Why Nutrition is the Foundation of Mental Health - Dr. Bonnie Kaplan & Dr. Julia Rucklidge - HPP 86

0:00 hi bonnie and julia welcome to the show it's a pleasure to be here thanks very much for your interest yeah we're super excited about this particular episode because as i was saying to you both just a little bit before unfortunately nutrition doesn't tend to be one of the first things a lot of mental health providers are really leaning into in terms of trying to get somewhere what the symptoms are seeing um and there's some that do but many don't and and it might not even be the last thing they do um to try and help people in terms of really looking at whether it's deficiencies or just diet

0:45 and you know this link between nutrition and mental health and mental illness and so i thought we could just start off hearing from both of you just with every all the research you've done over the years uh why is it so key that nutrition is right at the forefront of the conversation when we're looking at somebody that's not really well mentally and is really struggling why is nutrition right at the front of that conversation go ahead julia okay i think one of the things that i learned from writing the better brain with bonnie was that we had to delve into a lot of the research around eating habits of north americans and what stunned me when i would really kind of immerse

1:32 myself in that was that less than 20 percent of the north american population is meeting the targets for their fruit and vegetable consumption and that about 50 of the caloric intake is from ultra-processed food so when you look at that in itself you need to you you realize it sort of hits you on the head that that's where you need to start is that people are simply not eating foods that are nutrient dense so ultra processed food is is high in calories but very clearly low in its nutrient it's micronutrient content it's high in your macronutrients your fats your proteins and your carbohydrates but really is not hitting even the rda the recommended dietary allowance for

2:18 many of the key nutrients that are essential for our brain health and so that alone says we need to start there we need to change this ratio we need to be increasing the the whole food consumption of the population and reducing and personally eliminating the consumption of ultra-processed foods yeah thanks julia that's that's a good answer i'm totally in agreement bonnie you want to fill in any gaps there or any additional pieces a couple of very related pieces we should stop calling ultra processed food food food is defined as what we ingest to build and maintain our cells and as julia said the micronutrients that are needed for

3:04 building and and some of the macronutrients uh needed for building and maintaining ourselves just not there in that that stuff that ultra processed stuff and i'm also shocked by that and it's particularly just this one other comment about how relevant this is right now nutrition is the foundation of our physical and mental resilience and that has been known for millennia i mean we know that when people are starving they are more vulnerable to every kind of infection ever heard of covid you know and it's not a matter of one nutrient at a time it's having all of the nutrients in our brains and bodies all the time for our resilience

3:51 and that that was shown very well for mental health in the starvation experiments from the university of minnesota published in 1950 so we've known for 70 years that people who are reducing that was an experiment with 36 healthy men reducing their nutrient and caloric intake by 50 percent and what you end up with they're all the symptoms of depression anxiety and even inattention which we associate with adhd so this is really the key thing to focus on right and from that study i'm glad you mentioned that bonnie uh it sounds like the finding the symptoms that were found uh way back when

4:36 70 years ago are some of the very same symptoms that you see that you have seen in in terms of response to uh broad broads from micronutrient treatments i wonder if you could speak to that in terms of what you two have seen in your research for our audience here you may not be familiar with the studies you've published i'll give one generality julian and maybe you can chime in with some of your data okay so um if you look across all the studies that have been published that involve dietary intervention and micronutrient supplementation there the theme the really consistent theme is improved mood regulation

5:21 and so this is this is a really trying time we're all going through and so mood regulation in whatever form is something that's a really a very worthy goal julia the thing i might add is that the research that we've done i always like to look at it as proof of principle because you you we don't want to supplement the whole population or certainly we don't want to we don't see that as being the solution uh but what we are able to do that you can't do with diet studies is that you can have those very controlled experiments where you can you know that that that the science you know that the the medical community will believe i mean we can have big debates about

6:07 whether we want to just rely on controlled studies with placebos but what they prove is that the nutrients are important it puts nutrition back on the map in a way that you can't do with the dietary studies because the dietary studies you can never adequately control for a whole host of the other variables and the other factors that can influence why people get better with a double-blind placebo-controlled trial you can so we really do with the research that has been done and there are you know dozens and dozens of controlled placebo-controlled trials looking at the idea of a broad spectrum of nutrients as an alleviator of psychiatric and psychological symptoms

