Ep. 357: Nutritional Psychiatry? Stopping Symptoms Through Eating! [REMASTERED]

What if your "chemical imbalance" was never actually in your brain — but on your plate?

Dr. Georgia Ede is a Harvard trained psychiatrist who began to experience a host of mystery symptoms in her 40s, including fibromyalgia, migraines, chronic fatigue syndrome, and IBS. 

 
When she got relief after experimenting with her diet, she began her path of nutritional studies & later became a nutritional psychiatrist. In this episode, she covers questionnaire collecting vs research, a warning about experimenting on yourself, chemical imbalances vs inflammation & 3 tests you can do at home.

This episode originally aired on July 8, 2024.

If you liked this episode, you’ll also like episode 251: FOOD ADDICTION: CHARACTER FLAW OR REAL DEPENDENCE? [REMASTERED]

 Guest:

https://www.instagram.com/georgiaedemd/

https://twitter.com/GeorgiaEdeMD

https://www.diagnosisdiet.com/

https://www.facebook.com/GeorgiaEdeMd

https://www.linkedin.com/in/georgiaedemd/

Sponsors: 

https://www.historicpensacola.org/about-us/ 

1:31 Skeptical Psychiatrist's Turning Point

3:11 Why Nutrition Studies Lie

5:38 Rethinking Chemical Imbalances

7:10 Metabolic vs Nutritional Psychiatry

8:52 Two Diets, Two Goals

11:12 Testing Diets in Prisons?

12:04 How Fast Results Come

14:05 Special Forces Eat Keto

15:00 Is Inflammation to Blame?

18:14 Try 30 Carbs a Day

21:02 Self-Experimenting Without a Doctor

24:25 Test Your Insulin at Home

28:58 Does Red Dye Cause ADHD?

31:06 The Chocolate Craving Mystery

34:00 Inside Food Addiction Research

39:32 Escape the Glucose Rollercoaster

42:11 Her 90-Year-Old Mom's Keto Win

46:08 Hope Is on the Menu

Request to join my private Facebook Group, MFR Curious Insiders: https://www.facebook.com/share/g/1BAt3bpwJC/

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

When my next guest was in her 40s, she, like Minnie, began to experience a host of mystery symptoms, including fibromyalgia, migraines, chronic fatigue syndrome, and IBS. When she got relief after experimenting with her diet, she went from seeing food choices as a way to control her weight to a powerful medical intervention. Her path of nutritional studies led her from being a traditional psychiatrist to a nutritional one. She has since spent 12 of her 25 years of clinical experience as a college psychiatrist and nutrition consultant, where she was the first to offer students nutrition-based approaches as an alternative to psychiatric medications. Today she's going to share how food is not just fuel for your body, but a powerful ally for your brain health. Harvard-trained food first psychiatrist, changing diets and minds, Dr. Georgia Eid. Thanks for being here. Thank you so much, Meredith. That just says everything we need to say. Right. I am so excited to have this conversation because I had never considered this area of nutritional psychiatry. And I love things that make me feel empowered with my health and especially my mental health. And but I wanted to ask you about your personal before and after because you practiced traditional psychiatry for a number of years. And I wanted to know do you think you would have been open to nutritional psychiatry had you not experienced results yourself? No.

SPEAKER_00 1:32

In fact, I know for a fact that I wasn't, because a lot of patients who were coming to me had seen other practitioners or were working simultaneously with other practitioners, nutrition-focused practitioners or holistic practitioners working in the sort of complementary health space. And I, I and I'm I'm I'm not proud to say this, but I really did view those approaches as less than. I viewed them as inferiors, non-medical, not scientific, not grounded in all of these. I'm all of the training that I had, you know, four years of biology in college and four years of medical school and four years of psychiatry residency. I really had a particular way of looking at things. I was trained to think about things in a particular way. And there was, it wasn't really until my own health problems cropped up that I was forced to look outside the conventional training that I had and that the doctors that I was going to see for help had, because conventional medicine simply wasn't able to help me. And I didn't understand what was wrong. They didn't know that they told me everything was fine. And of course it wasn't. So I had no other choice but to go further. And if honestly, I I worry, if I hadn't come across my own selfish motivations for exploring different paths, I might still be practicing that same way and really not able to help patients in the way that I'm now able to work with people. It's just been career changing and life-changing. And I am very, very grateful that I stumbled into this area of work.

SPEAKER_01 3:11

It seems like a really powerful application of medicine and of wellness. As I was reading more about it, it seems that what you do eat is as important as what you don't eat, which must make the research challenging.

