Sanity Before Vanity: Nutrition as Mental Health Medicine with Dr. David Wiss

Have you been conditioned to believe that nutrition's only purpose is weight management? This groundbreaking conversation with mental health nutritionist Dr. David Wiss shatters that myth, revealing how the food industry has deliberately gaslit us into focusing on calories rather than food quality.

Drawing from his journey as a registered dietitian turned whistleblower, Dr. Wiss explains how he discovered troubling conflicts of interest in nutrition education. Food companies sponsor webinars about the "safety" of high fructose corn syrup while promoting the oversimplified calories-in-calories-out model that keeps us trapped in diet mentality. Meanwhile, the profound connections between ultra-processed foods and mental health challenges remain largely unexplored in conventional healthcare.

The functional medicine approach offers a revolutionary alternative. Rather than treating symptoms in isolation, it connects mental, physical, and spiritual health through systems biology. This comprehensive framework examines a person's entire life history—from childhood eating patterns to antibiotic use, trauma experiences, and beyond—to understand how these factors collectively impact health. For those struggling with addiction, depression, anxiety, or other mental health challenges, this approach provides crucial missing pieces that conventional treatment often overlooks.

Most striking is Dr. Wiss's rallying cry: "Sanity before vanity." This philosophy prioritizes using nutrition to enhance mental wellbeing, quality of life, and relationship health rather than appearance. The difference between 1,000 calories of Doritos and 1,000 calories of nutrient-dense food might be negligible for weight loss, but profoundly different for brain function and emotional regulation.

Ready to reclaim nutrition as a powerful tool for mental health? Explore David's app "Wise Mind Nutrition" for a qualitative approach that moves beyond calorie counting. Your brain deserves better than diet culture—discover what becomes possible when you nourish your mind as carefully as you would any other vital organ.

Chapters

• 0:42 Meeting Dr. David Wiss
• 5:00 Functional Medicine Explained
• 10:42 From Dietitian to Mental Health Nutritionist
• 16:40 Exposing Food Industry's Hidden Agendas
• 23:07 Ultra-Processed Foods and Mental Health
• 33:28 Dietitians vs Nutritionists Debate
• 40:22 Nutrition Beyond Weight Loss
• 44:10 Eating Disorders and Treatment Approaches
• 47:51 Sanity Before Vanity

Transcript

Jenn Schmitz: 0:22

Well, hey, everybody, you have been gaslit into believing that nutrition is only relevant for weight loss. We are your whistleblowing shrinks, Dr Tara Lynn and therapist Jen, and you have landed yourself on the Gaslit Truth podcast. Today we have a special guest, and our guest today is David Wiss. David is a mental health nutritionist and scientist. Dr David Wiss, not Weiss, Welcome to the show.

Dr David Wiss: 0:48

Thank you so much for having me.

Dr Teralyn Sell: 0:50

Got it right. I'm so excited to have you here because I didn't know you, but I saw you, like seven years ago, and I know that you have changed exponentially since that time changed exponentially since that time, but you were one of the first, I would say, relevant entrances for me in the yes, I'm on the right path with nutrition and mental health and addiction and all that stuff, and since then, like Jen and I, the growth has been exponential. So I cannot wait to dive in with you now, because you didn't have a PhD back then either, so that's relatively new.

Dr David Wiss: 1:27

Yes, I remember building a niche using nutrition to help people recover from addiction and it was a revolutionary idea and I got some pushback, but I also got a lot of really great engagement.

Dr Teralyn Sell: 1:42

Oh good, Because mostly I just get pushed back.

Jenn Schmitz: 1:44

But yeah, I was going to say anytime we bring nutrition into the addiction space, it is we are shunned within that we are told it's out of our wheelhouse, there is no research to support it, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, and it's just like. It's like fucking getting old, it's just getting old. It's getting old and old, like 12, come on, guys. 12-step model of shaming yourself for addiction is not going to heal you. I'm sorry, it's just not.

Dr David Wiss: 2:12

It's time for holistic approaches, functional medicine, mental health. Let's do it.

Dr Teralyn Sell: 2:19

Let's do it first to set things off like functional medicine as a definition, because I think it's getting a bad rap, really meaning something that it doesn't mean. So maybe we could start there as kind of a baseline explanation. What do you think?

Dr David Wiss: 2:38

Yeah, absolutely, and I think most people think of the term. You know root cause medicine, but in today's world it's really starting to describe, you know, alternative paths and I think that you know functional medicine for a lot of people means things that are not readily acceptable by conventional medicine. But a really good functional medicine approach is going to combine wisdom from a lot of different areas and bring them together, to be more comprehensive and to really look at someone's life history. The timeline, I think, is the key to functional medicine being able to see the big picture rather than just the immediate symptoms.