6:52 and so many of them i've looked at you know counted it and it's about 80 percent of them are positive and that's not a bad number in terms of the wealth of the all the rcts that have been conducted and it all points to the idea that nutrients matter nutrients are relevant to the brain and if you said that 10 years ago definitely 20 years ago you would be laughed at that's right yeah and also keep in mind that um those positive studies that means that the group data showed positive benefit of the micronutrients and of course some people respond very very strongly there are always people who do not benefit from taking micronutrients but i wanted to say one more thing about the

7:38 the dietary studies um they're they're very hard to do and the problem is uh and i've seen this in some of the work that i've done is that people really are not honest uh you know in a diet record you might forget to mention that your morning snack was a candy bar right but you sure remember to mention your healthy oatmeal with blueberries and that's or whatever it's is it intentional deception or not i don't know but some of the dietary researchers are totally frustrated about that it's a real problem let's go this kind of leads me to a more macro kind of philosophical question about so we're basically talking about diet which is you know kind of under this you

8:24 are what you eat concept and um the food we put into our mouths and then we're also here talking about supplementation micronutrient supplementation and i'm wondering more on a philosophical level about all the you know information you've gathered over the years like first of all like what most matters here like where do we start are we starting with diet are we starting with supplements and like are we doing both um is there any way of thinking about this practically in terms of getting well if we're suffering quite a bit in our you know in ourselves mentally and you know just kind of you know what do you do here uh okay i'll start julia um in our book we talk about three steps and absolutely the number one step is to

9:11 get people to get rid of the ultra processed stuff and to improve their dietary intake but that is not enough for everyone and there we discuss in in our book uh the reasons for individual differences and actually just two weeks ago another article came out in jama neurology showing or identifying 24 diseases where there is an inherited need for an unusual amount of the b vitamins a e and another vitamin like compound in those diseases and they've inherited that need and if you give them the nutrients at the at the time when this is discovered and early on in the disease process it can be very helpful we think that a

9:56 lot of that individual difference is very relevant to mental health do you want to take it from there julia sure i mean i just want to add to what you're saying there um and something that we've observed in our our research to date is that uh with the especially with the resilience studies that i've been involved in or after the earthquakes here um with bonnie after a flood and then more recently after a a hideous mosque shooting that happened in christchurch which is that's that those clinical observations have just are just about to be published is that when you when you um capture someone at the time when they

10:42 are are their stress levels really accelerate and go up we can have an enormous impact by giving additional nutrients at that stage and the way we conceptualize that and understand it is via something that bruce ames and mccann put forward in 2009 was this idea of the triage theory which is that when you're under an enormous amount of stress you're an immediate stressor the fight flight response always wins and it all your nutritional needs will get diverted to the fight flight response and that makes sense because of survival if that didn't happen then we would all be dead and we wouldn't have sort of survived as a species but the the downside of that is that if your stressor just keeps going like

11:28 with earthquakes we had these just constant constant aftershocks every single day triggering your bite flight response then that over time you can see that a whole bunch of other bodily functions are going to be are going to suffer like your mood your ability to regulate your mood or your concentration your energy so then we we gave them additional nutrients and that seemed to really really um change the course of their their recovery very much better than those people who didn't receive nutrients and so for me that tells me you really it's as you know what bonnie's saying about the get in early that's what i think is the best thing for micronutrients to have the quickest

12:14 and most impactful effect is to get in early and it's too bad that you know this kind of information isn't well known in terms of covet is that there's people who have been in lockdown for a year and that that just ongoing stress associated with so many different factors is wearing people down and the recovery and being able to replenish the nutrients i think it's going to take a lot longer that's just my hunch that's right actually in that context or i i don't know if you'll want to put this in here or somewhere else but i always bring up what i've been calling lately the unsung hero in the resilience uh literature that julia was talking about in our our recent article i i'm hoping attracts a

13:00 lot of attention because it puts together all these studies she mentioned uh post earthquake post flood post mass shooting but in the flood study in alberta our one of our comparators was b complex and um there is a literature on b complex uh for reducing it i usually say reducing stress but you know we should be saying improving coping or improving resilience that's what it's about and i've in countless situations i've had friends like one who was widowed recently who knew she was how can you overreact to losing your husband in 50 years but she knew she was not regaining her control adequately