SPEAKER_00 3:30

It is because well, nutrition research is really tough to do. Yeah. It's really hard to control people's diets perfectly, especially large numbers of people, and especially over long periods of time. And in fact, it's impossible. It's impossible. You can't take 10,000 people, put them in a test tube for a year and feed them exactly what you want to feed them, and then see what happens at the end. It's impossible. So most nutrition studies are either very short or very small, or they're very confusing or complicated. So most of the nutrition information that we have swimming around in our heads, which is incorrect, by the way, most of that information comes from these what seem like big, prestigious, important studies done with tens of thousands of people coming out of Harvard University and Tufts University, really prestigious institutions. And it seems so precise. Oh, if you have, if you eat half a cup more blueberries every week, then you're going to reduce your risk of dementia. It sounds like science. Oh, and this study was done over 25 years with 30,000 people. Of course, that's not real science. That is questionnaire-based guesswork. It's really just theories that have never been tested. And most of them are incorrect. Most of them have no foundation in biology. They're just people coming up with random ideas about foods. It's almost like kind of throwing spaghetti against the wall and seeing what's taken. And so this is this is what I learned when I started studying nutrition was that almost everything I thought I knew about nutrition was wrong. And and not just that it, not just that these ideas we have in our heads about things like whole grains and rainbows of fruits and vegetables and meat and saturated fat, not that those ideas are just wrong and they don't work. They're actually, it's harmful if you if you don't have the right information. You can do harm to your brain and to the rest of your body if you don't have the right information. So that's that's when I get really excited about sharing the truth about nutrition science with people.

SPEAKER_01 5:39

So how does nutritional psychiatry research differ from this other observational research that you're referring to?

SPEAKER_00 5:49

Yeah. So for a long, long, long, long time, we thought about really for the past 75 years, we've thought about mental health problems as chemical imbalances in the brain. And yet, still in 2024, I can't test you for chemical imbalances in your brain. There's no way I can really know what's going on as an outpatient psychiatrist. And but then this new field of psychiatry came along about maybe 10 years ago, called nutritional psychiatry. And that branch of psychiatry started to look at, well, what if the deterioration in the quality of our diet is driving some of these chemical imbalances? What if, what if, what if depression and anxiety and dementia and all these other things that we are facing? What if part of the problem is what we're eating? And so nutritional psychiatry started doing experiments, actual experiments with human beings changing their diets to see what happens. And that's where we get the information, for example, about the Mediterranean diet. There's now three quality, what are called randomized controlled trials, which are sort of the highest quality type of clinical trial you can conduct, demonstrating that if people have moderate to severe major depression, clinical depression, they can in many cases improve their symptoms simply by changing from the so-called standard American diet or the SAD diet to the Mediterranean diet. So these were actual clinical trials where you changed people's diets and they got better. And now that this even newer field of metabolic psychiatry, so I'm I'm both a nutritional psychiatrist and a metabolic psychiatrist. So I care about dietary quality, the quality of foods we eat. So the Mediterranean diet improves dietary quality. It's more nutritious, it has less junk food in it, more whole foods. I'm also a metabolic psychiatrist, and metabolic psychiatry, that is where even more fascinating, exciting, and powerful interventions are being studied. Because what we look at isn't just the quality of the foods in the diet, but the metabolic impact of the diet that you're eating on your glucose levels, on your insulin levels, on your brain, on inflammation in the brain, on something called oxidative stress, your ability to fight. We're always told to eat more antioxidants. Well, your brain has its own antioxidants and they work better when you switch the diet in particular ways. And the ability of your brain to generate energy in this smooth, reliable way for the rest of your life. So when you combine in scientific research the principles of dietary quality, let's eat healthier foods, with metabolic principles, let's get our glucose and insulin levels in a healthy range and make sure we're not damaging ourselves over time by eating the wrong way, then you've got a really powerful biologically based intervention that has the power to, in many cases, substantially improve, or even in some cases, completely put into complete recovery, even very serious mental illnesses.

SPEAKER_01 8:52

Wow. Okay, so if I'm understanding you correctly, the difference between the nutritional psychiatry and the metabolic psychiatry is one is for like acute symptoms symptoms and one is for like long-term brain health.

SPEAKER_00 9:06

Well, they both, they both are important. So they both, it's it's less about the short and the long term and more about the way you're thinking about your diet. When you look at your diet, there's two different pieces that are important to improve. So one is the quality of the food. Are you eating mostly whole foods instead of a lot of junk and processed foods? Are those foods nutritious? Are they healthy for you? All those kinds of things. And so that's where whole foods principles come from. That's why most diets that are healthier for us are based in whole foods rather than processed foods and that sort of thing. So the nutritional quality of the diet, that's important whether you're trying to treat an existing mental health issue or prevent one in the future, so short and long term. And then the metabolic quality of your diet. And what that means is that if you, as you look at your the foods you're eating, how are they affecting your glucose and insulin levels? So even if you're eating an entirely whole foods diet, let's say you're eating a paleo diet where you've got it's all of meat and eggs and fruits and vegetables and nuts and seeds and it's fish and chicken, it's all whole foods, kind of hunter-gatherer style pattern. It's all whole foods. There's no junk in there, but it could still have too much carbohydrate in it for your personal metabolism and be keeping your glucose and insulin levels running too high. And if that's happening, then you will need to make adjustments to it to suit your, to make sure that you, that it's safe for you. So there's the the the dot the nutrition quality piece, the food quality, and then the impact on your glucose and insulin levels, which is what metabolic psychiatry pays a lot of attention to. So nutritional psychiatrists, most people in that field focus on the Mediterranean diet. Because there's a lot of, as I said, there's now three trials already showing that it helps with depression. Metabolic psychiatry is more interested in the ketogenic diet because the ketogenic diet is such a powerful way to get those glucose and insulin levels into a healthy range. It's not the only diet that I use. I use lots of different diets in my work, but that's kind of a good way of thinking about the two different schools of thought.