Dr Teralyn Sell: 3:22

I think that's a really important part of the discussion is the history of the human. How did you get to this point? And we're not talking about the history to drill down into trauma and stuff you can but also the history in what was your life like growing up around the table? What was your first entrance into maybe medication, and why was that going on? For you, I think the differentiation is the history. Taking that we do in mental health is just very, to me, rudimentary how many siblings do you have and what kind of household did you grow up in? And that kind of stuff, your socioeconomic status, those things are still important. But I think functional medicine kind of takes it to a different level, doesn't it?

Dr David Wiss: 4:10

Yes, helps connect the dots across different domains mental health, physical health, spiritual health and brings it all together using systems biology. What is systems biology? Um, it really helps people because there's a lot of head scratching in in medicine and in uh treatment and recovery, and a really great gift that we can give to our clients is being able to help them connect some of those dots and make sense out of it. Even if there aren't really clear treatment plans for everything uh, being able to see how it all comes together can reduce anxiety and give someone at least a little bit of glimpse of hope for moving forward.

Jenn Schmitz: 5:10

Right. So it's this idea of not siloing all of these different areas and more so, looking at this idea that they actually all work interchangeably, that's right. It's all one system, right yeah?

Dr David Wiss: 5:22

So functional medicine requires that you develop some expertise in areas that might be a little challenging.

Jenn Schmitz: 5:29

Ah, yes, yes, and it kind of is. It's a rabbit hole as someone who's newer in the functional medicine world and only has, you know, a couple of years of really working through some of this. It's a huge rabbit hole, but yet it makes a lot of sense once you start to go down that. Um, as a traditional therapist who would normally ask about those, the family systems and the dynamics and what's the dinner table look like questions right Versus tell me about the sicknesses you had throughout your life. Tell me about all of the drugs that you've taken. Were you on antibiotics? I've had clients. Why are you asking me if I've been on antibiotics, jen? And then I have to explain to them this connection that occurs, right?

Jenn Schmitz: 6:40

I had a client who was just blown away when I was like, were you ever, you know like bit by a tick when you were younger? Tell me a little bit about like we've went through before, dr Terry and I, with like pans or pandas, right, and what that actually is, and why we ask these's beauty because we start to give them more options versus just this traditional Western view of what those things aren't. All those systems aren't connected, all cells, all systems. That doesn't make sense.

Dr David Wiss: 6:54

So in a 50 minute intake session, if in the last few minutes I can retell someone's story in a way that they haven't heard it before, it can build a lot of rapport. Oh, yeah, yes, and what's the beauty of rapport? The therapeutic relationship, trust. Is this a test?

Dr Teralyn Sell: 7:20

No, but I just want everybody to say that over and over and over again, because the therapeutic relationship is the biggest change agent of working with someone, and that sounds terrible, but like the buy change agent of working with someone, and that the sounds terrible, but like the buy-in of the whole thing. Um, it's that, it's that relationship, and so I do so you have, don't you have? Your aren't you a dietitian as well, don't you have?

Dr David Wiss: 7:39

Yes, blasphemy on my on my road to becoming a PhD, I am also a registered dietitian nutritionist. It's funny, you know I worked as a personal trainer when I really got into wellness in my early 20s, after college, and that sort of led me through grad school to become a registered dietitian, started my own private practice and then saw after a few years that I wanted to go deeper and have worked in that space since getting my PhD.

Dr Teralyn Sell: 9:12

Now moving more broadly into the field of mental health, yeah, so what did you notice as the why did you want to be a dietitian number one? And then, after you were in that space, what did you notice were some of the deficits there.

Dr David Wiss: 9:28

Yeah, I definitely had some compromised life chances. You know, when I had to reset in my early 20s I didn't come from a like a track record of success. I had some low spots in my early 20s and I pivoted and I said, wow, what feels accessible to me? And I got really into nutrition for my own healing journey. You know, the physical dimension of wellness revolutionized me sunlight, sleep, water supplements. I had one of those rapid transformations that everyone kind of hopes they're going to have that within a few months. Everyone's like whoa, you're different, what did you do? Can you show me the way? And so that path became well lit for me and I thought maybe nutrition was going to get a little bit more attention in upcoming years. And so I leaned into it.

Dr David Wiss: 10:18

And you know, when I got to school to become a dietitian, I was pretty quickly disappointed. There's definitely a culture there where they're teaching you you're going to be America's nutrition expert, you're going to work in a hospital, people are going to respect you, you're going to make an impact on patient lives. And there was hope. But when I was in school, I did learn pretty quickly that a lot of the information we were getting seemed to be more geared toward promoting the food industry's interests rather than promoting public health street culture. But I have an antenna that picks up agendas and I saw agendas in the curriculum that other students didn't see and I said, hey, are you guys picking up on this? We're getting a webinar right now about the safety of high fructose corn syrup from the Corn Refiners Association. We were told that a calorie is a calorie. There's nothing wrong with food dyes. These things are all safe. Just make sure people get the right amount of grams of protein. And you're going to be a medical nutrition therapist.