13:46 she's a psychologist right and a single b complex taken every morning with food has a tremendous effect in our flood study there was no difference between the benefits from a broad spectrum formula compared to b complex um julia hasn't didn't use a b complex in the earthquake studies no i did i did oh you did sorry what did you find we found the similar effects but that when we when we grill down into some of the sort of other measures what we found was that those who were taking the broad spectrum were more likely to report to us that they were much to very much improved and it was twice as many people were reporting that compared

14:32 to the b complex but when we looked at the measure of stress there were no differences between baraka which was the b complex that we used and the broad spectrum right but it is the unsung hero is very easy i think in terms of covid so many people who don't have pre-existing um crises that it's not a single earthquake it's just ongoing grinding stress that they could benefit from taking just to be complex in the morning that makes a lot of sense i mean in regards to i mean i think in the general public we think it's a no-brainer to think about uh cycle no no pun intended no brainer but it's a it's it's an obvious thing to think

15:17 about um psychological resiliency or physical resiliency in terms of like um if i want to go run a marathon i have to build up my resilience over or have to train over time but what i think is missing and what i love about what you're bringing in the better brain book is this issue of nutritional resiliency inside of a human body and i think that um it's a it's a really important new direction for all of us to be talking about is how do we keep the levels um adequate so that our resilience doesn't suffer under additional stress and you know it's relatively common

16:04 practice amongst holistic medical providers to say well you know you need to have um you need to make sure your vitamin d levels are high so you're not going to be as vulnerable to the common flu or to these you know stress stressful events may you may get a cold and we know even in the covid conversation that people with low vitamin d are having a much harder time with the infection and and we see you know studies are happening in that but in terms of nutrition it's it's so interesting to me that this has not been um an area that more people are looking at and i'm curious what what your thoughts are about why this remains such a hidden

16:52 factor in the conversation amongst providers oh i just made up a slump for this and the first part of the slide i'll comment on the second part is julia's contribution and it's why are people dismissive of vitamins and minerals and the first reason is education education education people and by people i mean lay people and i mean all the way up through physicians are not taught what nutrients do in the brain all we're taught about is eat a balanced diet so that you have strong muscles and bones and that's been true in my entire lifetime nobody is saying by the way your brain metabolism is dependent upon cofactors which are called vitamins and minerals

17:37 and that you need billion and billions of times every minute you need those in your brain so education education education so secondly we tend to distrust things we don't know about and then third julia talk about the media as you make a wonderful slide with all those headlines when does the media cover nutrition and mental and health oh yes well i mean they usually cover it in a negative way um and that vitamins are killing us and that's the usually the the only types of stories that they like to report on but i think to add to what bonnie said was that the the the you know dietitians are the ones that we would typically go to to to get advice on what we should be

18:24 eating and i i think i i feel a little bit let down to be honest by dietitians i hope that's not going to offend anybody out there and i'm sure there's some wonderful dietitians out there but they just typically say you know as long as you eat a balanced diet then you don't need to be worried about taking in additional micronutrients or concerned about that just a balanced diet but when you kind of grill down on what do they mean by a balanced diet i honestly think that they're just focusing on fats carbs and and proteins and i was you know the in terms of uh recently i was talking to a reporter who said yeah i i looked at my diet and you know struggling with he's the guy who's been struggling with depression for years and i you know i now know what to do i look at labels and i look at the sugar

19:09 content and i'm like oh my god you have totally got it wrong um that's if you're looking at labels then you don't get what a balanced diet is because you shouldn't be looking at labels because you'd be eating whole foods with no labels so the fact that that kind of that's what people are doing is that they think they need to look at the labels and how much saturated fat is in there and there's star ratings in new zealand i know they don't have them in north america but they really grind on me and they in the uk they have um uh traffic light systems but the same idea it's about being low in sodium low in fat low in calories um and what's the last one low and i'm trying to think of um

19:55 what would be the last one huh did you say sugars low in sugar there you go low in sugar and then one star rating for having one nutrient in there so a cardboard box would get you a four-star rating and that doesn't mean you need to eat it so that is so wrong that our our these the advice and the way that we're helping people guide their way around which ultra-processed food to eat is based on what's not in the food rather than what is and so we need to completely reverse that and change the way we understand food and the food industry has a lot to do to answer for in terms of the mixed

20:41 and bad messages that have gone out there to the public yeah and i mean it's it's quite clear that first of all we're facing a massive mental health crisis um across the planet right now the the amount of mental health disorders that we're facing is is pretty incredible and and those are the ones we know about in terms of people actually you know get getting diagnosed and um and then the food crisis is what i would call it which is that um it seems evident to me at this point that one of the critical issues one of them there's others one of the critical issues of why there's so many unwell people is food which is obviously both of your