SPEAKER_01 11:12

Yeah, that helps a lot. Okay, so I love how immediate the results are. Well, they sound immediate, apparent. Maybe I should use the word apparent. I love how apparent the results sound compared to these historical, these historical accounts, like with Ansel Keys and stuff. If my audience has been listening for a while, we did an episode diving into Ansel Keys and the history, the weird history of heart health and institutionalized hypotheses and stuff like that. So if you haven't listened to that, you can go back and listen to that as your homework. But what I love is that this has more of like a it feels more concrete. So if it is showing a concrete result for so many people, is there an ethical way to administer this and continue research in controlled environments like prisons or institutions?

SPEAKER_00 12:04

Oh my gosh. Well, I don't know. I hadn't thought about that before, to be honest. But what I can tell you is that there's a lot of the research, especially in metabolic psychiatry, is really exploding right now. There are clinical trials going on around the world, and some of these are going to be larger randomized control trials, which is again considered sort of the gold standard of high-quality clinical trial research. And so we've we've got some preliminary trials, the clinical trials that have already occurred that have been very, very promising, showing that if you switch people from standard American diet or something like that, to sort of a typical way, typical way of eating, to a ketogenic diet, that you can see within on average three weeks, anywhere between three weeks and three months, you can start to see people improving dramatically, even people who have had mental illnesses for very long periods of time, who have been taking multiple psychiatric medications, who have been in and out of the hospital, who have been on the verge of homelessness, who have been on psychiatric disability. So it's a really powerful intervention. Whether I would recommend trying out this diet in an institutional setting is kind of beyond my pay grade. But I will say that that I what people are fed in prisons and what people are fed in schools, what people are fed in the military, what people are fed in nursing homes is mostly driven by the dietary guidelines. And the dietary guidelines are dangerous. The dietary guidelines are grounded not in biology, they're grounded in guesswork. They're grounded in ideology and guesswork. And really there's no science behind them. And they're actually quite harmful to people. So I would love the dietary guidelines to change because that would automatically improve the quality of food that people are getting in these settings where they don't have a lot of control over what they're eating. So to that, I mean, I can get behind that.

SPEAKER_01 14:06

Yeah, I think we all can. We had we, we and me and the listeners, we had a great conversation with Nina Taischult, and she's working hard to really make those changes because you mentioned the government, like the military, but military members in the highest performing areas, like special forces war fighters, they're actually fed in many cases a ketogenic diet to optimize their performance and make them safer so that they can perform more safely what they need to do. So that is interesting, the contrast. But I love I love the empowerment that you're giving folks on like a personal level. So I want to kind of kind of cover myths and recommendations, if you don't mind. Sure. So at first I wanted to ask about inflammation. Broadly speaking, how guilty is inflammation in the role of mental health disorders?

SPEAKER_00 15:00

Inflammation is actually one of the drivers of most of the diseases that we face, whether they're mental health issues or physical health issues. Now, in the body, you can feel inflammation or you can see it, but you can't in the brain. So you can't see or feel the brain working. Your brain doesn't get red or swollen or sore when it's inflamed because it doesn't have nerve endings and it's encased in this thick layer of bones. You can't see that it's inflamed. But we know that it gets inflamed in a lot of different types of mental health conditions: depression, dementia, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, lots and lots of mental health conditions. Will researchers can see evidence of inflammation in the brain. You can't feel it, but it can be measured. And so this inflammation in the brain is a major driver of a lot of different types of mental health conditions. And I think where the evidence is strongest is in depression and dementia, but it's also because those conditions are studied more closely than some other ones. And this inflammation, a lot of times we're told, well, inflammation is the kind of the new kid on the block when you think about mental root causes of mental illness. We're not looking so much at the chemical imbalances as much as we used to. We're trying to understand, well, what's causing those chemical imbalances in the first place? And this new kid on the block, neuroinflammation or brain inflammation, can all on its own completely destabilize your neurotransmitter, your balance between brain chemicals like serotonin and dopamine and GABA and glutamate and all these other chemicals that we studied in school. So inflammation, what's causing the inflammation? Well, you actually need to look no further than the modern diet for some prime suspects and really the signature ingredients of the modern diet that it makes it makes it so unhealthy for us compared to all the other patterns that have ever come before it are tremendously high amounts of refined carbohydrates, sugars, flowers, cereals, that sort of thing, and refined vegetable oils or seed oils. So both of these promote inflammation and something else called oxidative stress in the brain, which is why we're always told to eat more antioxidants. So these, if we focus on these, the inflammation and the oxidative stress, and this third thing is insulin resistance, which we might get to later. If we focus on those rather than the chemical imbalances, then we have a lot more power because that's what's often driving the the only way you can try to fix a chemical imbalance, if you think the chemical imbalance is the main problem, is with medication. And medications don't work very well. They do help some people, they're really important tools. I still use them, but they do, if we're being honest, fail most people. They don't bring most people enough relief. And there's a tremendous price to pay in terms of side effects. So we need root cause interventions. We need to figure out what's causing all this inflammation and oxidative stress and insulin resistance in the first place. And diet's not the only factor, but it is the one you have the most control over. And it's the thing that's impacting your life three to six times a day, the choices you make.

