Owl's Nest Conversation about The Better Brain Book, July 5, 2021

0:00 clinically oriented thank you for somebody remembering to do that um so my inspiration was that as i was training in experimental and physiological psychology for my masters and phd i was kept being drawn to the biological basis of whatever we were studying cognition memory learning whatever i always wanted to know the biochemical basis and somehow that led me to doing a post-doc in neurophysiology and so i was always oriented toward physiological aspects of health or as my husband likes to say i'm not a real psychologist okay so that i leave to julia

0:45 i'll turn it over to her to answer that because of her background is also very relevant um right i mean i'm not sure if we're quite answering the question of why wrote why you wrote the book bonnie oh i thought oh i'll get into that oh did you not did i miss that oh okay sorry um yes we'll get to that julia well first i'd like to tell a little bit about your background and what ensure to pursue this field of study sure okay um well i i am abs i can only blame bonnie for the fact that i'm i'm doing this research because when i was doing my phd at the university of calgary back in the late 1990s uh she at that stage was learning about families using nutrients to treat very serious

1:31 mental health issues and so um as a as someone who trained in a very uh you know standard uh conventional psychology training program i had been taught up until then that nutrition was completely irrelevant to brain health and so to hear about these people doing so well with nutrients it was you know jarring for me in terms of my education and my background and what i've been taught but um at the same time i have huge respect for bonnie kaplan and if she says you need to pay attention then you pay attention and you listen to the fact that she what she was telling me and stories of people getting well and at the end of the day it doesn't matter what your allegiance is whether or not it's to medicine whether your allegiance is to psychology with a reason why any of us go into

2:17 these fields these health professions is because we want to help people get better we want to help them get to a better place and so um you know i could have said well that's irrelevant to what i've learned and i'm i'm trained in behavior therapy and other therapies for psychological problems and just completely ignored it or else kind of gone well you know what i mean i it wasn't long after i train i done might finish my training or even during my training that i was pretty open to the the sobering data which is that not enough people are getting well and so it's really important that we pursue new and novel ideas although it's not a new and novel idea but at the time it was to me um to to see whether or not it has any validity because if it does have validity well then that's got to be a good thing for anybody and all of us and if

3:04 it doesn't have any validity then that's also useful to know and we can just ignore it and and go back to the way we were thinking before so that's how i kind of fell into it it took me a while to start doing clinical trials but um i was i learned about that idea sort of towards the end of my phd right and so you you wanted people to get better and and some of the best ways to do that to reach as many people as possible is to write a book so so i guess why did you decide to write the book now as opposed to 10 years ago why now yeah that that was the the other part of the question that's kind of interesting so i always said for years and years people would say bonnie you should write a book

3:50 you should write a book not just because of your data but you have a different perspective on things and and you know nothing is working our mental our our prevalence of mental disorders is unbelievable the world health organization says that lifetime prevalence is now 50 one of two of us will have some very serious mental challenge at some point in our life that's insane in itself so um i kept saying i can't write a book i'm an empirical scientist but then i retired in 2016. i was no longer running studies and i just thought maybe the time had come and partly it was frustration irena because i knew how much research was emanating from

4:35 all over the world showing not just correlation but causation that how we eat today and especially our children and our teens how we eat today predicts our risk our vulnerability to mental health problems a few years down the road the media was not covering it there is julia doing the largest amount of clinical trials anywhere in the world on micronutrient treatment in pill form and there is no interest from the media they only i mean you know prozac gets on the cover of time magazine for heaven's sakes but nutrition it's just nutrition people diminish it the same way that julia and i did initially because we were taught that nutrition is trivial and nothing could be further from the

5:22 truth so it was frustration about that that made me feel okay we've got to educate the public because we're not getting through to policy makers or most clinicians and maybe the public and so we wrote it for the general public maybe the general public will get through when they read what we had to say i don't know does that cover it for you julia or do you want to add um why did well i mean i i was just thinking i was just thinking when you you were saying how people were ignoring my research which what is remarkable sort of to add to that story is that the research that we've been doing on nutrient formulas emanates from canada and so it was striking that when our first our my first big clinical

6:07 trial robust and there you can debate about how robust they are but it's the kind of trial that people pay attention to it's randomized it had placebo control and it was published in a really fantastic journal of the british journal of psychiatry which is one that's of great respect and yet i my memory of it was that the canadian media didn't touch it even though they were alerted to it so you know here's these this discover this important discovery in canada of identifying the importance of a broad spectrum of nutrients in alleviating mental health suffering and and it just wasn't even even it just didn't get the the level of attention you'd really think that it deserved

6:52 and yet as bonnie says we celebrate when a medication um is is no better than another medication in the world of psycho psychiatry uh but when something has a has sort of a similar level of effect with a much better side effect profile it's just ignored and scorned and and not not given the due respect that i i hope one day it will get well you write about that in the book is that this topic was seen as so controversial in the medical community and my question is twofold can you talk about why mental health providers physicians psychiatrists why they're so quick to dismiss this

7:38 scientific research and they're so hostile and uh you write about the hostility i encountered the hostility myself when i was telling people that i'm preparing to do this interview and the results um they thought uh this was a bunch of quackery what is it about something that is so simple and so natural that is that receives so much hostility that's one that's one question and then i have another question that i'd like to shall i give that a go bonnie sure you go ahead okay i mean i i would personally like to just be

8:23 incredibly kind to and maybe i'm this is misplaced but it's the only way i can manage it and is to just see that people in the particularly in the medical uh profession have been trained in a certain way of thinking and so when you're trained to think about mental health issues as being predominantly uh caused by neurotransmitter deficiency a chemical imbalance that can only be corrected by a drug then when you're you encounter the research showing that a broad spectrum no special molecule a whole bunch of nutrients that you can get out of your food but can be given at a higher dose and you may be able to get out of your food is is going to completely um be an opposition to the way they think about

