Eating These Foods Can Decrease Symptoms of Depression and Anxiety

Episode Transcript

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

Hi everyone, welcome to the show, I am Dr. Nicole, and on today’s episode, we’re talking about the connection between food, depression, anxiety, and mental health in general. The saying “You are what you eat” is so true when it comes to mental health and brain function for our kids and for us. I know that many of you are aware of the importance of diet when it comes to supporting your child’s health and improving symptoms in the areas of things like learning, attention, mood behavior, all of those things. But did you know that there are specific foods that actually provide the most benefit for our brain? It doesn’t have to be super difficult to work them into our kids’ meals, our family’s meals, and our snacks each day. So to provide us with some information and insight on this topic, I’ve invited Dr. Drew Ramsey to the show, let me tell you a bit about him.

Dr. Drew Ramsey is a psychiatrist, author, farmer, teacher, and advocate who is a long-time proponent of the healing power of food, understanding dietary change to help balance moods, sharpen brain function and improve mental health. He is an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons and is in active clinical practice in New York City. His work and writing have been featured by all kinds of publications, and he’s been named a “kale evangelist.”, we can ask him about that. He’s made appearances on many of the big shows that you all have seen, he is also the author of 4 books, including his new one out right now, called Eat To Beat Depression and Anxiety. Dr. Ramsey is also a father, so he gets the challenges and practical issues involved with feeding kids and family every day.  Dr. Ramsey, welcome to the show.

Dr. Drew Ramsey:
Dr. Nicole, it’s really great to be here with you. Thank you and hi to everybody who is listening, I’m really looking forward to spending a little time with you and talking about nutrition and mental health. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:
I’ve been so looking forward to this conversation and I know that the audience is just going to love not only you and your interesting combination of backgrounds and things that you bring to the discussion but also the really practical tips. I want to start out with this because I know there are probably people who heard the intro and the bio and they’re like, “Wait. Psychiatrist talking about nutrition? Farmer?” Tell us from the outset here, how did you get interested in this? Because most psychiatrists do not talk about nutrition, or certainly are not farmers. So talk to us about how this interest in nutrition and food developed for you. 

Dr. Drew Ramsey:
For sure! The farming, I grew up on a farm in Indiana. My parents moved out to really rural Indiana in the late 70’s and we don’t have a big dairy or cattle farm. We’ve got basically a big forest and some pasture. But they got really interested, they were part of this Back to The Land movement of trying to grow more food and really the first generation of folks who got interested in things like organic food and how we can grow our own food and store some of our own food. So that’s just always influenced me as I went through college and medical school. I was really curious about nutrition. I was an athlete in multiple sports and at that point, I was a low-fat vegetarian, really trying to optimize my health through food, even back then. I think the way it all kind of came together is I completed my training in adult psychiatry at Columbia in New York City and began to really think about this merger of my personal and professional lives in some ways when it came to food. It seems odd to me, I was spending so much time thinking about how to get enough protein and what vegetables I was going to try, and in my professional life, I wasn’t talking about food at all. I think everybody listening, and Dr. Nicole, as you know, when you see those things in your life that don’t meet up, eventually they’re going to. It did, for me, just from my clinical work of prescribing medications and seeing people gain weight or not, or lose weight and having to get involved with asking people what they eat, and it just really organically evolved that I began asking all of my patients what they eat. The data started to come out. I got really interested in how to pool this information together and wrote my first book, The Happiness Diet. Then I got really interested in kale and leafy greens and how we use media to create mental health and public health messaging around food, and wrote 50 Shades of Kale, and then Eat Complete. Throughout this whole time, all this evidence had been coming out. So this new book was written over the last — during the pandemic, but it’s really been inspired by the new research, and also, I was at a phase in my life where I was commuting back and forth between Indiana and New York at that point. We had moved back from New York City into the farmhouse with my folks. So I was really in this, for me, a unique vantage point, it felt like. Getting to really experience the attitudes and values and nutritional landscape of Manhattan on Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday, and then the rest of the week in really rural Indiana where the closest supermarket is Walmart, which is 25 minutes away. 

