Uma Naidoo MD, THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON FOOD: An Indispensable Guide to the Surprising Foods that Fight Depression, Anxiety, PTSD, OCD, ADHD, and More

[2:02]Zibby Owens: Hi. I'm Zibby Owens, the creator and host of the award winning podcast that you're listening to right now, thank you so much, called Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. It is a daily podcast three hundred and sixty five days a year, and each day we talk to an author about all of the things related to their career, their book, their life, and more in thirty minutes or less because who has time? I am now an author myself, although I wasn't when I started this podcast, and you can get my new memoir, A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Literature wherever books are sold starting July 1, and my children's book, Princess Charming. You can learn more about me at zibbyowens.com. But really, you're here to learn more about the authors, and that is what we're going to do. Also, be sure to check out all the other podcasts in the ZCast Podcast Network. You can learn more at zcastnetwork.com and definitely check out those shows as well. Doctor. Uma Naidu is the author of This Is Your Brain on Food, an indispensable guide to the surprising foods that fight depression, anxiety, PTSD, OCD, ADHD, and more. This is one of several episodes we're producing this month focusing on health and wellness. Michelin starred chef David Bouley described Doctor. Uma Naidu as the world's first triple threat in the food as medicine space. She is a Harvard trained psychiatrist, professional chef, and nutrition specialist. Her niche work is in nutritional psychiatry, and she is regarded both nationally and internationally as a medical pioneer in this more newly recognized field. Featured in The Wall Street Journal, ABC News, Harvard Health Press, Goop, Healthline, Martha Stewart, many others, Doctor. Uma has a special interest in the impact of food on mind and other mental health concerns. In her role as a clinical scientist, Doctor. Nadeau founded and directs the first hospital based clinical service in nutritional psychiatry in The USA. She is the director of nutritional and lifestyle psychiatry at Mass General and director of nutritional psychiatry at the Mass General Hospital Academy while serving on the faculty at Harvard Medical School. Doctor. Nadeau graduated from the Harvard Longwood Psychiatry Residency Training Program in Boston, during which she received several awards, some of which included a Junior Investigator Award, Leadership Development for Physicians and Science, as well as being the very first psychiatrist to be awarded the coveted Curtis Proud Scholar in Medical Education Award. Doctor. Nadeau has been asked by the American Psychiatric Association to author the first academic text in nutritional psychiatry. In addition to this, Doctor. Nadeau is the national bestselling author of This Is Your Brain on Food. In her book, she shows the cutting edge science, explaining the ways in which food contributes to our mental health and how a sound diet can help treat and prevent a wide range of psychological and cognitive health issues from ADHD to anxiety, depression, OCD, and others. Welcome, Doctor. Naidu. Thank you so much for coming on Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books to discuss This Is Your Brain on Food, an indispensable guide to the surprising foods that fight Depression, Anxiety, PTSD, OCD, ADHD,

[4:59]Uma Naidoo: and more. Thanks so much, Savi. I'm so excited to be here. I love the title of your podcast.

[5:04]Zibby Owens: Oh, thank you. I love the title of your book and I love the premise that we can actually eat to counteract some of the symptoms of these pervasive mental issues facing really almost everyone I feel like these days post pandemic. Can food really affect mood and fight all of these things and how?

[5:28]Uma Naidoo: The mechanism is based on neuroscience of the gut brain connection and people have heard about the gut microbiome. You may see it or read about in the magazine or the newspaper, but it's actually true. And it's newer because it's really unfolded in the last two decades, even though I have to say Hippocrates was onto it many, many yonds ago, but it turns out that the gut and brain are different parts of the body, but they arise from the exact same cells in the human embryo. They divide up to form these two organs and then they remain connected throughout our lives by the vagus nerve, the telephrangial nerve, which I like to call a text messaging system that allows for chemical signals and messages to be transmitted up and down back and forth all the time. So even though the gut and brain are far apart, they connected and that gut brain connection helps us understand the food mood connection. So that's a long way of saying that food does actually impact our mental health. And that's how we have started to understand it. Also the science around the gut microbes that live in the gut. So, what we eat does impact how we feel at a point where we are nutritional psychiatry. This is not prescriptive, but it's meant to give people guidance. And as young or old as our brain may be, there's always the fact that good nutrition can make a positive change.

[6:55]Zibby Owens: I love even the concept of a nutritional psychiatrist. How do I get one on my speed dial? Can I just call you anytime?

[7:05]Uma Naidoo: Can call me anytime, but one of the initiatives I'm working on at Mass General Hospital where I work is to actually create a training program to educate other healthcare practitioners, not just physicians, but other healthcare practitioners in the space. Because so many people after my book have reached out and asked the same question. They want to know more or they want to refer patients or they want to have access to someone. And it's because it's a newer, more nascent field, It's something that we really want to be able to share and have more people doing this kind of work. Call me for now, but I'm working on getting more people trained.

[7:47]Zibby Owens: I feel like in the news, the major culprit is always sugar. I feel like it's the scapegoat of all things, but maybe it really is deserving. But does sugar really mess with our mood as much as we are led to believe?