9:10 uh what causes mental health issues and so that's we we you know as humans we struggle with when there are new ideas we like to stick with our old ways of thinking and so i can only assume that is part of what is going on you know if we want to be a bit more cynical about it then perhaps there's uh there there's in for some people it will be monetary gain uh in terms of the pharmaceutical industry that it affects potentially where they're going does that influence some people i don't know but it's just some some ways of of thinking about the hostility without feeling that it's directed at me that it's just a p it's just human nature uh being very much challenged by

9:55 this um the fact that you need nutrients your brain needs nutrients to function optimally i'll just add one word education and i'll say it again education education we don't teach our children in school about how to eat for healthy brains we don't teach them why that's chapter two in our book that what the nutrients do in their brain we don't teach our physicians in medical school about nutrition and brain health and that's why so many of them as we mentioned in the book have come to me over the years and said bonnie those vitamins and minerals you study they don't affect the brain do they well yes but they weren't taught it i don't blame them it's all it's our educational system

10:44 so the second part of my question is has the better brain has the publication of the better brain resulted in in a change in an acceptance in the medical community has there been any kind of a shift in that uh as well as have you received any kind of feedback in how psychiatric patients are being treated have you have you received that kind of feedback from the mental health community well i would say it's a little soon wouldn't you agree julian i mean yeah only a few been it's only been out a few weeks may and june basically two months so but i think in general there is a shift and we have more and more

11:30 integrative physicians physicians who are tired of turning to medication first and that's both for physical health and mental health and they're they're receiving higher education going to fellowship programs learning about everything from meditation and deep breathing to nutrition so i think it's getting better i see an improvement in openness in the last five years even do you julian no i think there's definitely an openness i i i something else that i did sort of in conjunction with the book was a a mass open online access open an online access course which is a mooc uh through the edx platform and it's something that you can go on on there and you can either do it for free for six weeks or you can pay 150 u.s to get a certificate and so

12:18 that's been running since march and the it's been the uptake has been massive 16 000 people i think at this point have signed up to for this mooc and it's very much the same content as the book but in video form and um but what has been really really exciting is that there are many many mental health professionals who are taking it so i've said there are psychiatrists on there there are physicians there are also psychologists and integrative medicine and you know so it's a it's attracting a wide range of people and the number of times i've read i've looked at the comments and people who are you know walked into it quite skeptical have kind of written things like goodness i didn't realize there was so much data to support this idea wow this is kind of really opened up my mind so the more that's going to happen the

13:05 more they talk about it hopefully the more there's going to be a point where it it cannot can no longer no longer be ignored and that's that cannot that's our hope is that it's going to we're going to get there to the tipping point of where it's just on the obvious and then i can do something else with the rest of my career so maybe we could ask sarah to enter into the chat line if you uh that i'm so glad you brought up the mooc okay because it's it's really uh it it is helping a lot of people sure sure if you put well i can i can try i can put that in i can put the link in i just usually tell people the easiest thing to do is to go to edx.org and search for reclage because ruckledge is my usual name so but you got to spell it right so yeah it's really worth your well it's

13:50 free unless you want a certificate and it's really worth your time and it's interesting it is entertaining it was a lot of fun it was done for the public and um it was done in new zealand where we could actually do videoing and um i mean in the same room together yeah they're in the same room together um and it is about to start in middle august the next run of it so yeah there we go but the book gives you more information absolutely we encourage you to look at that too um i'd like to talk about the science behind your work um and that you write that it is likely that many mental health problems might emerge because our brains are not getting the nutrients they need

14:39 um i'll give them evidence behind that claim sure i'll give you a little overview of the kinds of research but then i'd like julia to fill in on some details because she's the more active researcher obviously now but in the book we make it pretty interesting i think we have a lot of stories and anecdotes but we do cover the science and we cover four different kinds of science this is how i usually think about it one is correlational there is so much correlational data showing that how we eat is correlated with how we feel no matter whether you have a diagnosis or not it's a phenomenal amount we should stop doing correlational studies i always say because it's a waste of money now but then the second category is really very interesting and now

15:24 i alluded to it before irena and that is it's been shown in both children and in adults um in a very important study in canada another important one in spain a really important one on suicide in japan that based on how people are eating you can predict the risk for their their developing mood and anxiety problems a few years later and i mean when you look at the one that was done in canada it's it's it's breaking your heart because what are we doing to our children maybe they're enjoying the way we're feeding them now but what's going to happen later and and you're really increasing the risk for the japanese one the risk was cut by 50 percent in those who ate a whole foods diet so these are very powerful studies the third kind of study there are only a

16:11 few of them but they all show that when people are taught to eat a better diet that they have a change in improvement in their mental health and the fourth category is over to julia it's on on what most people would call supplementation sure this is where we have a lot of control yeah so i just want to also add because i think one way to think about your question is also to think about what happens in utero and the pregnancy studies that have also been done and that the there's research that shows when mom is eating a whole a more whole food diet that reduces the risk that her child is going to have internalizing and externalizing problems which is you know those are words that are used to describe things like anxiety or or oppositional defiant problems etc