I appreciate what you said, to me it feels like, I don’t know, I love food, I love mental health. They kind of get all mashed up in my brain, I try and do some creative stuff with it in the world via social media and books, and I hope it inspires people to start paying attention and feeding their mental health. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:
I love that phrase “Feeding your mental health.” I think it’s so perfect because it’s really what we’re talking about. Most people don’t understand that those things go together. The things that sort of naturally came together for you just from different aspects of your life, it’s like, “Oh yeah, food, mental health: That works”, most people think about those things as being really separate. I think the typical discussion around how we talk about mental health or different kinds of diagnoses doesn’t involve the discussion about what we’re eating. It’s sort of like that dichotomy of our physical health, which is where most people think of nutrition, how we eat to maintain our weight, or those kinds of things versus mental health. And what you’re really talking about and what I talk about is those things are really connected and inseparable. 

Dr. Drew Ramsey:
Exactly. And it makes sense. We make it sound like it’s separate because it’s the brain. The brain is just a part of your body. And it’s also striking to me, Dr. Nicole, the disconnect you’re talking about. We all know when we don’t eat well, we don’t feel well. When we do eat well, we feel a little better. We all, especially parents,  know those kids get psychotic and irrational and just mean and tearful, and then you realize like, “Oh, it’s because I haven’t fed you.” And then you feed them and they are lovely creatures again, right? People sometimes ask me what the evidence is for nutritional psychiatry, and I say “Do you have kids?” There’s that acute part, but then there is the data about the longer-term implication, which I do agree, I don’t think most of us think about it, I didn’t think about it, and this data didn’t exist that if you eat a more traditional quality diet, there is — at least, in populations that eat more traditional quality diets, there is a decreased risk of depression between, let’s say 30-50%. In the meta-analysis of all the dietary quality studies in depression, they found a 19% decrease in the risk of depression for people who have the healthiest diets compared to people who are eating lots and lots of processed foods. Then there is the treatment data now. For the first time ever, we have multiple randomized clinical trials showing that adding on food intervention, usually a Mediterranean-style diet or something like that, adding that on to treatment, as usual, gets more people into full remission, up to a third more people end up in full remission, at least in the SMILE trials by Felice Jacka.

So that’s where I think it’s really time for us all to double down on our efforts about our mental health. The pandemic is really causing us to do that, but also these places where — it’s not like something new, you don’t have to go see Dr. Nicole once a week or twice a week — “I need to see you like 4 times a week, I’m going to book that after the podcast. I need the full deal.” Or take maybe a medicine. I prescribe lots of medicine, I think they’re really helpful and they work for a variety of conditions. I also appreciate people are anxious about them and have concerns, especially parents in giving meds to kids, and so the thing that’s nice about food is you’re doing it every day, and not in a like, “Oh gosh, your kid has depression or anxiety because you didn’t feed them right.” I really don’t like turning it around like that. Instead, I really like to think about it as an opportunity that if you’re not eating well — we don’t even think about it like that, I’m just thinking about if there are foods that are really nutrient-dense. In the book, Eat To Beat Depression and Anxiety, I call them the “power players” and they are just a representative of food categories. Seafood is one of the food categories, it’s really important for mental health. That’s where we get the long-chain Omega 3 fats, it’s really the best protein source in terms of just thinking about nutritional benefits. A lot of kids don’t eat seafood or struggle with that. So how can we make that accessible? So the power players are wild salmon and anchovies, which does sound like food kids are not going to eat, but I’ve got a great wild salmon burger, a little pan-seared, really easy to make using canned salmon. Super-easy on the budget, our kids devour them. I really have to test all these recipes on the children. Or something like dashi. Dashi is the base seafood broth basically, and kombu seaweed that is in a lot of ramen, in noodle dishes that kids tend to love. So there is a great soba dashi recipe in the book. So those might sound like a little bit of a stretch, but there are also just easy things for families like the buckwheat cacao pancakes, we just had those this morning. Incredibly nutrient-dense pancake. It kind of illustrated nutrient density. Think about a typical pancake, like flour, a little bit of honey or sugar, milk, egg, baking soda, right? That’s it. And maybe some blueberries in there if we’re worried about brain health. So the buckwheat cacao pancake really takes the pancake to a whole other level where we use buckwheat flour which is a gluten-free flour, we sweeten with bananas, we put in some flaxseeds or oats, then we finish it out with some cacao nibs.

