Nourishing the Mind: Food, Light, and Lifestyle for Better Mood

At a time when anxiety and depression rates are soaring across all age groups, Dr. Mark Pettus cuts through the noise with revelatory insights into how our daily choices shape our mental landscape. This compelling exploration connects the dots between what's on your plate, how you move through your day, and the remarkable resilience of your brain.

Dr. Pettus introduces the concept of allostatic load—how our bodies interpret and respond to environmental stressors—and reveals why our modern lifestyle creates the perfect storm for mental health challenges. Rather than viewing mood disorders as purely psychological phenomena, he presents compelling evidence that insulin resistance, inflammation, and disrupted circadian rhythms form the physiological foundation of many mental health struggles.

The conversation takes a fascinating turn when Dr. Pettus explains how rapid blood sugar fluctuations can trigger symptoms indistinguishable from anxiety attacks. That afternoon panic might actually be the aftermath of your lunch choices! Through practical nutritional principles focused on whole foods, lower glycemic options, and nutrient density, he offers actionable strategies to support neuroplasticity—your brain's remarkable ability to generate new cells and neural pathways throughout life.

Beyond diet, we discover how Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor (BDNF)—essentially "miracle grow for the brain"—can be boosted through movement (especially dancing!), natural light exposure, time in nature, and specific foods. The gut-brain connection emerges as another critical pathway, with our microbiome directly influencing neurotransmitter production and mood regulation. Most empowering is the concept of metabolic flexibility—how developing your body's ability to efficiently switch between fuel sources enhances both cognitive function and emotional stability.

Weaving together ancestral wisdom with cutting-edge neuroscience, Dr. Pettus presents a holistic framework that honors our evolutionary design while navigating modern challenges. This isn't about quick fixes or magic pills—it's about building sustainable resilience through aligned lifestyle choices that activate our innate capacity for wellbeing.

Ready to rewire your approach to mental health? Listen now and discover how small, strategic shifts in your daily habits can transform your mind, mood, and quality of life. Your brain was designed to thrive—learn how to give it what it truly needs.

For PowerPoint slide deck: www.thehealthedgepodcast.com

For Essential Provisions Meals Ready to Eat (MREs): www.essentialprovisions.com

Transcript

Introduction to Mind and Mood

Speaker 1 0:02

Hi, I'm Dr Mark Pettis, medical Director of Essential Provisions, a whole food, nutritional and human performance science company that makes meals ready to eat and nutritional sports blends that fully leverage the science of human health and performance, and this webinar focus will be on mind and mood and the nutritional and lifestyle contributions to mind and mood, why it's important and what we can do to enhance the cards that we're holding, that in modern life can certainly pose very unique and unrelenting challenges. We have other educational webinars on our Essential Provision platform that I would encourage you. You can find it on our website, essentialprovisionscom. We also have a YouTube channel and all of this content, the videos, the audios if you're interested in that, the PowerPoint handouts and slide decks are all available to you. So these are intended to be very brief, high-level overviews and let's jump in. I'm going to share my screen with you all. Share my screen with you all and here we go. Well, just to start by stating the obvious in 2025, when you look at many, many sources of data, the American psychological societies and certainly mainstream peer-reviewed literature, there is a very, very high prevalence today in the general population, from kids in school, young adults, adolescents, high schoolers, college age and across the age continuum of high prevalences of anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress. I mean we've all come out of the pandemic to a large extent traumatized and particularly, you know, kids who are out of school and socially isolated. These are challenging times indeed. So it helps to start from a place of understanding that the current state is not a very good one in terms of how well people are coping and obviously that greatly undermines one's quality of life. So we'll look at again at a high level some lifestyle and environmental drivers of mind and mood, with an emphasis on nutrition. We'll look at this concept of allostatic load. This is essentially how we interpret and respond to the environments that we are in, and if our interpretation and response is one that tends to leave us more fearful, more uncertain, that is a setup for fight-flight, this chronic fight-flight, and that's what allostatic load is. When the environment that one is coexisting in overwhelms one's ability to interpret, respond and adapt in a normal functional way, we would call that high allostatic load. This is work by Dr Bruce McKeown, the late Dr McKeown at Rockefeller University, an amazing neuroscientist.