16:56 and the more that that she eats a western-style diet which is high in sugar and high in those in in takeaways and lower in fruit and vegetables then the greater the risk that her children will have to develop these internal internalizing and externalizing problems so just want to add that in because that's really saying it's starting from it's right from the get-go from the beginning about how important it is that we get our nutrition right um during pregnancy and you know some people would even argue pre-pregnancy uh but we you know that's that's it becomes even harder but we can certainly control what happens with moms and how much information they're given uh during pregnancy for me it's been uh many many years now since i was pregnant but i can remember and i you know hopefully things have changed but all i ever felt was that there were just so many things i couldn't eat and it's all about it was all about how

17:42 you couldn't eat this so you couldn't eat you know have lettuce because it probably wasn't properly washed and you couldn't have fish because it probably was contained mercury and you couldn't eat the fish anyway because it was raw or it was just an endless list of things you couldn't eat that you felt so confined and really what we could what the message could have been was think about all of these amazing array of foods that you can eat during pregnancy the nuts the legumes the beans the lentils the fresh fruit and vegetables you know peel you know if maybe have to think about it whether or not it's peeled or not but to really focus on the things that i could have eaten rather just on this terror you know just terrifying moms into what they can't eat and so and that seems to you know just perpetuate that is it's constant uh in in a lot of the food messages that we get

18:28 so then answering you know going you say that julia because uh i remember the story when my mother was pregnant with me she would always say when i was pregnant with you i would always eat the most healthy foods right yes and this is great and uh i'm over 50. so like this is what we're talking about a woman who was pregnant in the late 1960s yes yes the diet was different yeah exactly exactly wisdom was known back then yeah so yeah oh definitely yeah yeah so but uh what my kids were i was it was the early part of the century and it was it just seemed like it was a different message at that point hopefully things

19:14 will change um but then going to the fourth thing that bonnie was uh referring to the fourth type of type of data or experiment experimental design that can give us a really good clue about whether nutrients are relevant to the brain is by simply studying them in pill form so it's a it's a proof when you do it this way it's proof of principle it's proving a point which is that nutrients must be relevant to brain health or else we wouldn't show superiority of nutrients over a placebo so it really nails it home is that yeah we've got the the dietary studies that that bonnie talked about where they manipulate diet but in those studies the challenges is that those people know they're getting put into a diet where they're encouraging them to eat you know healthy you know healthy healthier fats

19:59 or fish or fruits vegetables etc they know it whereas when you do a properly conducted randomized controlled trial nobody knows what they're getting they're just randomized to one a condition either the active or placebo and then the clinicians don't know what they've been put on and then we monitor them over time and then we assess whether or not there's change in the symptoms that we're targeting and for the clinical trials that that i've published the symptoms that we've targeted have been associated with adhd but that it doesn't mean that that's the only research but that's some of the most robust data that i've got from my lab and so that showed that the nutrients seemed to have a beneficial effect in some but not all symptoms associated with adhd uh you know one thing that what that we don't see as much of an effect on is say

20:45 for example hyperactivity but if you're you're improving a child's emotional dysregulation you know that is their anger their hostility just being sort of always um irritable being hyperactive becomes no longer as such a challenging thing for the parents when those other symptoms have really dissipated so they can still be active but there's some of the associated symptoms do definitely seem to improve so i just wanted to say that there there's not always the same effects for example as you may see with ritalin where you definitely see a lessening of that overall energy so that's um that gives us a bit more of that confidence but not just from my lab you need rare application and so there's studies that have been done in the u.s on uh where for example they've done

21:32 similar types of trials with this broad spectrum of nutrients no special nutrient it's the full array of about 30 nutrients that micronutrients that our brain needs to function and they should they see similar things which is benefits for the behavior associated with autism then there's studies on stress other studies on aggression and prisoners so you start to build this picture that it's not the idea of giving nutrients is not specific to a disorder it's like a a it's like a metabolic tune-up it's it's tuning up it's like a getting a really good you know repair of the you know of the whole the whole brain and in so doing you end up with beneficial effects being observed across all mental function

22:20 so i'd like to bring it down to very simple terms okay you talk about uh in the book you talk about micronutrients and macronutrients so what is the difference yeah fingers for micronutrients yeah thanks we we try uh not to use much jargon but people do have to learn this one distinction to understand what we're talking about so macronutrients everybody knows what they are when you pick up a piece of like a packaged food you'll see protein carbohydrates fats for example those are categories they're macronutrients and usually in that processed food

23:06 there isn't a lot of protein but that's okay most of us in western society we get enough protein elsewhere the fats tend to be not very good fats they're saturated fats and the carbs tend to be refined not so good carbs but anyway you're getting macronutrients but the julie referred to the families in southern alberta that that generated this idea for a broad spectrum micronutrient formula and their idea was to give the brain all of the minerals and vitamins that we need so we we use the term micronutrient to refer to minerals and vitamins and occasionally we include omega-3 fatty acids the essential fatty acids the term micronutrient if there's anybody in this audience who has

23:53 an agricultural background that might confuse you because farmers use the term micronutrient a little differently they tend to use micro to mean not just the things we get small amounts of but the things that plants get small amounts of so they would never call calcium for example or magnesium a micronutrient because our soil needs lots of that our plants need a lot of it but they're still the smaller category so we use the term micronutrient um if you're not in a food producer you can just ignore this but we use the term micronutrient to refer to the roughly 15 vitamins and 15 minerals and before i turn it over to see if julie wants to add me i just tell people where these come from because i'm always blown away that people don't

24:39 know but it all comes down to the soil and irena people don't realize this is a huge problem right now that our soil is lacking in minerals and there are reasons why but we're not going to go into detail here but we do have a half a chapter on uh the not just the human microbiome but the microbiome of the soil that some people might find interesting but the soil should have approximately 15 minerals and plants absorb approximately 15 minerals and then plants do something that we cannot do they take those minerals and they manufacture vitamins and you and i cannot synthesize our own vitamins there are some bugs in our gut in our microbiome that can synthesize