So cacao nibs is what you make chocolate out of, cacao beans. But they’re very high in phytonutrients and antioxidants, they’re really high in magnesium, in iron and they make the whole kitchen smell like you’re roasting chocolate. But again, they don’t have the sugar that milk chocolate does and just a really good example of taking something that doesn’t really have any role in the healthy life, pancakes are great, but they’re not bringing anything to the table, really nutrition-wise, and turning it into something that’s very, very nutrient-dense and great for your brain health. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:
I love that example because pancakes are something that kids tend to gravitate towards that they’re eating. I want to go a little bit deeper with this idea of nutrient density, because I think a lot of people say “Well, my kid’s growing fine. I take them in for their physicals every year and they’re growing physically. So what I’m feeding them seems fine. They’re growing.” And then we have conversations around the difference between heavily processed foods versus more whole foods and nutrient density and why that matters. And I think that that’s something for people to really think about, and I’d love for you to expand on, just because we can be feeding ourselves or our kids a diet where physically, they seem okay, doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re giving our brains everything that is needed to really thrive and function though, right? 

Dr. Drew Ramsey:
That’s for sure true. The human brain is made to exist on anything. On the planet, we have the most diverse diet of anything because we can eat anything. If you drop me in a foreign country and I don’t recognize a single food, I’m going to go to bed tonight full. Someone’s going to feed me something. I might not recognize it, but I’ll digest it and I’ll turn it into brain fuel. Also, kids, and particularly adolescents, brains are really in some ways shortsighted. Because when a brain is growing like that, really rapidly, thousands of calories are dedicated towards new bones, new brain cells, our kids are 7 and 10. Every day, they get out of bed and it’s like “Oh my gosh, where is my child! Who’s this big creature?” So that makes kids crave carbohydrates and sugars because to the brain, those signal safe calories. Sweet means safe. I say that because as parents, we often scold our kids or get down on ourselves, like “Oh, I can’t believe our kids want ice cream again. We give it to them too much.” And I learned that from the Monell Center for Science and Taste and it’s really stayed with me — again to think about that as a nutritional psychiatrist, how can we use that to our advantage? How can I use that sweet taste to help expand my kids’ palates into fruits? How can I use that sweet taste to get on some more fermented foods like using kefir in their smoothies? How can I use it to make pancakes? Something that they love? It can help me cook, but there’s also lots of pumpkin seeds and oatmeal and flax seeds in those pancakes. Not hidden away. I’m not like “Lie to the kids and hide it”, but just in a nutrient-dense way. Just to define that again, as doctor Nicole said, this is an equation, a simple equation of the number of nutrients that a food has, how much vitamin C, zinc, and iron, and whatever nutrients you’re interested in, over how many calories. 

So the really easy measure of “Why is a can of coke no good for us?” You can talk about the sugars and the inflammation, but an easy way is just, it has nothing in terms of nutrition. It just brings calories, it just brings the gasoline to the engine. What we want are foods that bring lots of nutrients with their calories. So a good example is an oyster. One east coast oyster has 10 calories. So 6 oysters, 60 calories. For those 60 calories, you get 500% of your daily need of zinc, you get 250% of your daily need of vitamin b12. You get almost 1000mg of long-chained Omega 3 fats, you get iodine, like 100-something percentage of your selenium. Lots and lots of nutrition for 60 calories.  So that’s nutrient density and why it makes sense. If you want to eat the fewest calories possible, the only way to do that is by focusing on eating the most nutrient-dense foods. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:
Yeah, which is good for us physically and for our brains. Let’s delve a little bit more into what the research has shown are some of the most important nutrients. I mean, certainly, they’re all important, right? Eating a broad, varied diet that incorporates the full complement of vitamins and minerals and phytonutrients, that’s what we want to be doing. But the research has shown that there are some stand-outs when we think about brain function, brain health, mental health. Talk to us about those. 