[8:01]Uma Naidoo: Yeah, unfortunately it does, you know, not just messes with our mood. It sadly is in so many foods, even savory foods like ketchup and store bought tomato sauce and even salad dressings, So sugar is definitely a culprit and sadly it is very deserving of the reputation it has. That not to say that it isn't delicious and we wouldn't enjoy a cupcake on our birthday or something like that. But really the principles of nutritional psychiatry are around not necessarily what's on your plate today or what's on scale tomorrow. It's about the sort of ongoing small and steady changes you can make towards a healthier lifestyle. Sugar does affect the brain. That's the short answer. And ways that we can find to take sugar in more naturally and replace the sort of processed, highly processed sugary foods that are loaded with high fructose corn syrup, the better our brain will be and the better our mental health will be. But there are also other foods, things like artificial sweeteners that people don't realize can impact your mental health or your emotional health and the gut microbiome. Fast foods and junk foods, we know this but we may not know that fast food french fries have sugar in them because the companies have figured out that they make them ultra palatable, hyper palatable by adding in the sugar, you don't taste it, but it's there. So there's all these sneaky things, processed vegetable oils and that. So this, what I do in the book is I go through the different conditions and to your point, Sabi, these days it's almost like everyone has a touch of something that just doesn't feel great. So it's not so much diagnostic because honestly the DSM which is our diagnostic and statistical manual that we use is all checklists. And you have to look at the human. So individuals come to me and they have a little bit of anxiety and some problem with focus. Often as human beings, we have touch of a certain condition. And you don't have to carry a diagnosis, you can actually be eating healthier and living a healthier lifestyle to help your mental well-being or mental fitness as I like to call it?

[10:18]Zibby Owens: I personally, not to make this all about me, but like I have a really hard time not eating sugar and I know all the science behind it. I feel like I eat the good sugars, right? I'm not eating fast food. I'm aware of what sugars I'm putting in. But even though I hear it and I hear it again from you, and I know it's bad for every part of me, like, it feels impossible to not eat it sometimes when it's especially when it's It is very hard. It

[10:45]Uma Naidoo: is very hard. And I actually feel very strongly about not telling people to restrict something and give it up. I do sometimes for certain conditions ask people to eliminate a food if there's some concern that it's causing a response in their mental well-being and we have to test and see. But I generally very much about adding in foods and removing them. So my guidance on that would be enjoy it when you can have some sense of balance, be leaning into those fruits and those veggies, try to move from the type of sugar you're eating to a piece of fruit, to the extra dark natural chocolate, because that by the way has serotonin, magnesium, not in the candy bar, right? The extra dark natural chocolate. So it's also the type of sugar you're consuming and try to balance it up by making other aspects of your life lean into healthy things that you can be doing. Because I've learned with clinical experience, mean, you say to someone, no, you can never ever eat this. That's why I always qualify. We can have cupcakes on our birthday. You can have a slice of cake. This is life. It's not about being restrictive, but it's about balance. So if you do consume that, better sources is a good way to go and leaning into those plant rich foods will help you. Leaning into the healthy fats will help you. Exercise, lifestyle, hydration, all of these things matter.

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[15:28]Zibby Owens: What's the hardest thing for you?

[15:31]Uma Naidoo: The hardest thing for me is I love to bake. So sugar is definitely something I understand at a very, as I was gonna say in a gut level, because interestingly, let me, I'm sorry, forgive me. So as a kid, I didn't know how to cook. And I would hang around the kitchen and always wanted to learn. And then there were so many cooks in the kitchen that I didn't need to. So my mom recognized that I loved science and she taught me how to bake because I love to measure and that type of stuff. So I grew up, you know, eating healthier foods but then learning how to bake. So it's often hard for me. And what I do is I bake for special occasions. So that's when I enjoy the baking, I bake something, because sugar and flour, all of these things have specific scientific reasons that they included in baking. So I do it then and I try the rest of the time to be a little bit better.

[16:35]Zibby Owens: So for those out there who have ADHD or children with ADHD which I also feel is like very pervasive right now, what is the best thing for them to do and what is the worst thing for them to do?

[16:53]Uma Naidoo: The best thing is to eat healthier whole foods. So one example of this is skip the store bought orange juice, eat the actual orange which has the nutrients in the fiber versus the added sugars and the fiber removed in a store bought juice. And to sort of look to see where they can clean up their diet a little bit. So rather than eliminate something completely, can they move towards healthier choices of what they're eating? There are several associative studies that tell us and any parent will tell you that sugar affects the children in a certain way and that they want them to eat less of it. So foods that they can lean into are those fresh foods, the vitamin C rich foods, always the omega-3s are great for brain development, anti inflammatory and antioxidant properties. You can get them from, you know, salmon, you can also get them from hemp seeds and flax seeds, walnuts. And then, you know, really looking to see what is it that the child is trying to, sort of leaning on as a food. For example, if a child is only eating a processed ice cream cone every single day, a banana ice cream, I have a recipe in chapter 11 of my book and you can make it a chocolate flavor is an easy hack that is pretty simple for a mom to do. I mean, none of us have enough time, but it's super soft bananas and it's easy to make. So it's sort of trying to see if we can encourage the child, the family member to move towards something like that than the less healthy version.