25:26 tiny amounts of some b vitamins but it's trivial so and it's not us it's the bacteria interestingly okay so humans are really rather pathetic in this way all the vitamin d oh and vitamin d sorry we're so at the mercy of all of these all of our outside environment or the environment that is inside of us right and as uh julia pointed out the hormone really which is what vitamin d is is the only one that our skin manufactures of course when exposed to sun so thank you julia anyway we come along we eat the plants or we eat the animals that eat the plants and that's how we get the broad spectrum of roughly 15 vitamins and 15 minerals but

26:12 if the plants don't have enough or and we we present this idea extensively in the book or if we have inherited a predisposition to need an unusual amount of any of those micronutrients to work in our brain metabolism that we teach about then it's not enough and those people can be eating a wonderful diet and still because of this inherited predisposition they will need additional micronutrients in pill form did you want to add any no all right i just i need to clarify something in my mind so we need micronutrients and the western diet is full of macronutrients like eating carbohydrates i'm always reading

26:59 labels and if i see high protein i think oh this is good well if you need protein it is so does the body not need macronutrients as well like protein and proteins and carbohydrates isn't that a good thing of course it is but most of that packaged food is not a very good kind of carbohydrate it's refined carbs right and not a very good kind of fat you're not usually getting olive oil in those packaged foods and to quote my friend julia sometimes you'd be better off eating the package that the food come in ice cream no but i mean i'm i'm eating yogurt

27:45 yes greek yogurt and i'm looking at the protein content yes that's good that's a good thing yeah but where are the minerals and vitamins so uh if i can just i jump jump in here yeah um i mean there's absolutely nothing wrong with with making sure that you're obviously we need micro we need the macronutrients and so it's not that's not what we're we're we're trying to say that you shouldn't eat those but what we are highlighting and i've been able to highlight this actually again through the mooc because i've been asking people to look at food packages and when the people look at most food packages not all but most of them around the world pretty much the the nutritional information that's on that food package and is telling you about the

28:31 macronutrients but it says nothing about the micronutrient content and so if they were forced to say how much of each of those 30 essential micronutrients was contained within that packet you would see a whole bunch of zeros that there isn't in it so you will almost wonder whether or not this has been uh i want you know those nutritional information that are for i don't i think i i think some of them are mandated by law that you have to give certain information on a food package the fact that the concentration of focus is on the macronutrients means that the food people who make these ultra-processed foods have no incentive whatsoever to make sure that there's micronutrient content in there and so without that micronutrient

29:16 content coming in from those ultra processed foods your brain is essentially starving because it's not getting the nutrients that it needs in order to make the neurotransmitters or make hormones or enzymes and all the things that it needs to do so that's that's the challenge that we currently face with the the massive increase in the ultra-processed food industry is that it's it's gotten us all thinking about fat it's low in fat it must be good for me or it's glow in the low in sugar it must be good for me but the food messages are typically about what's not in the food low in fat low in sugar low in saturates low in sodium but you shouldn't as bonnie says is that you you shouldn't be determining to eat a product based on what's

30:01 not in it you you need to know what is in it in terms of its particularly what we're emphasizing is the micronutrient content and that's why the a box would get a in new zealand we have a star rating system it would get a four star out of five stars because it's low in all of these these things that um are emphasized in our in our packaging does that help with the sort of that yeah that helps a lot so another thing that i see i'm a huge package reader okay i read all packages and if it's something that is not plain english i don't i try not to eat it that's a good that's a good place to start yup definitely so you're talking

30:47 about the e numbers on there uh i don't i don't know like i'm i'm not very scientific color good i just need it simple if it's plain english then it said ingredient i understand so i'll put it in my body but something that silence sounds like it's in it belongs in a chemistry a lab then i won't eat it that that's basically my thing so another thing that you cover that i found so fascinating is you talk about omega-6 fatty acids and omega-3 and that the western diet is very uh that you need to have the right ratio the one-to-one ratio or the two-to-one ratio of omega-6 fatty acid to omega-3 and that the western diet we're

31:32 consuming excessive amounts of omega-6 fatty acids which have been linked to cardiovascular disease excessive inflammation and even some forms of cancer right that is scary stuff so what should we be doing how can we put down the package okay so what am i not talking about the label don't what is the main what is a what is omega-6 fatty acid like what how do i stay away from it so you're you're more likely i mean the packaging for some things isn't essential like you can't buy uh frozen peas without it being in a package right so we can't just say just you know a simple solution would be well just don't buy things in packages because that's not going to solve it because there are things like nuts that are in packages and you know all of that

32:20 but the more we can understand what is real food the less than you need the less you need to depend on that nutritional information that's on the back of the package so the more you're thinking about buying something that is you know are the fruits and vegetables often don't come in packages although sometimes they do and then they put that they have to put the nutritional information on them um i was eating olives all of this this week which are a fantastic part of the mediterranean diet and it had a label on there and it said it was two and a half stars and i'm like what the two and a half star this is a real food it shouldn't it's of course it's good for me um and that it got less less than what kellogg's corn flakes would get as a as a star rating that's how crazy the

33:06 star ratings are when uh when olive oil or your real yogurts get lower ratings in their sort of overall uh what is omega-6 am i not supposed to yes so like that and fries or like what what so you're so the omega-6s are going to be more likely to be found in your packaged foods you're going to more likely see that so if you're going for your nuts and you're going for your fish then you're more likely to get your omega-3 fatty acids i don't know if you want to add to that bonnie but that's sort of my thinking of how you can more easily avoid just the way that your food choices will it will inevitably lead to you consuming more omega-3s yeah you're not going to see omega-6 on the packages over here anyway i don't