Dr. Drew Ramsey:
So the most important nutrients we’ve found in our work have been the anti-depressant nutrients, it’s what we focused on. Laura LaChance is a psychiatrist in Montreal, she and I partnered up and worked on the antidepressant food scale. So we looked at all the depression literature and found that there are 12 nutrients with significant levels of evidence that they influence the prevention and treatment of depression. So some of them do matter more. B vitamins, B9 and B12 in particular, and then in all my work, my goal is to take that where people think “More B12, maybe I should get a B12 supplement”, and instead, really ask you to translate that into food. It feels, I think, like a lot to keep track of, like which food has. B12, which food has Omega 3 fats? Which foods have magnesium? So that’s why we looked at food categories because there are certain categories of food that just have more of these nutrients. So long-chained Omega 3 fats, the only place you’re going to find those in concentrated forms that will make a difference in your brain health is in fatty fish. So that leads you towards wild salmon, anchovies, and bivalves: Mussels, clams, and oysters. Some of the nutrients that I really love to focus on: Potassium in white beans and bananas, really important for nerve conduction and also for anybody who has had a little heart arrhythmia, which often happens when you have low potassium. I love focusing on magnesium, it’s one of these nutrients that’s linked. One of the things that I focus on in the book is the idea of neuroplasticity or brain growth. So magnesium is one of the few nutrients that’s really linked to the genetic expression of what’s called BDNF, Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor. This is a neurohormone, it’s a molecule in the brain that leads to the birth of new brain cells, it leads to brain cells repairing themselves and healing. So it’s very, very powerful magnesium. So magnesium is linked to BDNF, so that leads me to eat more greens and beans and other high magnesium foods. Another nutrient that I really like is vitamin A because there are mostly plant forms of the carotenoids like beta carotene that we turn into vitamin A, then there is retinol, actual vitamin A that we get from foods like liver and meat. 

So those are some of the nutrients that we focus on. In the book, one of the things I tried to do, because I just think it is so much information, is I’ve tried to really illustrate for people a little detail about each nutrient, how much you’re supposed to get, what foods you find them in, in a nice illustration for each of the 12 nutrients, as well as some of these concepts we’re talking about that people hear about like the microbiome. Just to try and give people as many different avenues for exploring these ideas. I’m a really visual learner and so I can read, but then I get distracted and I love to see things. I find when I see an image, it really sticks in my head. So I hope to give those resources to people. There are also 30 recipes in the book. Some of them are formulas to try. Again, your question is really around key nutrients, so as you can hear, taking those nutrients, thinking about what foods have the most of them, and then how do we come up with recipes that make those foods really delicious for us?

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:
Which is key, because if things aren’t relatively simple and tasty, we’re not going to incorporate them into our diet, right? Or just not. Not even as adults, forget about kids. So that’s why I love the practicality that you bring to it. And your visuals, every time that I hear you speak, or a lot of the things that you do online, you do incorporate those visuals, and I think those are so helpful for us to just really see and be able to internalize the overlap with these things. It’s like it can be overwhelming when people hear, “Oh, there are all these nutrients I should be focused on.” But here’s the good news: When you look at the lists of foods that contain those nutrients, there is a lot of overlap there. So if we are incorporating certain types of more nutrient-dense foods into our diet, chances are we’re ticking a lot of those boxes just in those foods or meals that we’re preparing, and that makes it a lot simpler than thinking that “Oh, each of those things is going to be in something different and I’ll have to figure it all out.” 

Dr. Drew Ramsey:
I think that’s exactly right, Nicole. Two things you’re saying: One is by focusing on the nutrient-dense foods, you really don’t need to worry that much. I think that’s a really important lesson for people because there is so much messaging in fear for parents: “You’re not giving them enough of this, you’re not giving them enough of that.” And that’s where parents will end up giving kids chewies, multi-vitamins, and gummies and stuff like that because it’s safe. I think there’s another approach where we focus on these nutrient-dense foods and we focus on helping our kids enjoy them, not forcing them on them. The other part that you mentioned or touched on how these foods crowd out the foods that we think are driving things like inflammation, obesity, diabetes, and in the mental health world can have some piece of the depression/anxiety/ADHD story for kids. That as you’re on more processed foods, as you’re eating more sugars and refined vegetable oils and food dyes and food fillers, and have dysregulated blood sugar and extra weight gain from all those foods, there is the consequence of those, that when you crowd that stuff off your plate by eating more plants, more seafood, more nuts, and beans, you just get lots of health benefits because you’ve gotten off the — that’s one of the reasons people when they come to see me, they say “I’ve heard lots of vegans feel amazing when they go vegan and carnivores who feel amazing when they go carnivore, and paleo, and Whole30. Why do all these diets work?” The thing that connects all of these diets is you’re getting people off of processed foods. That, no matter what you’re doing, is the most important step. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:
Yeah. I totally agree. To me, that’s the foundation of all of it. I have families come in and they’ve read about all of these specific kinds of diets or elimination diets, so they’re focusing on taking all of the things out of the diet. Sometimes that can be important and necessary, but if we don’t start from a foundation of good nutrient-dense whole foods before we start looking at what we’re going to take out or whatever, we can really run into some problems because you can be on a specialized diet and still have a lot of nutrient-poor junk in the diet. Gluten-free is a great example of that, right? It is entirely possible to have your child on a gluten-free diet and have it not be very nutrient-dense and not very supportive of health. So that idea of really starting from that foundation of a good variety of nutrient-dense foods and then pushing that in first, especially for kids, adding things in before we start taking things away. 

