Leading Nutritional Neuroscientist: The Foods That Shape Your Brain, Mood, Focus and Mental Health!

0:00So when you eat smart, you feel great. key drivers of all chronic health disease. It all begins with inflammation. Sugar acts in the same way as some class A drugs and that's not a myth that has been shown time and time again. How does alcohol affect both in the short term and the long term brain's health? The future of medicine is integrative, it's holistic, it's personalised. We need to start writing prescriptions that include nutrition. Dr. Rachel Gao is a world-renowned nutritional neuroscientist and child psychologist who focuses on spreading understanding on how food impacts brain health, particularly in ADHD and autism.

0:45Her goal is to help people optimize cognitive function, mood, and behavior through diet and lifestyle. In her best-selling book, Smart Foods for ADHD and Brain Health, she empowers individuals and families to support mental well-being with practical science-backed strategies. My son was diagnosed with dyslexia and ADHD when he was around seven or eight. Because of these constant complaints from the teachers, I was forced to take him out of the school. There's a lot of pressure for me to medicate him. I just felt horrible as a mom. Individuals of ADHD have lower levels of omega-3. So that's why fats like omega-3...

1:26A brain essential. Brain essential. Because they feed the brain. Yes, they have many, many functions. One of the key functions is... And if I want to be energized, what should I eat? Why are we not investing in what we're putting in our fridge? Because what we're putting in our fridge goes into our bodies. How can we regulate our mood through what we consume? We pick up the traits, personalities and habits of the five most closest people in our lives. before you do anything you need to so much food for thought literally food for thought

2:12dr rachel i've been so looking forward to this conversation because i and by the way also all my friends find your work so fascinating how basically the food that we eat and consume can affect our brain and therefore our mood our energy levels or even more severe things like depression and anxiety but obviously this is a very like high level definition of what you do so in your own terms which i would imagine is a much more scientific way of describing your work what is that you do? So I have many hats. I'm trained in nutritional neuroscience. But the story really began when I started studying psychology.

2:57So I did a Bachelor of Science in psychology. And I thought at the time, that would be it. You know, I just had this sort of fascination of learning everything I could about neurodevelopmental differences. The Bachelor of Science led to a Masters of Science that led to a PhD at King's College London that then led to a four-year postdoc at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. And for those that don't know, the NIH is almost like a research town. There's up to 55 ,000 research scientists. It's incredible. It's the Department of Health and Human Services. So essentially, I got to co-design the world's first randomized placebo-controlled clinical trial testing omega-3 fats in the brain activity of adults with ADHD using neuroimaging.

3:48So that was absolutely fascinating. And then I came back for two years and I started my charity, Nutritious Minds Trust Charity, which supports individuals who have diagnoses like ADHD, ASD, dyslexia. And then by chance, I got invited to go back to America. So I hopped back across the pond and I ended up working for Dr. Daniel Amen, who has about 11 brain health clinics across America. I was the director of research and development. So I got to not only have a very cool job, but I also lived on the beach. so I lived in Newport Beach and there were literally like dolphins you know I'd be able to walk into my road and watch the dolphins it was an incredible experience and I was there for a year and then back to London back to reality.

4:42All right if my research is accurate and I very much would hope that it is your career did not study in did not start in this field so Right now you are known as the leading expert in this space. But if I'm correct, your career started in the real estate industry. Is that accurate? That's absolutely right. So when I finished my education as a young adult, I decided to go straight into real estate. And I worked on the very famous Abbey Road in St. John's Wood next to the EMI recording studios. I had a lot of fun because obviously I was you know sort of 1920 and I was you know got to meet some of the recording artists and the producers I used to have my lunch in the garden cafe in the basement of the recording studios and yeah it was it was really amazing I loved my job I was sort of you know literally walking in and out of these incredible properties in like Regent's Park and and West Hampstead.

5:49And yeah, it was an incredible career. But what happened in your life? So then you decided to just like completely change your path and become a nutritional neuroscientist. Yeah. So essentially, I was a first time mom, my son was diagnosed with dyslexia and ADHD when he was around seven or eight. So yeah, and that was just like, whoa, what's going on? And it was one of those moments where I knew nothing about these neurodevelopmental differences. Like, obviously, I'd heard of dyslexia, but attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, also known as ADHD, wasn't a thing back then. It really wasn't.

6:28No one kind of had even really heard of it. It was some sort of diagnostic label for naughty boys back then. Now it's a household name. Yeah. What is ADHD? Yeah, so ADHD is different things. It presents differently, but there are three sort of core symptoms, if you like. So there's the ADD, which is the inattentive component of ADHD. So inattentiveness, perhaps disorganization, forgetting appointments, obligations, double booking, turning up late, not turning up at all. Oh, my gosh, you know, those sort of moments. I was meant to be, you know, wherever you were meant to be. And then there's the hyperactive impulsive type, subtype, which is driven by impulsivity.