SPEAKER_01 18:15

Yeah, because I think medical burnout is such an under highlighted aspect of any health struggle, whether it's mental health or physical body health, you just get tired of going to doctor's appointments and the whole, the whole act of, oh, they don't know, we're going to more tests, my insurance may or may not cover it. So if somebody is like listening to this and they think, well, I really struggle with depression. And yeah, my medicine isn't working, if someone decided to experiment on themselves by swapping out seed oils while cooking and for snacking for things like more stable oils, like coconut oil, avocado oil, animal fats, and reducing their carbs to say 30 grams or fewer. 30 for those that don't know, that's like a hamburger bun. So that would be like your 30 carbs. And then they did that for like three weeks. Or I guess the question is how long before they would start to notice a difference based on what you've seen in research?

SPEAKER_00 19:23

There's different steps people can take. And the first step, and it's sort of what you're describing just now, I kind of have three levels of in in of dietary change, degrees of dietary change people can make depending on what they feel ready for. But I usually will recommend that people start with sort of what you're saying is a whole foods plan. It's sort of a paleo pattern, meats and seafoods, and fruits and vegetables and nuts and seeds and that sort of thing. Anyway, uh a paleo plan, but lower in carbohydrate, about 30 grams per meal to start off with, and then gradually bringing that down from there if you need to. So whole foods plan. So what I see when I and then moving on from there, you might need to lower it further. You might even go to the need to go to the ketogenic level, and I explained how to do that too. So different levels for different people. But how fast does it take? So the fastest I've seen relief, and I've seen it enough times to say this is not unusual, three days. So three days is the soonest you will see improvement, and some people will feel better in three days. On average, it's more like three weeks. And on the outside, you might need three months. So this three days, three weeks, three months, those are kind of your benchmarks. And that's why I recommend that everybody tries these dietary interventions for at least six to 12 weeks, and you'll be patient and see what you can do. And if you're if they're not getting you where you're trying to go, there are other changes you can make and you can kind of gradually improve the the nutritional and metabolic quality of your diet as you move along, depending on what you feel ready for and how you're responding. But yes, some people, quite a few, feel better in three days.

SPEAKER_01 21:02

So if nutrition is that powerful of a medical intervention, should people be experimenting on themselves without the oversight of a nutritional psychiatrist?

SPEAKER_00 21:14

Great. Thanks for asking this. So when it comes to Whole Foods plans, I mean, really, it would be unusual for somebody to need medical supervision or approval just to switch to a whole foods plan, something like a paleo diet that's got enough carbohydrate in it that you're not gonna go into ketosis. And that's why the first plan in my diet that I recommend is kind of a 90 grams of carbohydrate per day. That's still dropping your daily carbs. For most people, eat at least 300 grams of carbohydrate per day. So dropping it to 90 is already a big drop, but it's not such a big drop that it's gonna be a huge shock to your brain and your body and your chemistry. When you go to a ketogenic level, especially if you switch too fast, you will need, I would recommend that you work with somebody, work with a professional. To guide you on that kind of a plan, because as you said, a ketogenic diet, it's not like other diets. It's not, it's it's a powerful biochemical intervention. When you drop your insulin, really what's happening on a ketogenic diet is you're lowering your insulin levels to the point that you can burn fat for energy. And when you drop your insulin levels from very high, with the typical diets are pretty high insulin diets, when you drop your insulin levels to that fat burning point, if you do that too fast or without the right supervision and help and monitoring, especially if you have a medical health issues like high blood pressure or diabetes, high blood sugar, or if you're taking medications, if you drop your insulin levels too quickly, your blood sugar can drop too fast, your blood pressure can drop too fast, your your fluids, you can lose a lot of fluid too quickly. And these are all good changes and healthy changes. You want lower blood sugar, you want lower blood pressure, you want to let go of excess kind of fluid retention. But if you do it too quickly, especially if you've also got medicines in the mix that are also pulling your blood sugar or blood pressure down, it can be dangerous. So it's such a powerful intervention that it does require some medical monitoring. So I do recommend that. And I and on my website, there's a free clinician directory if you're looking for help. There's a tab on the direct. It's it's yeah.

SPEAKER_01 23:31

So because I was wondering like how do people find a psychiatrist that are on board with this level of patient empowerment? Because that's half the battle, right? Is you don't want to be kicked out of your physician's practice for noncompliance, not just because it sucks to be medically homeless, although it does, but it also can put you at risk to not get refills that you need on your prescriptions. And that can be a sticky situation. So oh, I'm so, so happy that you said that because I was just, you read my mind.