33:51 know about obviously there's a difference with new zealand you use that term of e code or something we don't have that here oh no you don't they they're they're um they're just numbers they they definitely i'm pretty sure they are a unique person something you like red eye number two it would say that it wouldn't anyway anyway a little bit number two um so i want to move along here just uh yes the time's going just very quickly you don't cover brain cancer in the book why is that because we're not oncologists we're talking about brain health in terms of mental function cognitive function dementia etc but we

34:37 wouldn't go into cancer okay okay um but it's a good question yeah but we're just not experts you're not okay you're not uh so um just uh quickly talking about um the intestinal microbiome i want this to be kind of the last science question before i move on to nutrition you mean like practical nutrition yeah practical nutrition yes okay so uh julia has some interesting date on that so i'll defer to her on the microbiome um i know you could where do i start we could spend the rest of the time on this one uh but i'll try to keep it simple

35:23 the microbiome we often think about it within the context of probiotics and prebiotics although that's not exclusive but sometimes people are thinking about that the microbiome and how to feed the bacteria that's in our gut and the best way to feed our bacteria is by ensuring that we consume a lot of prebiotics and probiotics are things like your beans your lentils your asparagus onions your garlic your leeks and beets that's those are examples of prebiotics it's what the bacteria need um to to for for helping them do what they they do so that's um those are the the in terms of the research that's being done on the prebiotics and mental health it's too early and i think would be actually to if you think about it it'd be actually quite kind of hard to do because you'd need to get people it

36:09 would just you can't just exclusively have people eat prebiotics that wouldn't make any sense whatsoever so they are difficult studies to do but maybe increasing their prebiotic consumption and seeing whether or not that has an effect on mental health so at this stage we don't have a lot that we can go on and it doesn't mean that they're not important we know they're important for good gut health uh but whether or not that's going to put you in a better mood at this stage we don't have a lot of data to go on then there's the probiotics so that's would be things like your yogurt your kimchi your kombucha um some of these things that these drinks that are getting quite popular out there um your sauerkraut etc so those um again can't say that eating more of those is going to necessarily have an effect on your mental health we know it's good for your microbiome but the data aren't there but another

36:56 way that you can consume probiotics and everybody will have seen them they're in there you can buy them in sort of in a pill form or powder form um from your your either your supermarket or your drugstore and so the research on that there's been a massive amount of research on these probiotics and they're basically getting people to eat to take in and consume bacterial strains that we deem as being good for us so probe that's why the probiotic comes from um and then there's a term that's called they even call them psychobiotics which means that they have good beneficial effects for your mental health and uh it's a kind of a cute term that was coined by some very famous um uh neuroscientists at ted dinan and um john cryan

37:41 at cork in ireland so that was the term they used but they what people were then doing was just taking a couple maybe one strain or maybe two strains and seeing whether or not that had an effect on mental health and when we look at the vast amount of research on this topic what you unfortunately uncover is that different researchers and scientists use different strains and so it's hard to kind of figure out well what's the best strain that i should use or i should consume and i almost wonder we're not there yet but is it possible that it's not about the one strain it's about having a diverse bacteria in your microbiome and there's there is research that's suggesting that is probably good for your mental health is having a good great wide variety of bacteria and so

38:29 um you know the i think there's there needs to be more research to be done but certainly there are some of these strains that have kind of seemed to have gone gotten ahead of some of the others and so there is some research that's suggesting they may be beneficial for for mental health i really enjoyed it you wanted i really enjoyed reading that uh part of the book because my great grandfather had a yogurt producing farm in soviet georgia about over a hundred years ago so my family were great believers in the importance of yogurt definitely good for your microbiome yes and being a person from the former soviet union we were

39:14 we were taught to believe that people in georgia they lived a long life because they ate yogurt and very healthy food and and you write about that you know so it was it was wonderful to read but it was plain yogurt not the sugared stuff that people are buying now exactly yeah kiefer somebody just commented yes right yes keep fear that's why fear sorry here in russian and that kind of leads me into the third part of our interview uh you dedicate an entire section on how how to feed your brain and you talk about real food the importance of real food i know when i'm eating well if i'm eating healthy i

40:00 had a fabulous big salad today i felt so good and so what what is real food in plain real food sounds like plain english but what is real food define it for me well it's interesting because it's not a black and white situation right on one end of a continuum we have real whole food it's grown you pick your cucumber and you eat your cucumber at the far end that was probably a bad example because i can't think of a cucumber flavored snack let's say apples you pick your apple and you eat a real apple the far other end of the continuum you have apple flavored something or other with all kinds of chemicals and sugar and salt and whatever

40:47 so that's ultra processed but in between there are some foods which might be quite okay for example apple sauce which might not have any added sugar might just have uh a kind of a calcium sort of preservative because it's in a jar and it's not frozen or you might have peas which are frozen peas and those minimally prop processed foods have really helped diversify our diet since world war ii and and we're able to eat things out of season and people who are not growing their own food can get more of that kind of thing so it's not that you know we don't want to say that processing is absolutely wrong but we

41:33 should be increasing as much as possible the unprocessed and especially fruits and vegetables because as julia said these are the prebiotics i mean we should have a sign in every produce department get your prebiotics here because that's where they are did that answer your question yes yes eat real food eat real food and michael pollan followed that by saying mostly plants and not too much i always i try to count six to eight pieces of fruits and vegetables a day minimum good that's one thing that i try to do but um that's why we have a chapter on recipes in there that include things like my whole foods my whole vegetable

