Could boosting your mood be as simple as changing what’s on your plate?
NHS doctor Rupy Aujla is the founder of The Doctor’s Kitchen, the platform where he promotes the effects of healthy eating. He is now also working with healthcare charity Nuffield Health to promote the benefits of having a connected approach to our health in 2022.
“Connected health is about people taking proactive, holistic steps to stay physically and mentally healthy,” says Dr. Rupy. “It is an approach that recognizes the need for medications and therapies along with self-care in terms of nutrition and sleep. This approach should be taken, especially after a pandemic, to minimize the risk of long-term health problems, rather than relying on reactive care.”
In Dr. Rupy’s book Eat To Beat Illness, he explores the topic of nutritional psychiatry, which is the impact of nutrition on our mental health.
“It’s basically how we can eat to prevent mental health problems like moodiness, anxiety, and even severe depression,” he says. “Several studies demonstrate the ability of nutrition to positively impact mental health, and we need to have a greater appreciation of the medical impacts of eating well.”
In 2017, the SMILES trial, the first of its kind to investigate the link between food and mood, found that those in the dietary intervention group had a much greater reduction in their depressive symptoms over the three-month period, in comparison with those in the dietary intervention group. social support group.
“This showed that within 12 weeks of dietary change, the subject’s mental health could be improved by changing their diets to one that was largely unprocessed, high in fiber, included more plants, and was generally Mediterranean-focused.” says Dr. Rupy.
‘In 2019, this was followed by a large meta-analysis of 45,000 participants; results showed that dietary interventions significantly reduced depression and anxiety, particularly in women.’
Dr. Uma Naidoo is one of the world’s leading figures in nutritional psychiatry. She is known as Harvard’s expert on food and mood and has authored the book This Is Your Brain On Food, in which she details how food contributes to our mental health and how a healthy diet can help treat and prevent a wide range of mental illness. range of psychological and cognitive disorders. health problems, from ADHD to anxiety, depression and OCD.
“I grew up in the Ayurvedic tradition, which treats the body and mind as a complete interconnected system,” says Dr. Uma, one of the scientists behind the wellness supplement brand. Karmacist.
Now modern science is revealing how true that is. We can clearly see that the brain and the gut are intimately connected and work synergistically. The nutrients we eat profoundly impact our molecular and cellular processes and directly affect our brain and mental health.’
The Mediterranean diet, for example, now has data to support that it’s not only good for heart disease and diabetes, but also depression.
“A 2019 research trial moved more than 150 people with self-reported depression onto a Mediterranean-style diet supplemented with fish oil,” she says.
‘It led to significant reductions in depression and improved mental health after three months, improvements that were still maintained after six months.
‘The Mediterranean diet is associated with a high consumption of vegetable foods, such as vegetables, fruits, legumes, nuts, whole grains, extra virgin olive oil and a moderate consumption of fish. With the exception of olive oil and fish, all other foods are excellent sources of fiber, which feed the good microbes in your gut.
We know to avoid sweets and processed foods, which are high in sugar, salt, and trans fat, but the more we learn about the gut-brain axis and how interconnected our diets and minds are, the more we should consider eating for health. mental
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