Speaker 1 3:51

We'll look at some of the core metabolic disruptors in a separate podcast webinar. I talked about insulin resistance and inflammation. These very much are the underpinnings of alterations in mind and mood. And then again we'll look at some lifestyle interventions and after a while you begin to appreciate that the lifestyle interventions are pretty consistent because they really address root causes, and whether you're talking about depression or Alzheimer's or type 2 diabetes or cancer, as it turns out many of these share the same metabolic disruptors.

Speaker 1 4:35

So the great 20th century physicist Buckminster Fuller once said you never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. And as much as I respect the world of psychiatry and behavioral health, in my humble opinion we really haven't come a long way beyond, maybe, these pharmaceutical approaches, all of which can be helpful for some, even critical for some, but inherently limited in their ability to return a person to that full capacity to thrive, without side effects and in an enduring and sustainable way. So it seems we need a different model. One could say this about the Western American medical model. To begin with, we do a good job in our acute care, critical care, trauma care, management, but our ability to prevent and maintain optimal health is not an output of the model that we've all been existing in now for the last few generations.

Speaker 1 5:51

So let's look at this connection between nutrition and stress resilience, the principles that you'll hear me talking about repeatedly, of minimizing processed foods, getting a diversity of whole food intakes Again, I know there are people who prefer vegetarian or vegan. Anything that involves whole foods will be a huge step above a standard American diet. So diversity whether that's plant-based or plant and animal-based, more of an omnivore or paleo approach what really matters, in my view, is that you're getting sufficient nourishment, sufficient nourishment to support your metabolic and life needs. Nutrient density, obviously, is huge. Processed foods tend to strip away so many of the nutrients, and many of these from B vitamins to omega-3s, to zinc to magnesium are known to be associated with some disruption of mind and mood.

Speaker 1 7:05

Ideally, we want the foods that we consume to be lower glycemic. You want to avoid a really high rise in sugar and if you ever have the opportunity to get a continuous glucose monitor, it's worth asking your primary care doctor about. You might need a diagnosis of prediabetes or diabetes for it to be covered by our insurer, but this is an enormously valuable tool that I recommend anyone who's eligible get, and it really allows you to see how those glycemic effects can be quite eye-opening Foods that you thought were serving you well. When you're wearing a monitor, you realize, wow, that bowl of oatmeal and glass of orange juice and two slices of whole grain wheat bread had effects on my sugar that leave me thinking twice about whether I love these foods, but I'm not so sure that they love me. Back and again, meal timing the more we can align our eating with the sun rising, sun setting window and not eating too closely to bedtime.

Speaker 1 8:17

These are very, very important nutritional principles and we know that when the research would suggest that, when one is able to, you know, adhere to the best possible to these principles, you tend to see more neuroplasticity. Your brain is not this fixed organ that peaks when you're 20 and then it's all downhill from there. That's what I was taught in medical school, you know, 40 plus years ago. It is clearly not the case. We can make new brain cells, we can prune those cells and neurons that maybe are starting to become disruptive throughout our life continuum. We know that these principles are anti-inflammatory, and again I refer you back to the webinar on inflammation.

Nutritional Principles for Mental Wellbeing

Speaker 1 9:05

If one can lower inflammation, virtually any potential health or quality of life concern that you have is most likely to improve considerably. You want to improve your body's response to insulin. You want to lower the amount of insulin that your pancreas has to put out. These principles will do that. You also want to enhance the cells the 30 plus trillion cells in your body's ability to take fuel and use that fuel to metabolize and to run. The machinery is what insulin does, and we want ourselves to be sensitive. Insulin resistance and inflammation again are your passports to aging and accelerated aging. We want to give our gut biome, this ecosystem that we're still learning so much about, more fuel to diversify, and fiber-rich foods are a good way to do that. Colorful plant-based foods, these phytonutrients, are very good for the biome. Our biome turns out to be really part of our human journey, and so we need to be mindful of that ecosystem of which we are part of. We need to be mindful of that ecosystem of which we are part of, we're not separate from. We are indeed part of every ecosystem around us.