Dr. Drew Ramsey:
I think that’s the way we think about it in the clinic, there’s so much fear-based marketing and messaging around food and I love the idea of adding things in, just as you say. People are talking about all of the processed foods we’re eating. Instead of “We have to stop that!”, we say, “You need a healthy snack, it sounds like that’s going to give you energy. What’s your relationship with an avocado like? Have you tried dark chocolate-covered almonds? What kind of nuts do you like? Have you ever tried this? What are some barriers to accessing it? Where do you shop and get your food?” All those questions that I’d never asked as a psychiatrist, but then as I started asking them, I just learned so much about my patients. So many details about their lives that I’d never really considered that of course, they’ve never thought to — they’re not going to come and tell me like, “Hey! I’m really super disorganized in the kitchen, I never spend any time cooking meals! That frustration tolerance that you’re talking about Ramsey, boy, that’s caused me to break all my dishes and I just order in now.” You learn so much about how people care for themselves by asking them how they feed themselves. It’s really become, in some ways, one of my favorite diagnostic tools.” I love that we’re talking about it not, Dr. Nicole, because I think as we come out of the pandemic, families in some ways have been in a state they’ve never been in before, they’ve cooked everything themselves for a year. Everybody’s kind of sick of that. And at the same time, it’s probably the healthiest any of us have eaten in the last few years, because no matter what stuff you picked up from the grocery store, there are still a lot of whole foods going into people just by nature of cooking at home, for the most part, not universally true. But as we think about how to survive 2021 and really get back to a stance of resilience, having the proper nutrition is just really at the center of that. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:
So true. I want to touch on the idea you mentioned of power foods. You talked about things like salmon and bivalves and those kinds of things. Give us some other ones that you think are really some of those power foods that as we’re thinking about helping families push more of the nutrient-dense foods in their diets, what should they be thinking about? What are some starting points?

Dr. Drew Ramsey:
In my book, I call them the power players and some of my favorites, and we’ve discussed the kind of food categories, so things like arugula and kale, right? The leafy green category. If you don’t like either one of those, that’s fine! There are lots of other leafy greens. But kind of falling in love with the leafy green, and it can be a purple-green. Like if Radicchio is your thing, that’s great. That’s just as healthy as kale. There are pumpkin seeds and cashews. Pepitas or pumpkin seeds are a great source of tryptophan, a great source of iron, and magnesium. Really, really easy to use, a lot of the power players, one of the reasons we picked them is, not only do they have so many nutrient densities, but they also are just so culinarily versatile. When I’ve got some cashews, I can put that in a smoothie, I can have that in a snack. I can chop that up in my stir-fry, I can chop it up in my salad. I can roast those nuts and have them while sipping a cup of tea by the fire later that night. So there are lots and lots of ways to use these foods. Some of the other ones: Seafood is a really important category. The power players that we emphasize are wild salmon, anchovies, and bivalves: mussels, clams, and oysters. So it’s really easy, tasty recipes for each of those. Another of the power players is dark chocolate, and this surprises people that are not used to doctors prescribing candy. But I didn’t do this as a marketing ploy, I did this based on science. If you look, for example, people who consume a serving of dark chocolate every day have a 60-70% decreased risk of depression. This is the association. 

