resilience i've just been people who have it uh so hard with what happens in their minds and to see them just do amazing things start companies have families transcend it get sober whatever it is for that part it's just it makes me very hopeful everybody listening should have hope no matter where you are whether food helps you or not or whether you want to eat some of these foods or not that there is a path forward and there's always a passport i think tom your story really demonstrates that of just the i think oftentimes you think about wellness in as a moment in time and we forget about our own personal development and evolution development is one of those words we use in adolescence and i think we've just forgotten that so much complex development happens in adulthood and and to really honor that and encourage that in ourselves and in each other and i hope i hope my book really pushes people towards that with food you know not that there's exactly the right perfect brain healthy diet but for you there is there are those foods that work for you they're the foods that hopefully include some of these power players in my book like red beans and olive oil and bivalves and fatty fish that we talked about and lots of dark chocolate we didn't talk about dark chocolates one of my big favorites so and i think that does make a difference it's like that little step that helps motivate us and keep us going and inspire us no question dude where can people find you i assume the book is available everywhere books are sold that is 100 true people can find me on the internet at my website ramsaymd.com i'm also on instagram where i'm pretty active is drew ramsey md and we've got some great pre-order incentives for the book that people can sign up for on our website and if clinicians are interested in this want to learn how to be a nutritional psychiatrist we have the first course where people can become trained to do this kind of work and tom thank you so much i hope everybody will will check out the book and and i really appreciate your support of nutritional psychiatry and personal optimization and more grounding and being open about how we really can be empowered to take care of our mental health and our brain health and that really is our biggest asset awesome thank you so much for taking the time thank you for writing the book and guys definitely check it out i think that what he's touching on in nutritional psychiatry is the future it's critically important and if you're struggling with any sort of mental illness don't let there be a stigma know that there are options and this book is in a phenomenal place to start all right speaking of phenomenal places to start if you haven't already be sure to subscribe and until next time my friends be legendary take care thank you guys so much for watching and being a part of this community if you haven't already be sure to subscribe you're going to get weekly videos on building a growth mindset cultivating grit and unlocking your full potential

Channel: Tom Bilyeu

Views: 276,892

Rating: 4.86268 out of 5

Keywords: Tom Bilyeu, Impact Theory, ImpactTheory, TomBilyeu, Inside Quest, InsideQuest, Tom Bilyou, Theory Impact, motivation, inspiration, talk show, interview, motivational speech, tom bilyeu, impact theory, impacttheory, tombilyeu, inside quest, insidequest, tom bilyou, theory impact, drew ramsey, brain diet, depression and anxiety, depression diet plan, depression food, diet that help depression, food depression, food for anxiety, foods that help depression, health theory

Id: KnDJrDjAjQM

Length: 45min 58sec (2758 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 25 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/cucumberlemon12]

Immediately turned off when he told viewers we are broken. A diet may be broken, social services may be broken, but I am not broken. PASS.

[u/greyuniwave]

SHOW NOTES:

The current state of depression. [01:05​]

Why nutrition is the easiest way of influencing depression positively. [1:25​]

A psychological lever to reduce your anxiety. [2:41​]

How your anxiety is influenced by the food you eat and the food that causes Tom anxiety. [3:36​]

What creates lasting change, and how to lead with kindness to change behavior. [6:44​]

Why most diets fail. [8:40​]

The food basics almost every Nutritional Psychiatrist agrees on and why they matter. [9:25​]

Drew reveals the things that are NOT part of every good diet. [12:03​]

One thing Tom and Drew disagree on. [14:29​]

Why knowing where your food comes from can help you cure loneliness. [19:11​]

The big benefits of eating seafood and the top 3 kinds of seafood to beat depression. [24:40​]

How Omega 3 fats in seafood work like snipers in your immune system. [28:00​]

Drew´s on being vegan and which fats are bad for you. [30:25​]

What you should rather do than buying expensive tests and supplements. [33:35​]

How moving away from New York to a farm improved the mental health of Drew. [34:34​]

Why you shouldn´t lose hope if you currently struggle with mental illness. [42:29​]

QUOTES:

“It´s an epidemic. Everything is going up. Depression is up...Recently showing male depression is up 60-70% over the last 12 months.” [1:05​]

“They found that the risk of depression during quarantine, if your nutrition is bad, went up over 1000%.“ [1:55​]

“There are foods that people need to cut out of their diet. Diets need to change drastically…” [7:15​]

“All good diets are lacking ultra-processed foods. The reason I think they´re evil because of the way they increase inflammation.” [12:12​] “We did a research study where we said: When we look at all the literature, what are the top nutrients that are most important for brain health and helping depression? Twelve nutrients stand out. So we asked ourselves: What foods have the most of these 12 nutrients? Aside from plants, 3 of the top 5 foods were seafood.” [26:00​]

“I have treated people with every type of mental illness, and it´s actually what gives me hope. It´s what gives me strength and resilience. I have seen people who have it so hard with what happens in their minds, and to see them just do amazing things: Start companies, have families, whatever it is, makes me very hopeful.“ [42:57​]