Speaker 1 10:38

Epigenetics we talked about this in a separate webinar your book of life, your DNA's ability to have on and off switches that can take a chapter that's about to be written which is one you'd rather avoid and can rewrite that chapter. If you have a future chapter about your getting Alzheimer's, wouldn't it be great if at a younger age you could edit your book of life in a way that would make that translation less likely? That's what epigenetics is all about. Very empowering. And lastly, these nutritional principles seem to turn on most of the resiliency software in the human body. Our design is beautiful in that we have software that can be activated in response to threats in our environment.

Speaker 1 11:30

The challenge in modern life is the conditions have to be right for that software to be activated. It might be loaded in your system but it's never activated because maybe you're on a standard American diet, or you're sed, sedentary, or you spend all day indoors getting very little natural light, or you're mired down in toxic relationships, or maybe you've got mold in your home or workplace. All of these things will disrupt the software that's deeply etched into your book of life that ordinarily would sustain you throughout the life continuum. 21st century living and these new-to-nature changes for the homo sapien challenge those software systems. And that's just an important principle.

Speaker 1 12:21

So you know it's hard to find good nutritional randomized studies, being sort of the most widely categorized with fish and plant-based foods and meats and nuts, and you know olive oil and you know healthy fats and abundant protein. These certainly have been shown in randomized controlled trials to improve mood, to improve anxiety. There's some emerging research that people who are on those early stages of cognitive decline, cognitive impairment, can alter progression by consumption of foods that are in these categories, as opposed to the high glycemic foods, these processed sugar flour. After we consume them our blood sugars rise dramatically and we're trying to minimize this as a strategy for longer life and longer health span, quality of life along the way. When your sugar goes up quickly, your insulin will go up with it Again. We want to try to mitigate that. Your sugar will then come down quickly.

Speaker 1 13:58

Your experience of that might be hunger, it might be a little bit of brain fog, it might be heart palpitations, it might be sweating, you might feel weak. It can feel like a panic attack. It's sweating, you might feel weak, it can feel like a panic attack. It's a really horrible feeling and you know I've done work with college students at Williams College in my neighborhood where I live. They might come to the clinic and say gee, you know, dr Pettis, I'm in my public health master's class at two in the afternoon and almost every day I'm having, you know, these symptoms that sound like anxiety, and I'll go back and ask them what they ate for lunch, and often it will have been you know a muffin, you know with, you know a candy bar or you know a sugary soft drink, and it's hard for us to connect what a choice we might have made three hours ago with how we're feeling in the current moment. And this is where greater mindfulness around cause and effect can be very helpful and lead one to an intervention that would not have been considered otherwise.

Speaker 1 15:09

And again, a lot of research. This is mind and mood, and so mind from the perspective of cognitive decline. We know that a Mediterranean-type diet and the whole food principles that I just laid out for you seem to greatly change the trajectory of one's risk of cognitive impairment over time. I highly, highly recommend the research of Dr Dale Bredesen, who's in California. Bredesen and others are looking at how one could take individuals that actually have Alzheimer's diagnoses and regress their symptoms by virtue of many aspects of lifestyle diet, vitamin D, sunlight, you know, identifying toxins in the environment like mold, and so you know, one can begin to see that these are not just genetic diseases over which we have no ability to influence. You know, big pharma has just not been able in the last 30, 40 years come up with a magic bullet here, because a magic bullet is not the right response to a more complex disruption of metabolic ecosystems. And that's why these holistic approaches, these functional, integrative lifestyle approaches, are so important, because they really do get to the root cause.

Diet Types and Cognitive Health

Speaker 1 16:46

And again, when you look at the types of components of these nutritional interventions, they all involve lots of leafy greens, fatty fish, low glycemic berries, whole grains a grain that's less processed is better than a grain that isn't. But if you do have a continuous glucose monitor, pay attention to how grains affect your blood glucose. These are carbohydrate-dense foods and for many a whole grain, even though it's not processed, can still be very high glycemic. But much of the research puts a halo over them and so they're included in most of what you see published. You know poultry. I would add to this red meats very unfairly shastai, so good quality pasture-raised meats. We use bison in our products. I'm not here to sell our products, I think they sell themselves. But those are the nutritional principles that all of our formulations are developed around. Nuts can be a really great snack high fat, high protein, low glycemic, very satiating and, of course, beans, legumes high in fiber, nutrient dense, good for the biome ecosystem.