You kind of wonder what that means, and then you get into the biology of what chocolate does. We think of it as a treat, but as you get dark chocolate above 70%, you start eating a pretty pure cacao bean, and cacao beans have this amazing family of phytonutrients called flavonoids. We think about phytonutrients in plants as antioxidants, right? You always hear “Oh, this plant has a lot of antioxidants.” But they’re probably not actually antioxidants in the body. There is some data that really suggests that the main way that these molecules work is by influencing the microbiome and also by being cell signaling molecules. So turning genes on and off. So there have been some studies of cacao and cacao extracts that have been shown to improve memory, to reverse cognitive decline or age-related cognitive decline. There may have been a few little trials showing dark chocolate can help medical students cope with stress better. So dark chocolate is on there, it’s one of the power players. Those are a few. Red peppers are one of the ones I love because they’re so high in vitamin C. So as everybody is listening and hearing those foods, there are some things that are maybe missing like blueberries are usually on the list. I just want to emphasize. It’s not that these foods are the only foods or if you eat these foods you can get off all your meds or never go to therapy. It’s more that these foods are great samples of nutrient density. There are lots of other brain foods besides this list, but I thought it was just a good starting point to give people. Avocado is on there of course. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:
Yeah, avocado is a great one. And avocado I think is a nice starting point for a lot of kids too. Because you can work it into things, you don’t have to just sit down and eat it. You can work it into things, but with the dark chocolate, what I was going to say for parents listening, I have found a lot of success in the clinic — most kids like chocolate. Not all, but most do. And if they’re starting out with more of a milk chocolate kind of thing, you can shift their palate because you can get dark chocolate in all kinds of percentages. So you can start with something that’s just got a low amount of dark chocolate in it and you can work your way up and it’s a really simple and lovely way to just start to shift a child’s palate away from the super sweet kind of artificial chocolate to more of the dark chocolate. You can do that gradually over time and it’s just a really nice way to do that and they feel like they’re getting a treat and you don’t get into power struggles over it. 

Dr. Drew Ramsey:
I completely agree and I like that dialing that in and letting the palate — a lot of what they don’t tell us about parenting is that it’s kind of — they tell us about the palate expanders that our kids need before braces, but they don’t tell us about palate expansion, that kids often don’t really tell the truth about food. It’s like, “Do you like this?” “No” “Do you like this?” “Yes”. Then you get it and they don’t eat it, and you’re like “…..” But if we think about our job as really just providing experiences, empowering kids, shifting palate over time — another thing with the dark chocolate that I do is make it high-quality dark chocolate but have there be, I don’t know, dried cherries in there, where you’re adding in a natural sweetness as opposed to sugar. Mostly, we want people eating solid chocolate. But if there’s a little candied ginger in there or an almond or something else that adds a texture that your kid likes that helps them eat darker chocolate. My daughter loves dark chocolate-covered almonds. A great snack for us!

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:
Even if you need to start with something your child loves like pretzel sticks, dipping that. You start with where you need to start and that’s the piece about this that I just always try to emphasize for parents and families, it’s that there is no perfect in this. You don’t have to jump from wherever you’re at to some kind of ideal. We’re all on a journey with this, and as long as we are aware of and shifting and even taking small steps towards the direction of more nutrient-dense foods, towards the direction that we want to go, that’s a good thing. And I think especially with what we’re dealing with right now, with all the increased stress and everything from the last year, we need to stop focusing on “Well, it’s this way or I have to focus on getting to this perfect/ideal place”. I just want people to get started and dive in somewhere, and good enough is good enough on a certain level. That’s how I think about it. 

Dr. Drew Ramsey:
Perfect is the enemy of good. And I think that since there is no perfect meal and there is no perfect nutrition and there is no perfect food, I completely agree, Dr. Nicole. I think it’s also where the medical establishment and wellness establishment, I don’t think it’s really been that helpful. People feel overwhelmed. It’s like that debate, butter or no butter. Are you freaking kidding me? How many calories come from butter? I eat a fair amount of butter. I put a pat on my toast, I like it on vegetables. It’s such a minor part of my diet. That’s not where the debate should be. The debate should be around “Hey, how you can enjoy more seafood?” Or “Hey, if you’re a big meat eater, how can you get to healthier cuts? How can you move towards grass-fed beef? How can you get involved in more beef stews? How can you maybe expand the meat cuts you use to make beef shank stew?” So I think that there are places for all of us. That’s how we work in the clinic, we call it simple swaps. How can we find a swap? How can we make a little step for you that everybody is going to feel good about? It’s not like, “Oh wow, you’ve totally revamped everything in the last 5 days.” That’s not how change works, as you know.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:
And even if people do that, it’s not sustainable. And I see that with families too. It’s like, “Okay, we’re going to dive in and we’re going to do this big thing!” And even the ones that do it, it’s like over time, your interest wanes and you can’t sustain it. And I think we need to be about meaningful and sustainable for families, for kids and ultimately, what we’re doing with food, even as we’re making these shifts, is educating our kids, modeling things for them, this is part of raising them to become adults who can think about these things and make informed choices and decide for themselves how to handle this and have some experience with how food makes them feel and even the cooking of it. That’s part of our parenting, which is to raise our kids to get to the point where they can make these decisions for themselves and hopefully make some choices around food in ways that support them in adulthood. 