SPEAKER_00 24:06

Yeah, no, so so clinician directory, it's completely free public service cert, it's international. It's growing, we're putting new clinicians every week, adding this is specifically for mental health. And and something else people can do that it that can do right away that's empowering, they don't need any help with. So you you can change to a whole foods pattern without any special medical help, but you can also do some really simple tests for insulin resistance, even without a doctor. There are some of these you probably are speaking to your listeners now, some of these you've probably already had, like you've probably already had a cholesterol panel, you've probably already had a fasting blood sugar and a hemoglobin A1C. You know, that there are some things you've probably already had, but then there's something you can do at home, really simple. So you can, for example, measure your waist circumference, the the you put a tape measure on your waist. And if your if your waist circumference is more than half your height, that's a clue that you may have insulin resistance, meaning that you're probably eating too much for your metabolism, either eating too frequently or eating too much food or eating too much carbohydrate. Lots of different things can cause insulin resistance, right? So something is off and needs to be adjusted. You can look at your last cholesterol panel. If your triglycerides are greater than 100 milligrams per deciliter, that's a that's a clue that you're eating too much carbohydrate for your metabolism and it needs to come down. That's just a sign that your body is doesn't, that you're eating too much carbohydrate, more than you can use or store right away. I mean, use or burn right away. So your body has no choice but to store it. And it really stores most carbohydrate as fat. We have very limited capacity to store carbohydrates as carbohydrate. So it turns it into fat. And so if your triglycerides are too high, triglycerides are fats in the blood. That's a sign that you're eating too much carbohydrate for your needs. And you can also either order for yourself through an online lab, it's $10 or $15, even without insurance, or you can ask your clinician to order it for you a fasting insulin level. And a fasting insulin level, you want to be in the single digits. That's a clue to how much insulin is your body having to pump out to keep your glucose, to try to keep your glucose in a normal range. Because by the time your morning glucose is nine. Yes. Yep. Oh yep. So you really so single digits meaning so below 10. And even better is like six, five, four. That's really nice.

SPEAKER_01 26:30

Or below 10 was your blood glucose level.

SPEAKER_00 26:34

Fasting insulin. Fasting insulin. And that's a test most people have never even heard of. It's really simple and cheap. What most people get when they go to the doctor is they get a fasting glucose level. So that's your blood sugar level first thing in the morning after you haven't had anything to eat all night. And of course, it's usually going to be low because you haven't eaten anything all night. But your fasting insulin level tells you how much insulin is your body needing to produce to keep that fasting glucose level down. Because what's happening is you're developing pre-diabetes and insulin resistance, and you're kind of on that road to type 2 diabetes. That road to type 2 diabetes, which is when your blood sugar levels start to go really off the rails, that can take up to 20 years. So all that time, what's happening is your fasting glucose level may be perfectly normal. Your hemoglobin E1C may also be perfectly normal. How much insulin is your body needing to produce to keep those numbers in a normal range until it just can't do it anymore? Over that time, your insulin is rising and rising and rising in the background, trying to keep your glucose level in a healthy range until it can't do it anymore. So fasting insulin is like a really nice early marker of metabolic problems. And if you have a high insulin level, then you very likely have insulin resistance. But the good news is you can turn all those numbers around: triglycerides, fasting insulin, fasting glucose. You can get those numbers down in a matter of weeks. You can see them come right into the normal range. And you have just turned the Titanic around, essentially. I mean, almost all of the diseases in our brains and bodies that we fear and face all the time. Yeah, we think of as the chronic modern diseases, almost all of them are the result of high insulin levels over time. So it's a super empowering way to think about things.

SPEAKER_01 28:33

Well, hey there. Since you seem to be enjoying this episode so far, double check that you've hit the follow button on your podcast listening app and subscribe on YouTube. And to join my free private Facebook group, search MFR Curious Insiders on Facebook or click the link in the show notes. Okay, back to the show. I want to ask you about certain foods and certain behaviors because some parents swear up and down. For example, I'm sure you've heard this, that red food dye makes their kids psychotic, that it causes or causes hyperability. Is it is there any truth that certain foods can be directly linked to certain behaviors?

SPEAKER_00 29:14

Yes, there's actually very good science in that area. I mean, we've known for a few decades now that certain food additives, including certain dyes, can cause ADHD symptoms in kids, but kids don't eat red dye. They eat junk food that has red dye in it. And so it's not just the red dye, right? So it's also all the sugar and everything else that's in there. So what's really, really fascinating, and I think a lot of people don't know about this research, is that there were there were a handful of studies done. All of them were done in a very similar way using a very similar kind of diet, sort of back in the 80s and 90s in Europe. Researchers who were exploring the relationship between diet and ADHD in kids, they put kids, these are different studies done in different areas, different places. They saw the same thing every time. They put these kids, they switched them from a regular diet onto something called a few foods diet. So this was a diet that was mostly whole foods and none of the foods that tend to cause allergies and sensitivities in kids. So there was no chocolate, there was no shellfish, there were no nuts, there was no dairy. They took out all the common culprits. And it was basically just a small number of foods, mostly things like poultry and vegetables and meat and then some white rice and some margarine thrown in and some apple juice. Anyway, it wasn't a perfect diet, but it was a much, much healthier diet, right? Much simpler diet. And two-thirds to three-quarters of those kids in every single study responded to that diet within three weeks. And many of them no longer met criteria for ADHD anymore within several weeks of changing their diet. Whoa. Right? And so this is of course diet matters.