Supplements for Mind and Mood

Speaker 1 18:04

I'm often asked about supplements. Again, these are huge topics as it relates to mind and mood. This was a review right around the time that the pandemic was emerging, one of the best reviews that I've seen published, and I wanted to just bring this to your attention. This is what's called a forest plot and it looks at many, many studies that have been published, and anything to the right of this vertical line would be a positive benefit. I don't recommend supplements routinely unless a person has a specific deficiency, either measured or based on their what they eat. They may just not be getting enough of a particular nutrient. So those that rise above the pack and these are frequently deficient in Americans would be omega-3s, would be B vitamins, would be zinc, which is an essential mineral, which is an essential mineral Probiotics can seem to have an effect and N-acetylcysteine, nac, nac. Now, I'm not recommending that everyone with depression or mild cognitive impairment take these, but I would suggest that the research here is very compelling. The safety appears very good and many of these are inexpensive supplements, focusing first on dietary sources and where that may be a challenge to satisfy. Looking at thoughtful supplementation, another physician that just came to mind that I want to recommend to you is Dr Chris Palmer. He is I think he's still the medical director at McLean Hospital in Boston, harvard facility, and McLean is really at the vanguard of a lot of the behavioral health research and breakthroughs. And Dr Palmer isa refreshingly holistic, traditionally trained Harvard psychiatrist who, in my experiences with him, has a much more holistic approach. He's written some books. He's got some great educational material out there.

Boosting BDNF for Brain Health

Speaker 1 20:30

Bdnf brain-derived neurotrophic factor is a protein produced in the brain that can grow new brain cells. Some would say it's the miracle grow of the brain. As I get older, I want my brain's ability to adapt to continue to be robust. Brain's ability to adapt to continue to be robust, and so many of the things that our ancestors sort of knew without understanding are things that today are being shown to be able to really increase BDNF production. From movement to not overeating, right to meditation and mindfulness in its various forms. Curcumin or turmeric, green tea these are all anti-inflammatory botanicals. Coffee, you know, ideally black or, in my view, adding a little heavy cream. Yes, I said heavy cream. Uh, I think these can be healthy fats, um and uh, uh. You know the brain is 60, 65 plus percent fat. I want those fats to be healthy sourced fats, um, not processed seed oils, you know, not fats from feedlot meats and chicken and eggs, but things that are produced in ways that my body would recognize as a natural friend. If you look at DHA, which is an omega-3, upregulates, enhances BDNF.

Speaker 1 22:14

Intermittent fasting or time-restricted eating, bringing that window of consumption into 10 hours. Ideally, that 10-hour window should be between sunrise and sunset, depending on the time of year and the location you may be at. I think this is a really helpful way of reducing caloric intake. Many of the benefits of fasting and time-restricted eating can be directly traced to. It's just a good strategy for reducing how much you eat, and the less we eat, the more favorable our biology tends to be. And then, lastly, probiotics, in much the same way, standard American diet, chronic unabating stress, inflammation, which I've talked about in other webinars, and insulin resistance, disrupting circadian rhythm. I address most of these themes in a bit more detail in other educational webinars, at Essential Provisions. All of these are known to inhibit BDNF production. So less of this and more of this from Dr Rhonda Patrick, another amazing podcaster, blogger that I would highly recommend.

Speaker 1 23:42

Scientist with great integrity, has great. She is a great educator, translates the science really well. There are a lot of people like her that I enjoy listening to Zoe Harcomb, a PhD nutritionist in the UK. You know Peter Attia. Many know Peter from his. He's very popular these days. There are a lot of good people out there that translate this science in a very meaningful and effective way.

Speaker 1 24:05

So again, you know, movement and other aspects of healthy lifestyle directly increase our ability. As it turns out, you can teach an old brain new tricks and sign me up for that. Motion is the lotion, as I like to say. You know dancing. I mean there are many ways to move, but dancing is the holy grail. You're listening to music that you enjoy. It may bring back positive memories. You might be with someone you love. You're connecting, you're moving those tunes. If I listen to tunes that I grew up with, you know they bring me back to a place and to a time. Your brain lights up, almost as if you were back at that actual time, at that actual place. And if that movement and that music is in the context of positive emotions love, happiness, joy, gratitude you are off to the races. You can accomplish a lot with and at the same time, have a whole lot of fun Forest bathing. These are just, you know, a handful of things.