42:19 raw vegetable snacks and julia's lunches and so forth yes i just wanna kind of get back to treating mental health with uh with real food with a good diet with with basic eating one of the things that people who suffer from mental health challenges one of the things is that um sometimes they resist uh they resist uh care or they resist treatment uh and it could be even something for as simple as eating a better diet have you encountered that in in your practice

43:05 uh in your research patients resisting um self-care through through through better diet and what would you how would you recommend that medical prac uh practitioners deal with such situations so um resist i i guess i'd i'd be thinking is it possible that they simply either don't have the skills um or they are in such a state of unwellness that the idea of learning to cook is too overwhelming i don't know if that's kind of what you're what you're getting at with the word resisting is that what you're thinking of

43:50 sometimes uh they can be very stubborn okay all right that could happen too sense of reality yeah that's that's i mean if you've grown up thinking that these foods are what you're supposed to eat then it's it can be quite jarring to come across people who are going to say that you need to change your diet and they might just be quite um you know probably diminish you know see that as being perhaps not a pretty trivial change to make when they have serious mental health issues because they think i should have known that you know if it was that simple i would have done it by now or orca or controlling you're trying to control me uh yeah or or let me enjoy my burger yeah why would i want to eat you know

44:36 let me let me live uh my life in peace and let me buy omega-6 sure i mean i i suppose in those instances there those people tend to probably not come to see me because they when they come to me they've gotten over that hurdle of uh of recognizing that nutrition is probably important and so they're probably a bit more open to that idea but i think maybe what you're referring to is somebody you know if they were to go see their gp and the gp suggests actually what you should do is to do an overhaul of your diet um as the first point of call then i can imagine for some people that would be quite hard thing to hear uh if for lots of different reasons and so i i suppose you know you could just be set up set it up as an experiment um

45:23 as a first way to go is well you know what maybe it isn't something that would work for you but how about we figure you know see whether or not we can make some changes in that direction that um and determine whether or not it really isn't going to have a an effect on your mental health or not or sharing some of the you know the knowledge that we do have about good um eating and good mental health uh you know i i suppose that's that's uh other ways you might be able to approach that um which i think what else i mean sometimes people think that they simply can't change their diet because it's going to be too expensive and so that comes up oftentimes is that there's no point because it's so expensive to do that and i've seen so many uh posts so you know over the last actually only just over the last few weeks where they've

46:09 you know people have compared a home-cooked meal with lots of fruit and vegetables and maybe some mints and some you know some potatoes or and then compared the cost of that to the cost of going out and getting a takeaway and recognizing that actually the cost is exactly the same but we know that the home cooked meal is going to be far more nourishing for our brain than that takeaway so just sort of starting to maybe even just collect those data of how much am i really spending on on the takeaway foods and so that we can start to challenge that because if you you know we can eat expensive of course you can if you wanted to go and eat at fancy restaurants every night or you wanted to as bonnie says eat lobster every night or you want to have steak then that that may start to

46:54 increase the cost of your your grocery bill but if you're looking at eating fruits and vegetables in season then um you know doing a you know sometimes buying the frozen peas because they're cheap but they're just as nourishing you know doing you know a variety of different things then you may find that it's cheaper than you realize and so i like to kind of push back on this idea that it's it's too expensive and therefore why even bother i think we need to resist that because we do need to bother right and you write about that in the book uh i was a little bit not entirely clear when i was reading because you're really advocating for a mediterranean-style diet as being the healthiest and i was thinking okay the mediterranean it's a big place is it tunisian

47:40 is it greek is it israeli is it southern french is it italian what is a mediterranean-style diet and because it's so different in all those countries yeah but what should i be eating so let me answer that a couple ways irena first of all we use the term mediterranean style a lot because it is just generally a whole foods real foods or as andy weil calls it true food diet but depending on the country it's going to vary but the reason we emphasize that a lot in spite of the fact that we know that a lot of people will benefit from a broad spectrum micronutrient formula such as the ones developed in alberta in spite of the fact that we know that

48:25 we are diet first people because there's no point in continuing to eat your highly processed ultra processed stuff and then taking micronutrients on top of it with one exception and help me remember and i'll come back to that the point is that if you tell people instead to start out with a highly restrictive diet and this is kind of what julia was talking about about what you shouldn't eat right don't eat this don't eat that eat a ketogenic diet you can't have this you can't have that have a gluten-free casein-free diet you can't have dairy you can't have you know some of those diets help individual people i mean there are people who are exquisitely sensitive to gluten for example not as many people are eating a gluten-free diet but anyway

49:10 there are people who benefit from those but if people in general start out with a highly restrictive diet a large number of them are going to fail because they're hard to follow and so we recommend as step one and we're very clear in the book this is step one start by eating a whole foods mediterranean style diet whatever country you want irina but make it be true food not ultra processed stuff and then from there once you've really adjusted yourself to that you might want to try a gluten-free diet for a week or two you might want to try a casein-free what are some of the others we talked about julia vegan vegetarian wet all those you might want to try all of those for a week or two at a time

49:56 and see if you feel better but start by getting rid of the chemicals and eating a true foods diet does that help and we say that with great confidence because the data are clear from population studies in canada and in the us that half of the calories that that that the north americans are consuming are coming from ultra-processed food and so that seems like the most obvious place to start is to start by cleaning up the population's diet i i think that often the people that we see have often done that because their nutrition's on their radar and so they're not necessarily those people who are captured in those studies but we do really want to think about from a population level if we could reduce the amount of