7:13So, for example, could be anything like addictions to spending, you know, retail therapy online, for example, impulsively making decisions that perhaps are unwise and then suffering as a consequence. like um you know i'm gonna do this i'm gonna do that and maybe investing in projects without sort of the proper kind of let's sit down and think about this kind of thing let's plan this you know impulsive kind of decisions um also like just very very active very busy so always on the go always doing something here there everywhere really struggles to kind of take a moment step back. And then you have the combined type, the ADHD, which is a combination of inattentiveness, kind of slash disorganization, plus the hyperactive, impulsive behaviors.

8:04So it can be very debilitating. There are different levels. There's mild, moderate and severe. So, you know, depending on which profile you match, it can be incredibly challenging to manage. Yeah. Is this something that we can self-diagnose ourselves, at least maybe in a mild case? Yeah. Often, I think we're living in a time where people are almost sort of self-pathologizing. They're diagnosing themselves on Google. They've heard of something like ADHD and they put the keywords into a search engine that's like oh yeah that's me that's me that's me and then of course you have like a lot of influencers maybe who are diagnosed themselves and you know posting a lot on what their ADHD symptoms present like and sometimes there are kind of inaccuracies because when we have these diagnostic labels they can sometimes become all-encompassing so like everything's because I've got ADHD when let's break it down a little you know not everything you know so I think it's really important to be careful I mean a lot of people self-identify with symptoms and there is a debate as to whether you can be just a little bit ADHD well you can you can have mild ADHD or you can have really severe so I think it's important to understand that a lot of these diagnosis descriptions exist upon a spectrum so they vary in terms of moderation and severity for sure and sometimes a little sprinkling of difference has you know can be advantageous yeah so going back to your son yeah he's diagnosed with ADHD at the age of seven and then what happens you're not happy with the type of treatment because it's a medicine-based treatment and you believe that there should be other ways of treating that disease like perhaps dietary changes yeah um yeah and we never say disease that's okay so we say difference yeah there's been like a big drive to make sure we incorporate what's called neuroaffirming language because oftentimes the dsm which is the bible the diagnostic and statistical manual for mental health conditions that we're on volume five and then there's the icd 11 so these are the kind of the bibles of psychiatry which guide us to make the diagnosis um oftentimes they're criticized as being quite sort of old-fashioned you know um their you know their approaches and descriptions are not very helpful they're not affirming or empowering they are kind of labels like deficit disease disorder and we need to move away from those descriptions because in fact we're realizing that some individuals who are neurodivergent have kind of superlative skill sets not everyone but some do and you know they are olympian gold medalists they are the michael phelps of the world the simone biles of the world you know they are phenomenal actors entertainers writers look at Steven Spielberg profoundly dyslexic actresses like Whoopi Goldberg like you know differences are not considered as diseases but it's really important that you raise that because it's all about educating and awareness and um so yeah some of the descriptions are a little outdated and we need to kind of update them a little but to answer your question so my son was around the corner for my work um I was on Abbey Road he was on a road called Abercorn Place which was like three roads away so we would come to work together I'd drop him off and my father worked in Holland Park so he would often come and pick my son up my father was just such an incredible man sadly he's no longer with us but um he was you know just incredible anyway um so what happened was the school started complaining about my son's kind of very low level disruptive behavior you know children like my son who have adhd they are the children that fidget in the classroom they are sort of maybe tapping or squirming or my son liked to doodle he's like a phenomenal artist because of his dyslexia the attention to detail is profound um so he would always like to draw and now we know sort of decades later that drawing is an incredible tool um to help focus and pay attention especially in neurodivergent individuals but of course he got into trouble for this you know and then the meetings began we need to come and meet us and talk about your son you know it's always like we need to speak to you about your son and I was just like oh my gosh this is just too much you know I can't work like I was actually at that time I'd been promoted from a lettings manager um well a listings negotiated to a lettings manager and I was doing incredibly well um you know i was able to buy my first place at 25 like my first office home and you know things were going really really well and because of these constant sort of complaints from the teachers i had i was forced to take him out of the school and then it's like what next you know what do i do next so that's where it all began and why nutrition yeah so eventually my son went to a boarding school and um cut a long story short there were there's a lot of pressure for me to medicate him you know put him on metathenidate which is a psychostimulant medication it's a cognitive enhancer if you like it's very powerful some people even without ADHD will I you know I shouldn't really say this but I've known a professor or two to take metathenidate to stay up all night to write grants we know there have been studies with like air traffic control resulting in zero errors.