Dr David Wiss: 11:39

And I was scratching my head and pushing back and I started to really enter that phase where people looked at me like a renegade what's wrong with this guy? Why can't he just join? Why can't you just do what we're all doing? And I said there's something fishy here. And my nervous system picked it up really early on, and that's when I knew I wasn't going to follow a traditional dietetic path. There's pathways there for you. You can work in a hospital, you can do this.

Dr David Wiss: 12:03

I knew from the gate I was never going to follow a traditional dietetic path. You know there's there's pathways there for you. You can work in a hospital. You can do this. I knew from the gate I was never going to do any of those things, that I was going to sort of blaze my own path. So my master's thesis was actually called nutrition and substance abuse and I took a deep dive into the literature on how different substances can affect gastrointestinal health and people that had addiction histories being more likely to be depressed. How does that play out with eating, overeating, et cetera? And that's when I got into eating disorders and food addiction, what we now call ultra processed food addiction. So yeah, I knew early on that I was going to try to step into some uncomfortable places, and I'm really glad that I have, but progress has been slow.

Dr Teralyn Sell: 12:55

Yeah, no, I agree with the. Progress has been slow and sometimes that's the thing it it. It takes you from being what you need to be, because it's like why is this so slow? Why is there such resistance and so many barriers to entry here? Why can't other people just get on board with what we know to also be true, right? So, even like the ultra processed food stuff, what do you know to be true with ultra processed foods and mental wellbeing?

Dr David Wiss: 13:24

Yeah, I mean it's crystal clear that when food undergoes ultra processing, not only are there additives sugar, salts, fats, food additives, emulsifiers the list goes on but there's also a lot of stuff that's lost from the food during ultra processing. A lot of the sensitive phytonutrients and minerals. They're all stripped during high heat processes and then you add in, you know, plastics and the contact with the metals, and you're getting food that activates dopamine, that registers as rewarding and survival promoting. That's actually a pretty uh nutrient void as well as pro inflammatory. So it's. It's really clever because when a dopamine response is elicited, right, it actually convinces the brain that it's doing something that's favorable, when the opposite is true, Right, so so did you just say that, uh, that foods are made to be favorable.

Dr David Wiss: 14:27

Foods are engineered for maximum palatability, to profit maximize, and it's done so at the expense of public health.

Dr Teralyn Sell: 14:38

Where did you learn that? Where did that first come into focus for you?

Dr David Wiss: 14:42

Yeah, so when I was an early dietitian, we actually formed a group called Dietitians for Professional Integrity and we were whistleblowing in the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics because at the annual conferences there were a lot of speakers who worked for the food industry and at the time those conflicts of interest were not disclosed. So this was the part that really activated me early in my career. In medicine, when people work for pharmaceutical companies, there was a huge push towards disclosures and in the nutrition field, disclosure was not really a topic. So we formed a small group of renegade dietitians to be able to pull the curtain back on where these conflicts of interest were. And basically, we're asking for greater transparency in our parent organization. Where does the funding come from? Why are these position statements favoring industry? You know, why are we saying it's all foods fit? Why are we saying that artificial sweeteners are safe? What is the agenda here?

Dr David Wiss: 15:54

And it was a really exciting time because, you know, part of me was like, oh, I'm getting blacklisted. You know, yeah, this is going to be challenging for my career, but I think the biggest part that came out of that was you know, michael Moss wrote a book Salt, sugar, fat. I think it was 2014. And that book really opened my eyes to the food industry's use of, you know, laboratories that were used during tobacco development, and the same playbook that tobacco industry used to maximize the rewarding properties of their cigarettes they were now using with food, calculating the bliss point to the milligram of sugar or sodium. And, as someone that has a sensitive brain, I do have a history of some addiction stuff in my early 20s and late teens. You know I could sense the salience, you know, probably more than others could. And, yeah, I became fascinated in the link between nutrition, food and neuroscience and how that affects behavior, and that's always been my interest as a behavioral health nutritionist.

Dr Teralyn Sell: 17:09

That's really quite fascinating, and I know you listen to your talk all day.

Jenn Schmitz: 17:15

I know I'm just like I can't even ask him questions, because I'm so eloquent how you're saying it. I'm like I know we got to wrap weight loss into this at some point, but I'm just going to just keep listening to your talk right now, Cause.

Dr Teralyn Sell: 17:28

Well, well, I think it it. It is such a parallel to what Jen and I talk about with big pharma and therapists right, it's the same thing, it's the same thing. It's like they all took the same chapter out of a playbook and they're just like let's repeat, let's repeat let's repeat.