SPEAKER_01 31:03

Of course, diet matters to kids. Yeah. What about the reverse? When I am stressed, I crave chocolate, not other carbs. I don't want crackers. I don't want bread. I crave chocolate. It is so specific. Is that just like a me thing, or is there any science behind that?

SPEAKER_00 31:28

I've never heard this before, Meredith. What a strange experience. Call me immediately as soon as we hang out. Schedule a session. Something horrible is wrong. That's fascinating. Lots and lots of people have this issue. Many, many people feel a pull, a calling towards a specific food, and chocolate is always like right up there on the top of the list. Other foods that are right there on the top of the list, pizza, ice cream. What's really interesting about these foods is often they're a combination of refined carbohydrate and dairy and or starch. So you mix the sugar with either dairy or starch, and you and and often a little and often some fat, it can even be vegetable oil. People don't crave vegetable oil, but it just changes the way the food gets dissolved and the way it tastes and everything, the way it feels, the texture and the way it's processed in the body. So you mix some fat with some sugar or starch, and especially throw some dairy in there. Most a lot of people are more drawn to milk chocolate than they are to dark chocolate. And so you throw these things together and you get this kind of perfect storm of people get kind of a rush from it. It's just as soon as they put it in their mouth, like it's it's bliss. This is a bliss point. That's a bliss point is something that food eminent food engineers use this phrase to describe what they're trying to go for when they're mixing their ingredients together in the factory, right? That bliss point, texture and flavor and sweetness and everything all mixed together. So you're not alone. And so, but if you but if you take the sugar out of the chocolate, I mean nobody's addicted to baking chocolate.

SPEAKER_01 33:12

I I will go and get like 70, 80 percent because I know it has fewer whatever, and it still makes me feel calm. I've heard people say, well, it's just because you need magnesium. And I'm like, Yeah, my magnesium glycinate doesn't do it for me. I really want the chocolate.

SPEAKER_00 33:28

I'd be so curious, Meredith, if the next time you get a chocolate craving, try buying baker's chocolate, which has no sugar in it at all, no sugar, no fat, nothing. It has cocoa, but what it has no added fat, no added sugar. See if that works for you. That would be an interesting experiment because dark chocolate does have quite a bit of sugar in it. And so if you were to try, see that way you could figure out is it the cocoa itself or is it the sugar and the cocoa mixed together? Okay. That's the only way to really know if that will, if the baker's chocolate is completely unsweetened. What role does food addiction play in all this? Oh my gosh. So I just a few weeks ago, I was at the world's first, it was the International Food Addiction Consensus Conference in London. This was really a pioneering conference. I didn't speak at this conference, I attended. I was part of the workshops that put together the consensus, but this was a wonderful conference where we were thinking about uh food addiction in new ways, trying to understand, okay, how do we define this? What are the foods that people are most addicted to? Is this a problem for everybody or just some people? And if it is a problem, what do we do about it? Right. And so one of our goals in this consensus group was to try to convince the World Health Organization that certain types of food addictions are real clinical problems that need to be addressed in in healthcare. And so we are still working on trying to convince them that this is a real issue. But the science in this area is really clear. There's some wonderful scientists in this, in this field, Dr. Nicola Vina for one, and Dr. Ashley Gerhardt, they're really doing some of the groundbreaking work in this field. And and what they, what their science tells us is that for some people, depending on which group of people you're looking at, whether it's children or adults or adults with health issues, anywhere between 15 and 30% of us are struggling with addictive eating to s to specific foods. And most of these foods are the ultra-processed foods that are high in refined carbohydrates.

SPEAKER_01 35:37

So have you seen a cross-section in your own practice of patients who, in your opinion, are experiencing food addiction as a result of their mental health disorder?

SPEAKER_00 35:52

Well, it's it's it's an interesting way that you put that question because I think the mental health disorder and and of food addiction. It's kind of like chicken or egg, right? They kind of go hand in hand, right? So it's it, I kind of love the way you asked it because it's forcing me to think to try to explain it in a different way. So there are lots of people who eat certain types of ultra-processed foods because they're addicted to them. And could and it's not their fault. These foods are designed to be irresistible. They pay people lots of money to make these foods, to hook you on these foods. That's how they make their money, right? These foods do not make you feel satisfied afterward. They do not make you feel good, they not do not make you feel good about yourself. These this is this is not a healthy relationship, right? But we return to that, and they're not nutritious, but we return to them again and again like a bad relationship, like an abusive relationship, because we can't stop. I mean, these foods are designed to be addictive. And so there are people who can eat eat one thing and walk away, and there are others who cannot, and you know who you are. So it's just like with alcohol.