[18:39]Zibby Owens: I of course go right to the chocolate protein smoothie.

[18:44]Zibby Owens: Okay. Great. Forget Oh, here's banana ice cream right on page two seventy four. Bananas and honey and oat milk. That sounds easy enough. Scrambled into a mug. Okay. That's easy. I can do that.

[18:57]Uma Naidoo: It's to make it easier. Was a chapter that was the most difficult for me to write as a chef because I kept thinking, I wanted to do this and I wanted to do that. But ultimately it's about just trying to get whole healthy foods on the table for any one of us.

[19:14]Zibby Owens: And this is interesting, your libido lifting menu.

[19:17]Uma Naidoo: Yes. So it turns out that a lot of medications that are prescribed in mental health also have an impact on libido. And that really is what led me to want to address that chapter because there are definitely foods you can start to tweak and adjust and start to include in your diet things like avocado, which have healthy fats anyway, pistachios, things like that. So it felt to me like an important thing to address because so many individuals are on medications and individuals who are not stressed by other things and the libido may not be where it's at or

[19:59]Zibby Owens: where they want it to be. I am delighted that chocolate covered chocolate dipped strawberries around the libido lifting menu as is lox and whole grain toast and onions and capers, Cajun chicken, avocado. He's okay. Great. Perfect. Thrilled. And, you know, it's not just recreational, so to speak, disorders. I mean, this is you prescribe foods for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. And, I mean, all like, there are different foods for each thing. That the idea of that alone I find fascinating in treating food with treating insomnia and fatigue with certain foods like chamomile. I mean, that's it's really, I love this. I love this science.

[20:45]Uma Naidoo: Well, thank you. It was exciting and especially wanted to bring it forward because it's not things that we understand intuitively. How often do we take a headache and our headache goes away in ten to twenty minutes? What do we do? We swallow it, we bring some water. Where does it go? It goes to our stomach, but it works on our brain, works on our head, on neural tissue. So I wanted to share that there's this evolving science. It's not prescriptive so much as it's information that people can use as an adjunctive tool. It like works collaboratively. I'm a big believer in psychotherapies and different forms as well. So it works with whatever you might be doing. If you are taking medication, you can still tweak how you're eating to feel better. And in individuals who are taking say some of the stronger medications in mental health that have conditions like bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, sometimes those medications cause weight gain. So they also want to be careful about how they're eating while they're still taking their prescription medications.

[21:50]Zibby Owens: Interesting. Is there a food that you discovered in your research that totally blew your mind as something that was helpful?

[21:58]Uma Naidoo: Doctor. You know, it's interesting. Sulphurophane rich vegetables came up pretty high up on a lot of lists of so, the cabbages, the cauliflowers, the broccoli, the brussels sprouts came up with an interesting number of nutrients specifically the sulforaphane antioxidant and how they interact with gut microbes. So I liked that because they're pretty low calorie but they find fiber. Fiber is so important for our gut. Most Americans come protein grams instead of the fiber grams. So we really should be adding those in. So to me, what emerged was that there's a lot of good evidence behind what's in them. And the second actually also leafy greens because people ignore them and think, oh, my doctor's just telling me to get a salad again, but they're super high in folate, which as you know, moms need to take when they're so they take the supplemental form, but you get lots of folate from leafy greens and low folate is associated with a low mood. And there's lots of studies to show that. So just having folate, it also has some really cool antioxidant substances in them, which help the gut microbes and help us along. So often things that we might know or have heard are healthy actually have much more to them than meets the eye.

[23:22]Zibby Owens: I love that. So what are you going to have for lunch?

[23:28]Uma Naidoo: I tend to meal prep on the weekend just to make it easier for me. And I always have salad greens prepped and then I have chopped veggies and I decide on what protein. So sometimes I might have legumes as the protein, love chickpeas, I like to roast them in the oven or I might have some big tofu and then add in some healthy fat from either my dressing, I prep three ingredient vinaigrette in a Mason jar, keep it in the fridge for the entire week or a piece of tofu or something like that to go with it. And that way, I have a few things to pick from to change it up a little bit, but I know that it's gonna take me a little bit of time to eat that salad. That in itself is gonna keep me full and it's something that I enjoy. That's what I usually do. All right. Sounds good.

[24:19]Zibby Owens: Thank you so much. I'm really fascinated by your research and hope to see this sort of exploding and becoming super mainstream so that everybody knows, you know, I'm envisioning a restaurant where you can order for your, you know, here in the ADHD section and like yeah, I would love that. Like a menu that's coded for mood as opposed to just vegan or whatever. Would be so neat. You work on that in your spare time. I will do Okay. Promise. Thank you so much for coming on. It was a joy to meet you. Thank you so much, Zibby. Take Take Bye bye. Thanks for listening to this episode of Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. Don't forget to follow me on Instagram Zibby Owens and moms don't have time to read books. Also, sign up for my newsletter at zibbyowens.com and sign up for my virtual book club and meet lots of authors on Zoom every other week. Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan at Texture Sound for the sound editing, and thank you to Morning Moon Productions for providing this fantastic intro and outro music.