Jenn Schmitz: 17:47

Let's repeat Because it works. Because it works, I mean, it creates the forever consumer and you're in it, and I'm so jealous of what you said. I'm just going to throw this out and be transparent. I'm super jealous of this idea that when you were in school, you were in a space of like there were these feelers out there and I'm just like wait a minute, this doesn't make sense, right, cause I never got there. I never got there until after the degrees and after 15 years of practice, right Like I didn't get there.

Jenn Schmitz: 18:19

So the fact that you had that inquisition so early on. That that's profound to me because most people don't have that.

Dr David Wiss: 18:30

There was also a sense of all right, I got to drink the Kool-Aid a little bit and get on board so I can pass this exam. And then I can move on and forget some of this indoctrination and start to think about the bigger picture.

Jenn Schmitz: 18:44

Is Red 40 healthy Circle, yes or no? Okay, yes, fine, I'm just going to fucking circle. Yes, because it's all I can do right now.

Dr Teralyn Sell: 18:50

Okay, you know this reminds me of when I first took one of my very first addiction licensure exams years ago. The advice I got was whatever you believe to be the truth, it's probably the opposite of that. So circle that answer on there and that's what I did and I passed and I was like, wow, they were spot on, you know. So it was interesting.

Dr David Wiss: 19:12

And the playbook from you know, big pharma and big food in your example, big pharma and the mental health therapy field, big food and the nutrition field has a lot of similarities, as you mentioned, and their playbook is quite impressive, right In terms of finding ways to lean on the social determinants of health and create emotionally charged issues that pit people against themselves, so that everyone's focused on individual factors rather than systemic issues. And so, yeah, I've really taken a deeper dive in recent years when I started studying the commercial determinants of health and being able to see all the factors that are at play behind the scenes and how commercial actors use media control and gaslight people and basically have a very clear agenda to get people fighting amongst themselves so they don't see the bigger picture.

Jenn Schmitz: 20:13

Yeah, well said. That's exactly what it is. Are you running for political?

Dr Teralyn Sell: 20:18

office anytime soon, because I feel like you could. Do you have a button? Yeah, I want to. I heart David Wiss. Button Vote for. David, yeah, I can't like. Thank you, what do you say? What do you say now? Because I know you call yourself a nutritionist and is that by design? Because you've you've kind of pivoted away title registered dietitian may actually be hurting me more than helping me.

Dr David Wiss: 21:06

I am proud of who I progress made in terms of, you know, getting nutrition integrated into the healthcare system, and the Parent Organization Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics is supposed to be an advocate to help.

Dr David Wiss: 21:21

Their 100,000 plus dietitiansians, like you know, increase in status and I think public perception of the registered dietitian is at an all time low and I haven't got the sense that any progress has been made. And when you look at the energy in the field, there's this kind of culture of we got to rally, we got to stick together, let's go to Washington in March and let's go rise our collective voices to get nutrition recognized in the healthcare system, and nothing has happened. My entire career and so this year is the first year I did not renew my membership at the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics. I said I've been at this for 13 years and I am sick of watching people complain about other professionals moving in on the space. People are not elevating themselves, they're basically just upset about other people being nutritionists. And I'm like we need to collaborate, we need to have intelligent discussions and really I think that's where I decided that my annual conference is going to be the Institute of Functional Medicine and I'm not going to the nutrition conference anymore. Welcome.

Dr Teralyn Sell: 22:41

Welcome. Did you go to the IMMH?

Dr David Wiss: 22:44

or did you? No, I haven't been to that one yet, but I'm definitely keeping it on my radar.

Dr Teralyn Sell: 22:51

It should be. It's really good. I went for the first time last year. I haven't gone to the IFM, but I'll go to the IMMH again. But yeah, I agree.

Jenn Schmitz: 22:58

That's a tough space, for as you're talking, terry and I both start smiling, nodding at the same time, and I know exactly what she was thinking. And it is this idea that even when we write our titles right like the therapist, psychotherapist, mental health therapist there is a dissatisfaction that I feel internally with myself because the amount of westernized education and damage that has occurred over the years using that title, even right Like sometimes I type my name on here for to come into our program here, everyone that's watching on YouTube and sometimes I'm like I might just write Jen and for a while I was writing Deprescriber Jen, because I'm like I don't even like writing therapist feels yucky, just like what you're describing, because we know the amount of like damage that's been done within this and even though we're speaking against it and trying to talk about like the alternative perspectives to it, which we're part of it.

Jenn Schmitz: 23:59

Like, yeah, we are, we are part of it, you know, so I get that.

Dr Teralyn Sell: 24:04

A cognitive dissonance is surreal at this point.

Dr David Wiss: 24:08

Yes, I struggle with titles quite a bit because the you know, the areas that I'm most aligned with are nutritional psychiatry and nutritional psychology and I can't call myself a nutritional psychiatrist because that's misleading, because I'm not a psychiatrist or a nutritional psychologist. I have a doctorate, I practice functional medicine, but it would be misleading to call myself a functional medicine doctor. So I'm left with this title, confusion right. And I've, you know, moved through some different ways to describe myself and I've been using mental health nutritionist lately and it's not a utilized term, so we'll see if it picks up.