SPEAKER_01 36:56

Okay, my name is Meredith, and I cannot stop eating chocolate. Why do you think I'm like trying to find the most healthy version of it? I'm like, okay, so 70% got it, got it. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 37:13

You know, allulose is my friend. Allulose is my friend too. When I want something sweet, that is that is I I that is my go-to sweetener when I want a sweetener. But yeah, the other thing I think is important to say about this topic is that, and I want to get back to your question, but I just want to say if there's a way for people to eat certain things in moderation, that's great. Like if that is what keeps you on your healthier plan, if as a little escape valve, just know where your limits are and make those healthy swaps. But for some of us, it's so severe a problem that complete abstinence is the only thing that works for us. And so everybody needs to know where they are on that spectrum, whether they need to cut back and be careful and just have it occasionally as a treat, or whether they need to completely abstain. And so that's it's worth exploring because we're all a little different. But the coming back to this mental health issue versus food addiction, there are lots of people in my practice who have a mental health condition, or some of them are very serious mental health conditions, and they know they notice when they eat the wrong foods, their depression or psychosis or whatever it is they're struggling with gets worse. So, and when they eat health in a healthy way, their symptoms get better. So there is this chicken and egg thing where for some people, just cleaning up their diet is all they need to do to get things under control. Whereas for other people, it they they need to go further. So, and then the reverse is also true. If you're struggling with a mental health condition, which now many, many of us are, you're much more vulnerable to making the wrong food choices because you don't have the energy or the ability to kind of get yourself organized or it's all everything feels overwhelming. You're stressed. Stress will make you more vulnerable, especially if the food is in the house, to eating the wrong way, even if you've got the best of intentions. So they do they do play on each other.

SPEAKER_01 39:13

Oh my gosh, they so do. Because when you feel bad, like you said, you want to eat more bad stuff to try to feel good. And then you eat it and you feel good for a minute, and then you feel bad that you ate it, and it's the vicious cycle. So, from a behavior standpoint, how do you recommend people break that cycle?

unknown 39:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 39:33

And this is another empowering thing that people can do that's really quick and easy, and you can do it at home. And it is tracking your glucose levels and changing your diet in a way that gets your glucose levels into a healthy range, getting yourself off the glucose, the invisible glucose roller coaster. Because when your glucose levels are going up too high after meals and then they're crashing too low after a few hours later, that puts all of your hormones, not just insulin, all of your hormones, your reproductive hormones, your blood pressure-regulating hormones, your appetite hormones, your stress hormones, adrenaline and cortisol, all of those hormones ride on that roller coaster too. So you can stabilize your stress hormones, your appetite hormones. Your appetite can come down into a normal range. Your stress levels can come down. You can feel calm, you can feel satisfied in between meals, even under stress, by changing your diet in ways that normalize the glue, your glucose pattern. You can either get a finger stick glucose monitor to do this. Those are really inexpensive. You do have to poke yourself a few times a day. That's not always fun. Or if you've got more, if you've got more resources available to you, you can get a continuous glucose monitor. Slap, I just did this with my mom actually this morning. She's 90 and she's trying to lose some weight. She was wondering, how much bread can I have? She loves bread. That's her favorite, favorite thing. And she was like, Well, how many slices of my favorite bread can I have? And I said, Well, mom, I don't know. Let's find out, right? Glucose monitor, it's a painless skin patch. It lasts two weeks, costs maybe $60, $70 out of pocket for a two-week monitor. Doesn't hurt. Put it on. This morning she had a slice of bread with her eggs, and her glucose went from about 100 in the morning up to 150 after one slice of bread with her breakfast. Any food that pushes your glucose above 125 is dangerous for your metabolism. And so that's going to make you hungrier for the rest of the day. It's going to make you more irritable, anxious, panicking between meals. You're not going to be stable on the inside. So a lot of times we think that we're stress eating because our hormones are making us feel our hormone. I eat because I'm hormonal or I eat because I'm stressed. Well, it a lot of times the foods are what are driving your stress and hormone levels to go up from the inside, no matter what else is going on on the outside. So even you could your everything could be perfectly stable on the outside, but you could still be very, very stable, unstable from within.

SPEAKER_01 42:11

Okay. I have this is so cool. I'm so excited right now. But I have to ask questions about your 90-year-old mom because oh my gosh. Like, first of all, most 90-year-olds that I've met, it's not like I've met a bunch of them, but they aren't like, how can I improve my health at 90? They're like, you better let me eat whatever the hell I want. So that's thing one is like kudos to your mom. How did that happen? Because there's people listening to this that are like, oh my gosh, there's some people that are the skeptic, the skeptical people that are like, I'm not too sure about this, but I'm looking for results and I'm not getting them. So therefore I'm open. And then there's the second set of folks that maybe are already on board with these general thoughts, but have family members who are really suffering. And as we know, when a family member suffers, it's not just that family member who's burdened, it's his or her caretakers. So maybe they are thinking right now, Dr. Eid, how do I get my mom to be like your mom? Like, what did you do to her?