50:43 ultra-processed food that the population was eating then that that that should have a positive effect on the mental health of of our communities right right and that's that that's a lovely and uh way to conclude the uh the interview portion we're just at eight o'clock and i saw so many comments and chats coming in on the chat line and i'd like to try to uh go through perhaps some of them um [Music] question um i see a question here from and i'm sorry if i missed some of you but i i have

51:28 one uh that is coming jumping out at me from gina rotstein in a recent publication of the walrus the journalist pointed out that mental health medical research is rarely shared between institutions data is not open or accessible given your experience in the drive from the who to recognize mental health issues as an epidemic especially in light of covid do you see this as a lack of desire to share information around mental health research changing and someone else that is writing uh sarah's writing great question uh well so

52:14 do you wanna try answering that yeah i i personally maybe because those of us who are interested in the relationship between nutrition and mental health around the world we're a pretty small group of people we tend to know each other so there's a lot of sharing um and so i don't i i'm aware of this issue and i'm aware of institutional attempts to make uh more uh raw data available in an open manner so that other people can analyze it etc and that's being done like on one of the projects that i started right now the alberta pregnancy and outcomes and nutrition the apron project but um it's not a big issue for us that i know of and julia judging from

52:59 the puzzle look on your face i think you're probably feeling similarly we share we share and work together a lot yeah so we might i i wonder if we are misunderstanding gina's question oh i'm not looking at it i was listening uh there is a question from jack ross i was struck by the health professionals and traditional health people in south korea who treat illness with specific food slash herbal modalities including specialty restaurants set up for specific disease illnesses conditions so amazing in their effects south koreans are well known for being very interested in nutrition and natural things it's

53:46 very much part of their culture but that's very interesting i hadn't heard about having restaurants that are organized around disorders that is very interesting yeah uh here is a question from nema marita how can i know that the pills supplements are from the good source that the plants use are from good quality soil um so maybe we'll probably both have something to say about this neither one of us is a natural health product manufacturer but we have worked with more than one and we keep arms length away because we don't uh respect the way the pharmaceutical company has taken over and employed

54:32 the physicians who are doing drug studies we don't want that to happen in the micronutrient research world and so um we have neither one of us has anything to do with sourcing micronutrients etc so what we rely on is um you know replication of results from companies that have pro products which have been reviewed and approved for safety and stability and purity but they don't i don't think they necessarily look at things like how it's grown and a lot of the vitamins and minerals that are in the formulas that we've studied are in fact synthetically developed not pulled not extracted from plants did you

55:20 want to add to that julia um only that when people hear the term synthetic they think that that's bad but that's not necessarily bad at all sometimes that's the only way to do it um but yeah i don't know about the sort of the plant sources of whether they're organic or whatever but it's um you know yeah it's actually one of the problems with studying botanicals and i get asked about botanicals all the time what about st john's wort what about i don't know ginger grown from this part of the world or that part of the world and unfortunately if you're studying botanicals all of the herbs and spices and so forth you don't have control over the ingredients whereas the manufacturers that are using the vitamins and minerals to make their formulas

56:05 that we have have studied uh do have control so we know that if they say there's x milligrams of something but it really is there whereas in a plant you've got a lot of chemicals together not necessarily ones that are even active i don't know if that helps lindsay mcgregor makes a very good point i recall you writing in the book that um that that hospitals need to teach cooking oh and um just basic good cooking and lindsey writes that one hospital in calgary has a collective kitchen for mental health outpatients so it is

56:51 happening and that that is a very good thing yeah which hospital um i've i've learned it's at the south health campus they have um the kitchen i didn't know about this but um it's probably gonna start in the spring but i i just had no idea but it's apparently a very lovely service and people are very well treated in it excellent i've made a pitch to a couple of uh mental health clinics which i will not name to introduce education about what micronutrients do in your brain to every single new referral for mental health and then also to try to get people together for uh cooking lessons but i have not gotten very far yet

57:39 so that's why i'm not naming them this year um with the mooc that came out and there was a need to create a um a nutrition module for our outpatients in our mental health clinic and so anyway i was able to use a lot of the videos of julia from the mooc um and what it's done is it's been able to increase the conversation and make it a little bit more intelligent and then julia's providing all that you know hard science information and she's like a little celebrity guest like bill nye the science guy or something like that in our group and then i have a more practical conversation of like hey what does this mean for you like have you considered you know if the science says that you can improve your mental health with eating

58:24 have you considered what that might mean to you so and they get to tell me how they feel about it and i think that it's really really great oh delighted to hear that story that's great that the mooc has been used that way thrilled and i just want to say lindsay is a registered dietitian and as i often point out dietitians are my heroes because you have the hardest job in the world which is to change how people eat and the all these people who are writing i call these books about nutrition and health they're often the shake your finger books because they're saying you should eat this you should eat that and they're not educating as to why and i think registered dietitians know you've got to teach the why you've

59:11 got to explain what the nutrients do if you're going to get people to change their behavior so kudos to you lindsay aren't you in rocky view though i was uh looking into uh collective kitchens and stuff and i just learned that about the south health campus okay i am just uh going through the the questions and comments uh there is some preliminary this is one from susan beale i'm just reading it as i see it there is some preliminary research happening now to look at the total nutrient content of some foods particularly grains and legumes and relate this into

59:56 the agronomic practices this is exciting and ongoing and will ultimately result in more transparency about the actual nutrition contained within certain plants that are grown in certain ways you talk about that in in the book uh the better brain that's that's a big problem i guess uh i wrote that section julia so i'll just comment first um that the agricultural people in canada and actually in other countries too have been quite taken with our work and our attempts to teach people about micronutrients and i've been a guest lecturer many times now in various and i thought harvey dan was