Movement, Nature and Gut-Brain Connection

Speaker 1 25:19

I talk about circadian rhythm and the importance of natural light. This, I think, is just a huge opportunity. In modern life we spend very little time outdoors and the time we spend indoors is often in relationship to lighting that is not health-promoting Too much blue light, light that's too bright and intense at the end of the day, not enough of the warm, yellow, orange, red light at the end of the day. So more time in nature, more thoughtful creation of artificially lit environments can greatly improve our health. But just being outdoors, as we all know, this practice, this practice, japanese practice of Shinrin-yoku much has been written about this, a lot of great resources out there, and it's really kind of a no-brainer. And you know, if you can go out with a pet, again, it's like dancing If you're with someone you love and you're enjoying it and you're engaged, you will be creating another experience of reality and that's, I think we can all use a large dose of that. You know, the gut and the brain are again, these are huge topics, but the biome, the microbiome heavily influenced by our sleep patterns and the foods that we eat, clearly will have a lot to say about how happy we are, how clearly we're thinking, whether we're likely to get anxious or not in response to a potential threat. And so many of these nutritional principles, probiotics, circadian lifestyle, lighting considerations and again, please go back and review some of these other webinars to get a little more depth and create a bit more of a holistic picture All of these work in synergy and that synergy is amplified. So one plus one equals five. One plus one plus one equals 20. Our biology can be amplified in ways that can take a small, seemingly subtle intervention and the return on that investment can be much greater than one would ever imagine. Saunas are another example of that, whether that be a thermal or an infrared sauna.

Speaker 1 27:48

A lot of good research on the promotion of mental health and general health, cardiovascular health in general and these are this ancestral. These principles, I think, can relate to any risk reduction, lifestyle strategy and this concept of metabolic flexibility. Most modern Americans only use glucose as a fuel because it's their predominant fuel source, fat, which is a superb fuel. Many just don't eat enough of it, and of the right quality. So moderating carbohydrate, consuming more healthy fat sources will allow your body to switch more efficiently and nimbly between sugar, glucose and essential fatty acids or fat as a fuel. And essential fatty acids or fat as a fuel. That metabolic flexibility appears to be an important predictor of mind and mood, health and health in general. I think of it as that ancestral blueprint and we can enjoy modern life and still embrace some of these ancestral principles around.

Speaker 1 29:09

Just greater reverence to circadian rhythms, you know, sleep hygiene these very much connect. More natural light exposure, more fiber. Being careful about taking antibiotics if you don't absolutely need them, you know. Being careful of things like glyphosate. You know which is an antimicrobial. Glyphosate profoundly disrupts the gut biome. That is not a trivial connection. Meaningful relationships, right.

Metabolic Flexibility and Ancestral Wisdom

Speaker 1 29:37

Some resistance work, stressing those muscles that is probably one of the most under-recognized activities that can really help people as they get older to give them more metabolic flexibility. Right, sometimes we have to go fast and then sometimes we have to slow it down. Walk every five minutes or so, pick up that pace for 30 seconds, get your heart rate up, get that breathing rate up and then let it come back down. You know we're designed as an amazing species to turn it up, turn it down, and we tend to adapt. We turn on our resiliency software with these activities and with these principles novel and new experiences, things that are totally new.

Speaker 1 30:36

Anytime I can try something new, whether it's a new food or a new place to hike, or maybe it's a new author hike, or maybe it's a new author. Those novel experiences elicit dopamine oxytocin. There's a neuroscience to this that's really fascinating and describes a lot of the underpinning. And so, yeah, this is a shot from the Berkshire Hills where I live in western Massachusetts, and so a quick summary you know, liberal outdoor full spectrum lighting all of that is really really helpful. And sauna, steam, connection with others, sleep hygiene, heart rate variability I'll talk a little bit more about this and you know these are believe. That is the end of my slides. So I thank you for listening to this webinar. I hope it was helpful to you. Be well and stay well. Peace.