21:27 work is looking at nutrients and i guess i'm also wondering about so with supplementation micronutrient supplementation like if people don't deal with the way they're eating is that going to help them enough if they don't actually deal with the way they're eating but they just start popping some supplements hmm don't jump in first okay i think one of the things that we have to do and be very mindful of when we run the clinical trials and these very controlled trials is that we never talk to people about their diet we do some you know some assessment of their diet fairly basic assessment of you know number of fruit and vegetable uh servings they eat per day that kind of

22:13 thing but we don't really just focus we don't focus on the diet we don't make comments when they they come to the lab with coca-cola or with you know a kentucky fried chicken we don't say anything that's that's the mantra in my lab so but many people when they try the micronutrients and are eating that kind of diet there is some for some of them not all of them but sometimes this kind of like a eureka moment of oh my god i feel so much better taking these nutrients maybe i should look at my diet and so when that happens it's a it's a it's wonderful because they probably then don't need as much or even any micronutrients if they can change their diet for some they may need to continue to take the

22:59 micronutrients and i know a number of people who had fallen actually quite a few people who would fall in that camp but it may mean they don't need to take as much and that has to be a good thing um so i hope that answers that question i think it answered us a lot and i i shared with bonnie before you came on here i i've been taking daily essential nutrients for years uh and true hope for that and um you know my um this is one person's experience but these have been very helpful for me um very helpful with a lot of mental health symptoms and i also noticed that i was slower to change my diet i was one of those people i wasn't the you know coca-cola fast food person

23:46 since i was a teenager but i was much slower to actually really ask the questions of well what will happen if i keep refining my diet over and over um and you know i'm wondering just like your thoughts here it's it's so um at least for me and a lot of people i've worked with it's it's it's definitely a lowering fruit to be able to go take that supplement um in terms of okay i'll take it and and for some people that's even hard to comply with that especially when you're taking you know 20 supplements a day or something but it's a lower hanging fruit to do that versus like changing core behaviors and cravings and all day long and yeah i'm just wondering you know what's the the drawbacks to

24:31 just relying on the supplements only and with this food crisis that we have here going on because i again i'm a big fan of the supplements because they've changed my life and and but what else do we need to be thinking about here around food so there is a drawback for people to think they can solve all their problems with vitamins and minerals in pill form and that is that you know they're they're getting maybe 30 vitamins and minerals and that's great that's a broad spectrum and we know these are very important but what about the like relate what's the latest estimate on phytonutrients that's in fruits and vegetables twelve hundred two thousand i see numbers tossed around very few of them even have names very very few of them

25:17 have known functions um you know we we have to have these things the way they're meant to arrive on our plate and that is in the whole fruits and vegetables now that brings us to something else we cover in our book though and that is uh half of a chapter is on the problem of the the microbiome not of our guts but the microbiome of the earth and how this is a huge problem and factory farming uh is has really had a very adverse effect i don't know if you want to get into this in the podcast but more and more of our agricultural experts are becoming aware of the importance of re-mineralizing the soil and uh maybe

26:03 just for this level of podcasts where we can't show pictures at all just leave your audience with this bit of knowledge which is i don't think most people know how we get our vitamins and minerals plants absorb minerals from the soil if they are there that's the important thing the plants then synthesize vitamins from those minerals and also from water and sun and so forth right i'm oversimplifying it but we cannot synthesize minerals we cannot synthesize vitamins except for a very small amount of some b vitamins in our gut and even then we aren't doing it it's the microbiota that are synthesizing it so we are dependent upon getting minerals and vitamins for brain function by eating plants that have been grown

26:51 in healthy soil or eating the animals that have come along and eaten the plants so that's a very important thing that we we explain so that people become more aware of and support agricultural experts who are trying to improve the soil and get rid of chemical treatment and instead do natural kinds of ways of growing food i'll just add to that i recently interviewed well a good colleague of mine but for a an online course that is i've i've heard you know created and um ian shot really eloquently explained the role of glyphosate in reducing the mineral content of soil i had thought about it as the as the effect that the glyphosate