Dr Teralyn Sell: 24:53

We're taking up our own. It's funny because I've made up different titles for myself, because nobody understands what it is that I do. And I will tell you this I have a doctorate in psychology and in this space nobody thinks it's enough, like it's just. It's crazy the amount of pushback I get for not being a real doctor.

Dr Teralyn Sell: 25:15

If I were a real doctor, then I could talk about big pharma, big food, all these things that your real doctors aren't talking about, by the way, none of them are talking about any of this stuff. So what is your doctorate in?

Dr David Wiss: 25:28

Yeah, I have a PhD from UCLA in public health and I had a minor in health psychology and I loved health psychology. I had such a blast in that department, yes, yes. Quick side note criticism about my field as registered dietitians. There are levels, right the same way there are for registered nurses or physical therapists. There, registered dietitians, there are levels right the same way there are for registered nurses or a physical therapist. There are dietitians that don't have master's degrees. There's master's level dietitian. And then there's some of us that have doctorates and the healthcare system recognizes them as identical. So insurance would pay the same for an RD who had a bachelor's versus an RD who had a doctorate. So it basically forces those of us at the higher level outside of the healthcare system.

Dr Teralyn Sell: 26:15

Very much so. The difference between a master's level therapist and a PhD in private practice is a couple dollars an hour per insurance, a couple dollars. So it's really ridiculous. There's really not much incentive for anyone to move past the master's level. So, yeah, it's really. It's so similar, these systems are so similar. I didn't realize the parallels here.

Dr David Wiss: 26:40

Parallels and the same way that you know, venture capital firms have, you know, bought up, like insurance contracts, to promote telehealth services with mental health therapists and are basically offering people work from home. You'll get a full schedule.

Jenn Schmitz: 26:58

I get an email every week. I get a spam text or email on it every single week.

Dr David Wiss: 27:03

You'll get this busy schedule, you'll get a low rate, but you don't have to do anything, and that essentially just drives the competitive rate down. The same thing has happened in my field, where dietitians have been decimated and are working for less and less, and the rate for dietitian services is going down, going down. It's less than it was when I started 13 years ago.

Dr Teralyn Sell: 27:29

That's insane. What 13 years ago? It's less than that. That's insane.

Dr David Wiss: 27:34

My rate has gone up, but that's because I don't work in the healthcare system.

Dr Teralyn Sell: 27:39

Right right, All right. So here's the question du jour. When we look at the difference between a dietician and a nutritionist who has actually been to school, what are the differences that you see? Having done and had both, Like what do you? How can we differentiate that in the general population?

Dr David Wiss: 27:59

Yeah, nutritionist has no formal definition. So technically anyone could call themselves a nutritionist. And I think that's where there's a lot of contention and disagreement and debate is that you know a registered dietitian when I started it was just RD, and then you know we moved into registered dietitian, nutritionist. So a registered dietitian is a kind of nutritionist. It's a specific type and that it is recognized by the healthcare system. So in a hospital or in an eating disorder clinic there tends to be a requirement for a registered dietitian and you know that makes it the norm, I think, or maybe the mainstream nutritionist, but there's plenty of others. There's a CNS certified nutrition specialist and any other allied health professional that gets some sort of training can call themselves a nutritionist. So it's a murky area because the criticism is that someone got a three-month online degree and now they call themselves a nutritionist and so it's created this culture war in my field where you know the dietitians are like we're not nutritionists, we're dietitians. And we went to school and we had to do this and we did an internship and we sat for an exam and I've been so exhausted watching the infighting going on for all these years and you know I do remember in school and in the internship, this message of you know, you're the dietician, you're the expert, you are the one and seeing that sort of play out you know. I remember when I was in my internship and I went to a hospital, they sure didn't treat me like the expert, right? I was like the bottom of the totem pole in the hospital. They sure didn't treat me like the expert, right, I was like the bottom of the totem pole in the hospital, right. And so there are a lot of people that are disenfranchised and disillusioned.

Dr David Wiss: 30:02

In my field I've had a lot of colleagues leave basically and say this isn't a worthwhile career.

Dr David Wiss: 30:08

I'm not making any money and I think the biggest challenge of it is that there isn't. I have a lot of job satisfaction, but for a lot of my colleagues there isn't a lot of job satisfaction, and this is really based on the assumptions that are made about what the job entails, right? So if someone's a dietician, there does seem to be people that are, you know, attracted to that person because they want a calorie calculated meal plan, they want to be given a very specific diet. And you know, I think dietitian lends itself to go see a dietitian when you need someone to do some calculations for you right To figure out exactly how many grams of protein you need and how to fit that in, and I have never done that type of work. But in 13 years, the amount of people that reach out to me because they assume that my job looks a certain way. I spend a lot of time managing people's assumptions and providing some re-education about what kind of work you can do together.