1:00:42 in the group oh is harvey on on the line okay so baby's gone now i don't know but it's hard to scroll through the whole thing but i didn't see he was there i i would like to say that uh give him a shout out harvey dan who is in winnipeg has taught me i think almost everything that i know and is not responsible for what i don't know about agriculture and practices and how the problems of the soil etc he is the one who gave me the 40 sample the assay results from 40 samples across western canada which uh is that in the final version of the book julie i think it is i think that's that's we if we see occasionally that we don't know what's in our own book irena just before it was published that we were told we had to cut 10 to 15

1:01:28 000 words and i sometimes forget what ended up on the cutting room floor but i think it it is in the final version that we showed that that it was just shocking this random sample of soil assays across western canada had uh inadequate amounts of virtually every mineral that that we looked at there was only magnesium maybe was fairly okay and now i lost where i started out so harvey uh about four years ago started holding an annual conference on nutrient density because the people who grow crops you know god bless them it's a hard life and we need them to keep doing what they're doing but they measure their success in terms of quantity they do not look

1:02:15 at enough at the minerals in the soil and they rarely look at the nutrient density of the food they produce which then goes into our stomachs and the there is good reason to believe that the nutrient density has been going down down down and harvey is still working on that in a very large project that's going on between the us and canada so i think i told you more than you wanted to know about crops didn't i irena no i found it to be an interesting interesting topic in the book uh someone had a very interesting question sebastian badara uh is asking about how much meat

1:03:00 should we be eating per day uh well yeah and i'm i'm just trying to find we actually said in the book go ahead bonnie oh the number of milligrams well it depends on if you're male female child adult etc how much protein you should get the fact is there is no requirement sebastian for the amount of meat that you eat because a lot of people don't eat any meat right they get they might be pescetarians and be getting their protein from fish or eggs or whatever um and the number of milligrams of protein did you find no we said it in servings in the book it was three to four servings per week of lean red meat was part of the mediterranean diet right so we the that recommendation came based on the smiles

1:03:47 trial and the replication since then that that was the recommendation that they were giving the people who were struggling with depression and trying to get them to eat certain you know servings of foods and so that was the recommendation around meat um you know fish was at least two servings per week um and then there's you know all the servings of the fruits and the vegetables and the number of eggs recommended that you should be consuming so that's in the book around that but of course as bonnie's saying that not all people obviously are going to eat meat um but that was a little bit of meat the research shows and it's just with just the messengers here is that a little bit of meat does seem to be good for people who are struggling with mental health issues and that may very well be because of some of the nutrients that are more bioavailable in meat than in plant sources and specifically that would be your irons your zinc and

1:04:33 your b12 that are just easier for you to get out of those sources it's much more har it's harder out of the vegetarian vegan sources so but that doesn't mean everyone thrives on a you know has to have meat it just some people are doing amazing on vegan or vegetarian and veg that's fantastic but then i've seen quite a few people over the over the last few years where they're they're vegan vegetarian and they're really really struggling and so that's when you need to kind of figure out is this is you know well first of all it might not just be might not be nutrition that's contributing to their mental health issues but it may well be something that's contributing that's just making it more difficult for their brain to function and it may be that they have genetic differences um that's that's that may be relevant for the omega-3s um specifically that some people can't

1:05:19 convert ala to dha or epa as easily as others and the the mental health benefits of the omega-3 seem to be more more highly correlated with the epa and dha which is just harder to get from a vegan plant-based source the best place to get your epa dha is from fish yeah there's a there's a an important question that i really feel we need to answer and i think it might be a good uh question for us to kind of wrap things up on and uh and i didn't have a chance to cover it in my questions or in my comments but one of the things uh you i think it's an important takeaway

1:06:05 and this question is it's by christy mayer i'm not sure if i'm pronouncing the last name correctly um and you write that you really should not be getting off if if you have significant uh mental health uh mental health uh challenges you shouldn't be getting off your medications and that you should be working with your um with your psychiatric team uh and and so this this question is with so many people currently taking meds for mental health what are your recommendations to navigate and transition to a micronutrient approach if our medical system is geared toward a

1:06:51 pharmaceutical solution where is the best place to start this journey that's a great question christine i like the way you worded it i just found it on the chat line it's impo for those of you don't realize it's impossible for julie and i to read the chat questions while we're talking so i'm trying to catch up and anyway you talk about transition i mean the number one thing to know is that if you improve your diet you might start feeling better enough that you can decrease your medication there you should also ask yourself you know julie and i are not anti-medication that would be stupid i mean it would be like physicians being anti-nutrition right but anyways you know we're more educated than that we know that some people benefit from

1:07:37 medication it would be silly to be anti-medication but in our vision for the future chapter 12 in the book we talk about the stages to go through and and i think that you would find what you want in there but i'll summarize it a little bit here and that is first of all ask yourself if the medications you're taking are making you feel better i can't believe what just happened again the other day talking to a friend who said i didn't know he was taking medications i said oh what are you taking he told me the two medications i said are they helping any and i got the classic answer well i really don't think so but i'm afraid to stop them and i'm afraid to go through withdrawal stopping them because as we know now a lot of them are highly addictive

1:08:22 so i respect that but you can improve the way you feel by improving your diet and as you feel better you will be able to decrease some medications if you want to do that now as for doing that you can also do it of course with micronutrients in pill form supplementary micronutrients if you turn to your psychiatric team i can i mean i agree in philosophy that's who we should turn to our mental health team but you will unfortunately certainly in alberta still find i would say over 90 percent of the time from what i hear that team saying oh no no don't take vitamins and minerals they don't do any good and

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