27:37 was having on the plant but actually the way he describes it is that the glyphosate gets into the soil it binds to minerals and then and then all you have to do is have the rain and it washes it away and so that to me was was you know kind of heart-wrenching around wow these things that we're putting on every you know us plants all over um the world are having this effect and really detrimental effect on the nutrient density of our food well just to riff off of the glyphosate theme it's a real pet peeve of mine i'm glad you brought that up julia in addition to chelating the minerals in the soil it also as you probably know interrupts the shikimate pathway in the plants

28:22 and one of the interesting things that's not well known um about glyphosate is that it also blocks the shikimay pathway in the microbiota in the god and the shikamate pathway for some microbiota in the human gut is instrumental in producing enough tryptophan for us to then absorb enough tryptophan to then have precursors for serotonin and melatonin and so forth and so on so um it's a and there are other issues with glyphosate that are even you know beyond that as well but i think it's an important pathway for our audience to know about specifically around chelating the minerals in the soil but also deeply uh disturbing tryptophan issues

29:10 and i think that in inside you know inside the human organism and our ability to absorb uh tryptophan um it's interesting that um in my practice as an integrative psychiatrist when i encourage people to make dietary change and specifically trying to lower glyphosate levels in their system what i usually do i usually start with eliminating american wheat from their diet because as you probably know glyphosate um had a second uh sort of boom in terms of its um uh worth to monsanto which is that it desiccates uh wheat berries and so because american weed is 30 times uh

29:56 is genetically modified to have at least 30 times more uh gluten than heirloom wheat from europe it's very greasy and it um interferes with the combines that harvest it so it from a practical sense it makes sense to dissicate wheat berries and because glyphosate works to do that they douse the american wheat with glyphosate uh not as a wheat killer but to make the berries drier for harvest and so people who eat american weed are getting a massive dose of glyphosate that they don't even know is going on so what what's interesting about it and i'm trying to get to the point briefly here is that when people stop eating american wheat often their anxiety levels drop tremendously very quickly and i think my sense and

30:42 this is only a hunch from a clinician and not a research result by any means but i think that the tryptophan levels are coming up for those folks because as we restore the the microbiota uh and we replace uh disabled microbiota whose chickamay pathways have been um blocked by glyphosate and we replace them by healthy microbiota then we can now make more tryptophan we can absorb it and and i think we see symptomatic change from simply just from that and there's a lot of other factors involved but i think it's a it's an interesting thing when you start going down the rabbit hole and looking at these uh biochemical pathways and how things work oh exactly and i mean they are there to solve problems but they just have created a whole bunch

31:27 of new ones that we then have to try and kind of then solve that problem and so it just goes on and on doesn't it i i miss some of what you said there but um i think that it relates to something i often say in lectures which is that um there's good reason to believe that a lot of people's gluten sensitivity is in fact a reaction to the glyphosate and there's now one animal study i can't remember if we got this into the book or not julia i think we did that shows that pretty clearly what would you say um kind of practically about shopping for food with knowing our soils depleted

32:15 um knowing that there's a ton of ultra processed foods all over the supermarket um what's our what's our best chance at getting the nutrients we need when we walk into a supermarket you want to start julia i could start sure i mean i think that what i said earlier which is don't eat you know try to stay away from packaged foods and that's not entirely realistic because there are some things that are in packaged foods in packages that would be perfectly fine like i don't know i'm thinking of maybe rice or some pastas might be you know perfectly fine so but at least um looking at the ingredients on in a packaged food and seeing how many are in there and when you start to have a lot of those e numbers then that might be a

33:01 sort of a clue that it's going to be more ultra processed and having emulsifiers and you know preservatives and artificial colors and in that food uh eating whole food in season um would be a great start going to your local markets uh maybe into the you know joining a local market around growing food that's happening a lot more around the world um i i know bonnie's a big fan and i'm i'm in total agreement with her but she's the one who who often will would say that first which is eat your legumes you know go for your beans and your lentils because they are so rich in your in proteins and get providing you with fiber and nutrients that that would be those would be really good staple foods

33:46 um canned food if you have to is not a is not necessarily a bad thing we talk about that in the book that that's a canning is a form of processing but it can it can conserve the nutrients of that food like your tomatoes for example and that's a really cheap option as well because often people are looking to see how can they eat well economically um bonnie do you want to jump in i know um frozen fruit vegetables would be another great way forward around uh and then again that is in a package but that's a great way of preserving the nutrients because they're picked fresh and then frozen yeah freezing and canning can be very low amount of processing um actually tomatoes in jars are