Jenn Schmitz: 31:19

Right, is that called informed consent? Like, are you informed consenting the shit out of people? Okay, you tied this right into this idea that we started with. Tell us how the idea of nutrition and weight loss, that concept Okay, cause you're talking about calorie counting. Okay, like, we're talking about a very structured, itemized like table of what. Here's what you follow, here's what you are taking in. Tell us when we started here, just so everybody knows, we said to David we said we're figuring this hook out. Tell us the hill that you're going to die on now, because the hill that you were going to die on eight years ago is different than the hill you're going to die on today.

Jenn Schmitz: 32:01

And your hook you came up with right here is people are gaslit into believing this idea that nutrition is only relevant for weight loss.

Dr David Wiss: 32:09

Yes.

Jenn Schmitz: 32:10

What does that mean? How has it?

Dr David Wiss: 32:11

changed. The Western medicine model usually necessitates a referral from an MD for these ongoing services and so the dietician was sort of built in. If there was type two diabetes, perhaps hypertension or BMI above 30, that would generate a referral to a dietitian, and the Western medicine model has long held the assumption that if someone is in a larger body, if they lose weight, a lot of their comorbidities will go away. So the dietitian has been linked to this referral. For I'm going to help someone lose weight and you know, when I was in school I was so embarrassed One of their major teaching tools were these food models.

Dr David Wiss: 32:57

You guys ever seen those dietitians are like, given these models that help teach people portion sizes? That, like that was the education in the outpatient clinic is that you were going to tell someone what their calories were and what an appropriate portion size was for them to meet those caloric needs. And I just remember thinking this completely ignores all the neuroscience of eating. All the information we have about behavior change, barriers related to trauma, the entire mental health picture is completely ignored by this assumption that people eat a certain way because they don't know what the appropriate portion size is right.

Dr Teralyn Sell: 33:41

I'm thinking wait, I went to school, spent all this money to be given a plate With the little pictures on it With the thing and learn a calorie counter, but that reminds me of therapists, though, going to school and learning how to, you know, do a manualized workbook for people. Like it's the same shit. Like it's the same, it's exactly so it takes into account zero human experience nothing art.

Dr David Wiss: 34:06

There you go, one size fits all and it's centered on the assumption of personal responsibility, which you you know, of course I'm not against. I'm all for personal responsibility, uh, but I I think I think that's done a number on the food world, because people have internalized this idea that if there is a change they want to make and they're unable to make it, it's because they don't have the right information or they don't want it bad enough. And then you internalize the shame and the weight stigma around it and then it just perpetuates the disappointment and isolation. And yeah, I'll never it's just like the addiction model.

Dr Teralyn Sell: 34:48

Yeah, it does, because I'm also thinking about metabolic weight gain. When you're on certain medications and I remember Jen and I worked in the same place it was a prison and these guys would be put on these medications. They'd gain 80, 90, 100 pounds and then they'd be put on a special diet and I'm like I'm sorry, but that diet is not going to counteract this metabolic weight gain from this medication, but it's going to make you feel like a fricking failure because you can't do it right.

Jenn Schmitz: 35:21

Well, and not to mention, like the gut dysbiosis that exists for these individuals, going all the way back to like meds they took when they were younger. Medical interventions, trauma, like come on Right, but like that's nope.

Dr David Wiss: 35:36

So yeah, my group practice, which is called nutrition and recovery, has brought dietitians into mental health treatment centers, and so for a long time, you know, we run groups and do one on one counseling for adolescents and adults that have addiction histories or other mental health challenges, and I've seen that all the time the patient is gaining weight from a medication and this is when they say, oh, bring the dietician in, hey, fix this right.

Dr David Wiss: 36:08

And that the dietician's role is there for, dietitian's role is there for calorie centric, math centric, weight management purposes, rather than helping someone understand gut dysbiosis, inflammation, eating to optimize neurotransmitter function all these incredible things that a nutritionist should be able to do gets overlooked and it gets reduced to this more almost vanity, focused, appearance focused approach to food, and I think that's given nutrition such a bad reputation. So I've been screaming from that hilltops sanity before vanity. Let's use nutrition to improve mental health and let's use it to improve quality of life, relational health, being able to look the world in the eye, build self-efficacy, and if we can move past these reductionistic models of calories in, calories out, I think the field could go much further.

Dr Teralyn Sell: 37:11

I agree 100% and I watch these dieticians on TikTok and they do that. It's just the calorie and no calorie is different than another calorie. And although that might be true, you know, a calorie is a calorie, maybe, but what about the nutritional value of the food? Right Like, I can eat a,000 calories of Doritos, correct, and lose weight. Or I could eat 1,000 calories of nutritious food and lose weight. It's so archaic, but how am I going to feel on the Doritos? Right Like, how am I going to feel?