Dr. Drew Ramsey:
I completely agree. Certainly as a parent, one of the things that I found most pleasurable was when my daughter said last night, “Can I help cut that up?” That was just like music to my ears when they get engaged when they get slicing and dicing and chopping, and I really feel like I’m passing them some of the skills that had been most important to me in my life, not that I’m an amazing chef or anything, but I just like the feeling of independence and self-nourishment and also creativity and confidence, as I open up the fridge, I usually have some fun. I figure something out and I love that! I did a little cooking class at the Aspen Brain Institute. And as we were getting ready, as we were talking to the founder and doing this class, I was going to make this anchovy dish and I said, “Oh, do you like anchovies?” And they just said, “No I don’t.” I ran back to the pantry and I changed up for a jar of sardines. I made this dish and we joked and called “Gnocchi alla Glenda” sort of had a little post about this recipe. To me, what it represents is the fun and the creativity and the expansiveness that food and nutrition can offer us when we approach it from a stance of joyfulness and creativity and nourishment, not from a stance of fear. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:
Love it. So let’s make sure everybody knows where they can get the book. It’s out right now. So the Eat To Beat Depression and Anxiety, tell us where we can find it, how people can find out more about you and what you are doing. 

Dr. Drew Ramsey:
Sure. Thank you, Dr. Nicole and thank you, everybody, for listening. I’d love for you to check out the book because I really think it’s going to help you feed your mental health. The book is available everywhere books are sold. I ask you to, if possible, support your local bookstores. You can learn more about the book on my website, drewramseymd.com, we’ve got great information about the book. We also have some great downloads if you’re not buying the book but you want some information on simple swaps, we also have a great newsletter, Friday Feels where we kind of highlight some of our favorite mental health and brainfood information on the internet every week. And then for any clinicians listening, we’ve got our great e-course, Nutritional Psychiatry for Healthcare Practitioners, which is the first-ever course for clinicians who want to learn about applying nutritional psychiatry in their practice, as well as a course for the public called Eat To Beat Depression. And then Instagram, I should have said the word Instagram because that’s where I’m kind of most active. I update my stories pretty much every day, and I try to have some fun there. So if you give me a follow on Instagram, I’ll probably make you laugh at least once, and I will definitely encourage you to eat a lot of dark chocolate, leafy greens, nuts, beans, seeds and wild seafood.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:
Your social media is great, I really want to encourage everybody to definitely follow Dr. Ramsey on social media. Just lots of great, practical stuff, and it is fun and it’s just engaging and great stuff that you put out there. We’ll put all the links to all those things in the show notes too for all of you to be able to access those resources. You really have my highest recommendation on the book and all of the things that you put out there, I think they’re really important for families, for individuals, for those of us who are practitioners, you’re doing really important work in bringing these concepts and things more into the mainstream, so thank you for that. 

Dr. Drew Ramsey:
Well, Dr. Nicole, thank you so much. It’s such a nice opportunity to meet up with you after meeting us a couple of years ago at that wonderful Food As Medicine conference up in Traverse City, so I really appreciate your efforts in spreading the word and really helping families embrace holistic mental health and get services and for all the care that you provide. I hope you also are taking good care of yourself because as you know, this is challenging stuff at work and a challenging time. But it’s been a real pleasure, I hope everybody feeds their mental health this week and takes good care of those around, and thank you so much for letting me come on.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:
Thank you, it’s been great to have you, and thanks as always to all of you for listening, we will catch you back here next week for our next episode of The Better Behavior Show.