In this video and post, we discuss how diet can influence mental health and provide useful guidance on food and behaviors to incorporate for general health and alongside treatments and therapies.
Feed Your Brain! What You Eat Affects How You Feel
What you eat affects your body AND your mind. From reducing inflammation to supporting healthy sleep and stabilizing blood sugar, food plays a key role in how we feel every day. Eating well helps us improve our mental health and is especially useful to help extend the dramatic results many people see with interventional treatments.
Why diet matters
There are many components to the link between your diet and mental health. Good eating habits lead to healthier overall health, which in turn affects mental well-being. Diet can also impact your sleep, which affects mood and cognition. And, the things you consume can directly impact your brain through chemical changes. In short, your body is an interconnected mix of complex systems and what you eat affects all sorts of things. What you eat matters!
We encourage a diet that is, as much as possible, full of unprocessed, colorful, and varied foods and that incorporates lots of plants. Studies consistently show these things to be significant contributors to good health.
As a general rule, the more processed the food, the worse it is for you. Ultra-processed foods – food with artificial colors, flavors, and preservatives and ones grown with herbicides and pesticides – contribute to poor overall health and have chemicals that can interfere with the healthy way our brains process information and the healthy way our brains support our mood.
A key component of healthy eating also includes avoiding foods that cause inflammation. Some herbicides, pesticides, and artificial colors and flavors can cause inflammation in the body. Inflammation often looks very similar to depression – it can cause fatigue, amotivational states, and decreases the dopamine you get from activities. The more highly inflammatory the foods, the more it will have a mood effect.
One resource we often recommend is the book This Is Your Brain On Food. Each chapter focuses on a different mental health need, such as ADHD, anxiety, PTSD, or depression, and discusses different nutritional needs of that mental health condition and ways of supporting it with dietary processes. One commonality between each of these chapters is the concern of an excess of simple carbohydrates, insulin spikes, and hyperglycemia, which can cause significant mood effects.
Diet can affect your sleep and your ability to get rest. You’ll often hear recommendations such as to not eat much before going to sleep or to focus on certain foods within a few hours of sleep – for example, cherries, which contain melatonin, or a warm glass of milk, which contains protein, can be more beneficial for good sleep than something like carbohydrate-heavy cake. These recommendations focus on avoiding insulin spikes and cortisol release that can disturb sleep.
Mood can also be impacted by too high or too low of blood sugar throughout the day, which can feel unsettling and lead to anxiety, brain fog, and fatigue. You can monitor blood sugar in detail – whether diabetic or simply interested in this aspect of your health – by wearing a continuous glucose monitor or having your hemoglobin A1c checked at their primary care doctor.
How to eat Well For Mental Health
As much as possible, try to eat unprocessed, colorful, and varied foods and lots of plants
Unprocessed:
The more processed a food is, the more those important vitamins and minerals are taken out and the more inflammatory that food becomes for your whole system.
Colorful:
Richly colored foods, especially fruits and vegetables such as blueberries and bell peppers, are more likely to be anti-inflammatory. Similarly, very colorful spices like turmeric, ginger, and cayenne are more likely to be potent anti-inflammatories that support good mood and decrease overall inflammation. These colorful foods will also be where you find more vitamins and minerals like magnesium, zinc, calcium and vitamin C, which also support mood.
Varied:
With a varied diet you are more likely to get the variety of nutrients that benefit our bodies and minds. You are also less likely to stick to easy, feel-good foods that may not be good for you (like bland carbohydrates). Variety in foods also supports a healthy gut microbiome which is good for digestion, general health, and our mental health.
Plant-Rich:
There are a number of reasons to focus on plants, including that plant-based diets consistently rank as the healthiest overall. Diets heavy in plants tend to provide rich anti-inflammatory food, tend to be less-processed, tend to avoid some specific contributors to poor health such as saturated fats, and tend to help keep weight down.
Progress over Perfection: Small Steps Make a Difference
Changing habits can be hard, but baby steps are great! Perfection isn’t the goal.
Many patients will ask if we recommend vegan, keto, Mediterranean, or another diet. We recommend whichever diet is easiest for you to follow, with more plants and more unprocessed food overall. Your diet doesn’t have to have a name.
We encourage our patients to make improvements throughout their lives whenever possible. Eating well is an important part of improving your mental health – It is unlikely to be the only thing necessary, especially when tackling difficult symptoms of depression, anxiety or trauma, for instance, but it can be part of a comprehensive approach. Eating well is especially useful to extend and improve the results you may see with interventional treatments such as ketamine infusion therapies, TMS or stellate ganglion blocks (SGB).
Any progress you’re able to make in eating whole, colorful, and varied foods, and mostly plants, should help you feel better – both for your body and for your mind.
About Us
Wells Medicine is a Houston-based practice designed to provide meaningful care for mental health. Providing targeted interventional treatments for Depression, Anxiety, OCD, PTSD and other conditions, with Ketamine Treatments, Stellate Ganglion Blocks, TMS, and Nitrous-Oxide Treatments. Focused on comprehensive care and integration with Psychiatry, Psychology, and Support Services. We are evidence-based, patient-focused and mission-driven.
The content here is for informational purposes and should not be relied upon for medical decisions. For the details of your specific medical conditions and treatments consult your doctors or other qualified healthcare professionals.