Jenn Schmitz: 37:46

It's so archaic. Are we back in the early 2000s, eating Snackwell 100-calorie packs every single fucking day and going it's okay because it's only 100 calories? It's such an archaic thought process. We have evolved beyond that, research has evolved beyond that, the field of nutrition has evolved beyond that, but yet that's still part of what's happening. Is what you're saying, david? This is still very real.

Dr David Wiss: 38:13

It's still very real and it is a message that does support the food industry's interests to get people focused on quantities of food rather than the qualities of food, and that's why the ultra-processed food conversation is so important. They're like well, you just got to count your calories. Here's an app and, by the way, here's a reduced calorie version for you because we're here to help. And I've also noticed that there's a particular psychological profile associated with people that are really into calories, because it really feels empowering. Some people are able to manipulate those variables and increase their exercise, reduce their calories and move their weight and they kind of move through the world with an assumption that you know that's how it is and that's how it should be and if, if you know, knowledge is power, you know you can do this. And it's almost like um, a personal trainer kind of mindset, in a little bit of like no, it's simple math, just do it right, I'll help you. And those of us that are really interested in mental health, trauma-informed work know that it's much more complex and nuanced.

Jenn Schmitz: 39:28

Yeah, you can't outgrit addiction in that way. You can't outgrit these things. You can't outgrit a really shitty food intake of what you're eating. You might think that there's this I don't have enough resiliency or I got to fight harder. But when you're putting in your mouth and into your body things that are actually contraindicated, things your body can't process, things that are actually toxic to your body, things that are actually toxic to your body, things that are ruining those neurotransmitter pathways, you're trying to outgrit something. Right? You got to be stronger. All the addiction clients we have. I'm not strong enough. I got to be stronger. No, actually, there's just a complete non-optimization of your brain right now. That's happening because of what you're putting in your body. So that theory, that battle cry I think that's out there within this is like, well, I'm just not tough enough and strong enough, right? So we have clients that come to us all the time.

Jenn Schmitz: 40:24

I had one, like two weeks ago, who got so mad when I said when you're ready to stop tracking on an app all of the things you eat and all the calories you eat, and I don't throw people on the bus, right? But it was a nutritionist. I went to see a nutritionist and said this is how you've got to do it, right. And they're showing me the app, they're showing me the paperwork, right, like that they were given. And I said you let me know when you're ready to stop doing that and we start to just pay attention to the types of foods that you're eating and you stop counting calories. Your life's going to fucking change and they got very upset with me.

Dr Teralyn Sell: 40:56

They haven't come back to see me since. Well, it's because diet culture is such big money. I mean, losing weight is big money.

Jenn Schmitz: 41:00

It is, it is so even for nutritionists.

Dr Teralyn Sell: 41:04

You know, if you want to build a practice like, do it on weight loss, because you're going to get the most clients from that.

Dr David Wiss: 41:10

Yeah, yeah.

Dr Teralyn Sell: 41:15

I was saying to David before the episode started. I said it's really funny to me because I'll have. I don't do weight loss, weight loss girl, everyone. I do mental health. But inevitably I'll ask, like what are your top three goals of seeing seeing me blah, blah, blah, number one to lose weight. I'm like, okay, all right, okay, we'll, we'll start there. You know, it's interesting. And there's also this uh, uh, there was a big, uh eating disorder clinic near me that I was touring and they had out in the middle of their lunch tables like little bags of chips, you know, like your Doritos and your potato chips, and all this stuff. And I said, why do you have this here? Well, because all calories are calories.

Jenn Schmitz: 41:59

And I was like Talk about it, david. I want to hear about that now. We don't have a ton of time, but can you talk about this idea of of disordered eating that develops within this context, or eating disorders that are already present, and this is the type of things that are being given to these individuals? Yes, like, can you talk?

Dr David Wiss: 42:19

about that briefly. We started off saying that the food industry has an agenda to promote, you know, the calorie centric model and to emphasize personal responsibility, and that's what trickles down through training for dietitians. Dietitians are the gatekeepers in eating disorder treatment, so it makes sense that that philosophy would be prevalent. Eating disorders are, you know, a really complex area because a lot of eating disorders not all of them are characterized by extreme fears, phobias and restrictive tendencies. So having a message of food inclusivity and food positivity is actually a good thing for a subset of people that have eating disorders. And I think you know, generally speaking, anorexia nervosa is the eating disorder that has the most, you know, morbidity, mortality, and it's scary to people. So in the field of eating disorders, it seems like everyone prioritizes the restrictive tendencies of the classic anorexia nervosa patient, which, in a case like that, being able to promote a chip or a cookie, it actually could be a very positive, recovery oriented thing. However, that subset of people is taken as the gold standard truth for everyone that has an eating disorder. So the food philosophy in this center is very anorexia centric and people are afraid to have any alternative philosophies or any competing theories because they're so protective of the vulnerable person with the restrictive eating disorder. So it's created a culture of this is how all eating disorders are treated and used, and so you could get someone in with a substance use disorder, a food addiction, a binge eating disorder, and they are essentially treated the same way that someone with orthorexia, restrictive anorexia, presents. You know from the stance of food philosophies.