34:33 better than in cans because you you do get a lot of so and also the dried beans and legumes are better than in the cans just because you get a lot of sodium in the canned stuff but if you put it in a colander and you rinse it off then you've gotten rid of most of the sodium so um but you know michael pollan's recommendations uh eat more plants um i don't know if he was the one who generated the idea of shopping around the outside of the grocery store um but that's a really good one don't buy anything that your grandparents wouldn't recognize as food that's a really good guideline you know i sometimes think about what our ancestors ancestors would think if they went into

35:18 a a 7-11 or something there's nothing there that's food you know by their criteria um but you should i mean also eating organic can often be very good organic growers tend to be better stewards of their soil even though we were disappointed in one analysis where we compared two adjacent fields in canada one organic and one not and found no difference in the mineral content but in general organic farmers are better stewards of the soil so that's something to look at um you know we skipped the really big issue though we went right down we drilled down very quickly into the nitty-gritty but the number one thing is learn to cook um cooking is not stuffing something

36:05 into a microwave is learn to cook from scratch so that's really important and for the clinicians out there on my own website i have i think it's eight tips for clinicians including how to talk to people about what they eat because i think a lot of clinicians worry that they're going to sound judgmental and so there are ways to introduce the topic but um uh pause for a minute because i just lost my train of thought the eight tips i'm just going to say something you can read my mind usually julia what was i thinking well it's in our article that's just come out which we've written directly for psychologists i have it's the proof sitting here right now which is nutrition provides the essential

36:50 foundation for optimizing mental health and that's going out to clinical no any psychologist obviously but i think the target audience was child clinical psychologist but really excited about having put this together with bonnie and with another colleague jenny johnston because it is going i really hope it gives that confidence to psychologists that they can talk about some food because we got so many comments back from the reviewers no we can't possibly tell psychologists to do this you're like but psychologists tell their clients to exercise and you know other lifestyle changes why is it that diet is such a taboo thing for psychologists to talk about anybody should be able to talk about the really basic idea which is eat real food i don't think you have to be a

37:37 trained dietitian to say that and thank you that's exactly the point i i wanted to make is i often tell people there is no reason nowadays that a clinic would not be educating every any mental health clinic would be not be educating their clients as to the importance of nutrition and maybe generating or organizing some cooking classes even or sharing of recipes or and one of the points we make in the book and and i often do this in my lectures is that it's been shown very clearly and individual people have proven it you save money people think eating a whole foods diet means you have to you know you have to be rich for it it's only true if you're going to be

38:22 eating steak and lobster every week but if you turn you if you learn to cook and turn your attention to those dried beans and legumes you will save money absolutely that's been mine sorry there's recipes in the books yes will did you did you do anything oh absolutely i mean we we we have pardon me did you do any cost comparisons oh for me it was just incredible how much uh we saved by uh by shopping locally and and making simple uh fresh meals ourselves and i think it's it's kind of um [Music] it's like you said it's a thing you have to get into and you have to appreciate for me it's um cooking is a really

39:08 relaxing experience uh when i get home from work and my wife and i connect and after i say hello to the puppy and he can calm down we have we have a small puppy at home right now but after that i can start chopping vegetables and it feels um like a really good way to ground myself after being in my head all day long so i i think i think there's a lot to um understanding the value of the the ritual and the habit of cooking for for people who can um find their way into a different it's a big lifestyle change as keith mentioned but it's so worthwhile on so many levels yeah well i'm wondering um keith and i like to invite our guests

39:56 on the podcast as we um as we wrap up uh we we like to ask the same question to each guest we have and we're curious we haven't done a co-interview with um with two guests before but we'd love to offer uh each of you an opportunity to respond here um that if you had a billboard that everyone in the world would see one time in their lifetime and you could put a couple sentences on that billboard what would you like them to see okay i have one idea nutrition is the foundation of our mental and physical resilience thank you beautiful julia um i'm

40:41 thinking of the end of my tedx talk nutrition matters and um goodness what else did i say nutrition matters um what did i say at the end of the fight i don't want to wait 264 years we don't want to wait that's right i don't think they would get that one on a billboard would they until we get uh serious about the impact of food on our brain though in order to get serious about i have to goodness this is embarrassing i can't remember it unfortunately we're going to be able to edit it that's right yeah well just take a second you know slow down and see what you want to say um