SPEAKER_00 43:15

And that she's like, I'm gonna wear a CGM. Yeah. Well, you know, it wasn't my idea. I so I'll I'll tell you the story of my mom. So, so back in the 1990s, when I was in in residency, psychiatry residency, I gained I'd gained quite a bit of weight during medical school and internship, and I was trying to lose some weight. My mom inspired me because she'd bought this book called the Atkins Diet, and she started the Atkins diet back back in the 90s. She lost 90 pounds on the Atkins diet. Oh my gosh. I thought, why? Wow, that's getting that's interesting. And she was on it for a long time, and then she, like many people, kind of slid off and gradually became kind of loosened things up around the edges. And a lot of that weight came, not all of it, but a lot of the weight did gradually creep back on. And as she got older, especially. Especially in her 80s, she was like, I just I'm in my 80s. I just want to eat whatever I want to eat. Leave me alone. I want to do my thing. That's her prerogative, right? But last year, about a year and a half ago, around Christmas time, she was having so many issues. She was having severe neck pain. She couldn't sleep. She was having terrible headaches. She was depressed. She was uns like unstable and was falling, like lots of different things. We were so worried about her that we moved to be next to her and about a year ago. But by the time we moved, so so around Christmas time, we went to see her. This is when she was still not doing well. And my my sister had wanted to go back on a ketogenic diet for a variety of reasons. And she loves Maria Emmerich's keto cookbook. So I gave my mom two of Maria Emmerich's wonderful keto cookbooks. The next morning, my mom is flipping through the cookbook, Oh my gosh, doesn't that look good? And she's putting little stickies on every recipe. And she's like telling my sister, Can you make this for me? Can you make this for me? So my sister says, My mom, well, why don't we go back on this diet together? Because my mom was like, Well, I I I this does all look really good. And so they did this together. But by the time we moved, we'd already put the wheels in motion to move. We get her, she's thriving. She was she didn't need us anymore. She was she's back to driving, she's back to working full-time, everything. And and so we moved here. We love being near her, but we she figured she solved all of her health problems by changing her diet, and she lost 40 pounds over the past year. Oh my gosh. At 90.

SPEAKER_01 45:36

That it's never too late.

SPEAKER_00 45:38

Incredible. It's never too late.

SPEAKER_01 45:40

Oh my gosh. What a great story to end on. I that is in that is so inspiring because you think, well, if a 90-year-old woman can be motivated to change it around and get results that are so noticeable in her quality of life, then yeah, then maybe like there's hope for the rest of us too. Any final thoughts before we close?

SPEAKER_00 46:09

Well, I just want anybody out there who is dealing with a mental health issue or who has somebody, I mean, all of us either have a mental health issue ourselves or someone we love is struggling with mental health issues. It's affecting all of us now. I just want you to know that if you think you've tried everything, medications, hospitalization, psychotherapy, meditation, exercise, if you think you've tried everything already, I want you to know there's so much more you can try. These interventions that dietary changes can be really powerful mental health tools, but you have to know which changes are the right ones to make. And they're not the ones we're used to hearing about. So that's what the book is all about. I mean, essentially, in order to change your mind with diet, you have to change your mind about diet and learn some new rules that are grounded in biology. And that's where the power is. So I just want you to know hope is on the menu. That's what I like to say. It's corny, but you know, hope is on the menu.

SPEAKER_01 47:10

I actually really like that. And I 10 out of 10, recommend your book. It is robust. If you're watching this video, you can see it's well over an inch thick. So there's no lack of detail in here. Tell people where they can buy the book. And if you have any other resources, you said your website, give them their website or any other socials that you want them to follow along.

SPEAKER_00 47:31

Yeah, so you can get the book anywhere you like to buy books. I like to recommend bookshop.org because they also give back to independent booksellers. So that's lovely. But wherever you like to buy books, it's there. And other resources. So there's the free clinician directory on my website. My website is called diagnosisdiet.com. And there's a tab on the website that says clinician directory. You can search for a clinician in your area who can support you your mental health through dietary changes. There's also like I teach a clinician training program, CME accredited if you're a clinician who wants to learn how to do this kind of work. And and the other thing I wanted to point people out to. Oh, so I'm on social media. I have Instagram, Twitter X, LinkedIn, Facebook, and it's all Georgia E D M D. E D E is my last name. If you want, I'm I'm pretty much on social media just about every day at this point. So if you want to connect with me that way.

SPEAKER_01 48:21

Well, thank you again. This has been incredible. I am so excited to share this with everyone.

SPEAKER_00 48:29

I'm I'm really so happy that you invited me on, Meredith. I love your program and I and I hope that some people out there have learned something new and are and are open to trying something new.

SPEAKER_01 48:40

Thanks for listening. Since you've made it this far, I'd like to invite you to be a part of my private Facebook group. And there I post content I don't share anywhere else. You can talk to me directly, and I even do occasional giveaways. Search MFR Curious Insiders on Facebook or click the link in the show notes. If you liked this episode, you'll also like the one about food addiction. That is episode 251. And stay tuned next week for a remastered favorite tackling homelessness in San Francisco from a man who lived it. Until then, keep it curious.