Dr David Wiss: 44:25

And then we wonder why there's so few treatment completions and people are so dissatisfied leaving treatment. Is that there has been a lack of nuance in the eating disorder space to be able to understand the complexities of addiction, metabolic disorder, and that the field of eating disorders is crumbling. And that's really the space that I've occupied for so many of these years watching the professional organizations get smaller. I went to Academy of Eating Disorders conference a few years ago and they didn't even have a. For so many of these years watching the professional organizations get smaller, I went to Academy of Eating Disorders conference a few years ago and they didn't even have a budget to serve us lunch. I flew there, spent thousands of dollars and I was in line in the hotel buying a sandwich from the coffee shop for lunch. I was like, oh, I'm never coming back here. These organizations are shrinking and angry. Angry about, you know, issues related to weight stigma and other important issues. But again, it's all infighting and no progress.

Jenn Schmitz: 45:28

Right, it's all a one size fits. All it's this, all this approach is just a one size fits all right, Whether it's a little disordered eating and orthorexia, you've got binge eating disorder. Your bulimia doesn't matter, it's just the one size fits all. Here's your potato chips on the table.

Dr David Wiss: 45:42

Yeah, when people live in fight or flight, it's hard to live in nuance in gray areas, and I think that's part of the grand design as well.

Dr Teralyn Sell: 45:51

I have one more question, because this is something that comes up a lot, and I just wanted to get your take on this, because some of the pushback that I get on social media or in person is eating healthy is too expensive, and so I was wondering how you might overcome something like that. When you hear those things, what are your thoughts?

Dr David Wiss: 46:21

Yeah, there are costs in this world and obviously we use money as our primary measurement of it.

Dr David Wiss: 46:24

But if someone has the ability to spend time learn how to cook, you can buy food that's not overly priced and learn how to prepare it in ways that are enjoyable and even palatable. But you know, especially living in Los Angeles, right, like you know, finances are a major concern with nutrition and I would go as far as to say that nutrition is a major unspoken tool of oppression to marginalized groups that don't have access to high quality food, particularly in the prison system and addiction treatment, other institutional settings. But yeah, a lot of people just don't want to get their hands dirty. There's barriers to cooking and cleaning, but it's probably the biggest lever that I can pull is to move someone from being averse to the kitchen to like bringing some joy there, being able to turn on a song or get into the right mindset and make something that's not only nutritious but also deeply symbolic about a commitment to health, connecting to food, connecting to nature and living in an ecosystem that fosters health, wellness rather than illness.

Dr Teralyn Sell: 47:41

I love that.

Jenn Schmitz: 47:41

I love it too, oh, that's a great spot to wrap up Sanity before vanity. People, If you take anything from this today, you need that. Do you have that on a t-shirt?

Dr Teralyn Sell: 47:52

I know, do you have that? It is some merch.

Jenn Schmitz: 47:54

Are you on a billboard in LA that says that with your face on it? Because if not, you need to make that shit happen. I'm getting there.

Dr David Wiss: 48:02

I also want to add that there are apps out there that don't track calories and don't track macros. There are other approaches to looking at food qualitatively rather than quantitatively, and they're not as successful as the MyFitnessPals and the calorie tracking apps of the world, because that's what people are programmed to believe that they want. But there are other approaches out there that are more geared toward giving people what they need, which is a look at qualitative nutrition over quantitative nutrition. So my app is called Wise Mind Nutrition.

Jenn Schmitz: 48:37

Oh, love it, love it, yes. Wise Mind Nutrition. Oh, I'm going to check that out. Okay, he has an app everybody. Nutrition for mental health.

Dr Teralyn Sell: 48:46

Love it All right everybody.

Jenn Schmitz: 48:48

We'll put that in the show notes for you too, just so you know All right, we are Jen and Terry, the whistleblowing mental maverick, deep throating informants that are wrapping up today with Dr David Wyss.

Jenn Schmitz: 49:02

Thank you for coming on the show, david, it's been awesome, you have brought some insight to our listeners that I guarantee you they did not have, and some good spots for getting inquisitive, curious about. So thank you for being on the show. Guys, if you want to send us your gaslit stories, you can do that at thegaslittruthpodcast at gmailcom. You can also hit us up on any of our socials. Dm us. We are on all the big ones. Let us know what you think. Only give us five stars and if you're feeling so inclined, buy us a coffee, because, guess what? We're doing this shit for free and we're advocating in that way. So thank you again, david, for coming on, and that's a wrap everybody.