41:31 may i add another one you may or may not decide to include it but i've often said that every child i worked in a department of pediatrics in all the years that i was in business before retirement every child should have the right to be treated first with nutrition before they're ever exposed with their little developing brains to medication that isn't to say that medication isn't relevant but nutrition and exercise and lifestyle should be primary treatments medication should be the supplement and that's why i try not to refer to

42:20 nutrients in pill form as supplements because it's medication which should be the supplement or seen as the supplement if it's needed that's great thanks bonnie julia did you come up with something um i'm i'm being terrible and looking up i think i knew what it was but i'm just going to just get the the review reminded that's great go for it go for it if i can while she's looking and let me just ask you julia referred to the fact she's just recorded an entire online course a mooc which is going to go up probably in march yes uh and she has a tedx talk i'd like you know there is my website she has her facebook page can we put resources like

43:07 that somewhere so let's actually i'm glad you brought that up so let's actually um we'll come back to julia for that last answer but let's reverse this okay let's get your answer and then we're going to go back to what you just said bonnie i think it would be i i think what i said at the end of my tedx talk is pretty accurate and might be helpful as a billboard i'm not sure it would be a billboard but whatever is that reminder um nutrition matters and if we're really ready to get serious about mental health it's time to get serious about the critical role played by nutrition great thanks beautiful thanks julian so how um this you could both answer this separately bonnie and julia um anything you want people to be aware of about your work or things you're up to or your book or anything ways you know for people to

43:54 reach you that type of stuff why don't you go first julie because i'm going to talk about my fun oh okay right well there's the book which is coming out in april so we are super excited about this we hope we're hoping this is going to be a bestseller um and the the mooc that i put together uh would be i hope is a really great resource for not just uh the it's geared towards the public but i really go grill down and i interview wonderful experts for it like bonnie's comes onto the mooc and like the toxicologist professor ian shaw and i have a nutritionist a clinical nutritionist uh walker walk us around a market so that you know in talking about different types of foods and what we should be thinking about when we're

44:39 when we're buying foods in a market i do a cooking class with an italian chef on the mediterranean diet and um you know it's i've i made knocky last night again so um it has had an effect on me which is great the secret that you know you don't probably have to put on the podcast is that my husband is the cook in our house so um and and uh that's been the case uh for for a long time uh but i'm cooking more as a consequence of this book so bonnie will be yeah we eat great food but he does all the cooking or he has me julia do you want to define mooc for the listeners that would not know what that

45:25 is sorry say that again define mooc mass online open access course uh there are it's a it's a platform called edx and it's an american platform and it's so easy to find it if you go onto the edx platform and just look for wreckledge and mental health and nutrition but i can certainly um yeah we'll put that in the show notes yeah that's great but it's a it's a six week course it's free it's free to audit it so all these videos i spent like oh my gosh days and days and days doing these videos last year finally they've been all edited they're all quite short five to ten minutes and walks you through the essentially walks us through the book but in a in a visual format rather than in a written format

46:10 so if people prefer that format then it might be a really good resource and um yeah we got out there in in new zealand uh you know i don't know if you know that we're really lucky here because we can pretty much live a a normal you know non-lockdown life so we gotta we got out into locate into lots of different locations to do the filming great that's so great and what about you bonnie is there some things you want people to be aware of right well i try to keep a lot of this information on my website which is bonnie g pardon me i try to keep a lot of this information on my website which is bonnie j kaplan.com you have to have the middle initial j because bonnie kaplan's a common name as it turns out um

46:56 and also one of the things on that website is relevant to what i spend a lot of my time doing in retirement which is um i i set up two charitable funds in 2015. their donor advised funds one is in the us and one is in canada and i've raised if you treat the two dollars as being the same which is not the case but it's easiest raised around 900 000 in in these five plus years all of it is distributed we're always looking more for more we're fun we have funded a little bit of research that julia has done we have funded um a number of clinical trials going on in the u.s and until the federal

47:43 funding agencies wake up to the importance that you know it's not just vitamin d that's important right people glom onto these magic bullets but it's important to provide the brain with all of the vitamins and minerals that we know function as cofactors even nimh is not yet willing to fund that work and so that's why i set up these funds and if anybody is feeling like they want a charitable tax receipt um contact me i assume you'll be giving our email addresses out absolutely well that's great bonnie thanks for sharing that we'll make sure that's in the show notes yeah well thank you both so much for being on the show thank you thanks for your questions this is fun to

48:29 talk to you