14:02Obviously, they have to have zero errors, but we know it's a cognitive enhancer. We've known that right from the beginning because the chemist used to give it to his wife, who was called Rita, to enhance her tennis performance. That's how it all started. And he was like, whoa, what's this medication? And oftentimes, individuals with undiagnosed ADHD, they can gravitate towards cocaine because it's a similar chemical compound. and it's a cognitive enhancer. So when they take cocaine, they actually feel normal. It almost normalizes their brain function. So in ADHD, it has similar effects. It can normalize their brain activity.

14:44And Professor Katia Rubi at King's College London has published on this quite widely. She's one of the first really to show demonstratively putting people into a magnet. And then the children or the adults take metathenidate and then they have a group that aren't taking anything, you know, or placebo. And then they look at the brain activity and they found that it can normalize brain activity. So there's no distinguishable difference between those that are on the placebo to those that are taking the stimulant medication. The results are the same, almost. So, yeah. So we know it's powerful. So there was a lot of pressure for me to give this to my son And it was almost like, you need to put your son on this medication or he can't come back.

15:35And he just settled into his boarding school and he was doing really well. Like he was kind of man of the... The boarding school said that. Yeah. He was like man of the match. And, you know, he excelled at sports. So he was very, you know, physically active. He was an athlete, you know. I mean, he could like triple somersault on a trampoline at home. You know, he could run super fast. he would sprint and um he was you know brilliant at most sports to be honest and uh yeah so this was like whoa and he was like 12 now so it's just like gosh his education is going to be destroyed you know if we don't give him this medic you know medication because he won't be able to go to school and the school was in hampshire so i lived in wimberdon so they also said well perhaps you have to move to Hampshire and I was like I can't move to Hampshire I can't this you know so we tried the medication we went down that route and initially what they do when you're trying medication is kind of they wean you on the medication so you start off with a smaller dose just to see how you respond and then it's increased so I think it started off on a very low dose maybe 10 milligrams and then it went up to 36 milligrams but in the end it was if I remember rightly it was close to 70 it was huge and he was wired like he looked he just looked really not himself it was quite disturbing as a mom because then he wouldn't go to sleep you know he wasn't sleeping at night because it took so long to wear off because it was such a high dose but he was brilliant in class I mean he did pay attention better and he wasn't as disruptive and we had great feedback like oh he's doing really well he's like you know completely changed child well yeah that's because he's you know at the expense of all these other things yeah yeah so basically like it got to the point where he'd come home at the weekends obviously and he was like not sleeping not eating and he was having some very strange emotional reactions like from being sort of really happy laughing to like suddenly crying hysterically and I was just like no no because I couldn't sleep at night I couldn't sleep at night seeing those side effects I just felt horrible as a mom and as a mom you want to do everything you can to support your child and obviously we we tried it you know he was taking it for at least three months and then I was like there's got to be another way there's got to be another way and of course he wasn't allowed back to that school so that was really really sad for him I just felt because of course children with ADHD they often their self-esteem takes a battering because they're on the receiving end of persistent negative feedback like can you imagine if you went to work every day and you had this kind of horrible boss and the boss kept reprimanding you everything you did was wrong you know you weren't sitting right you weren't you know contributing in in the expected way or you know and it's literally just big stick batter hit hit hit and and in the end what would you do what would you do if you're a teenager it would definitely affect your self-confidence but you would bite back you would bite back or you would quit that job right you wouldn't go in to work every day for that battering you knew it was coming fight or flight that's right yeah and unfortunately my son there was a stage where he did become very um oppositional because he was just so fed up and this was the most beautiful little boy who would you know come home and i remember when he when he was little in primary school he would pick flowers yes some other people's garden but he would pick flowers and he would always come home with his flower and say, you know, I love you, mummy.

19:15I love you so much. He was just such a loving child. It is heartbreaking as a parent when you have to go through this type of, you know, situation. It's tough. It makes you tough. It makes you resilient. But it also in me, it made me a fighter. I had to become the voice of my son. I had to because no one was listening to me. No one. Gosh, I'm so sorry you had to go through that. And also your son. And I apologize for the terminology that I used, I don't know better. So throughout this conversation, you'll have to educate me. But I also believe that perhaps I'm not alone in this naivety of how we need to refer to this particular topic and types of diagnosis.

19:59But I definitely agree that we need to be very careful and to treat it with a lot of caution. Yes.

20:12so you deep dive into the world of nutrition and how what we eat can affect our brains but in particular a brain that is neurodivergent and is diagnosed with adhd like your sons so for for anyone that is listening to this that just wants to have a general understanding of how food affects our brain how does it affect it because before we started this conversation i told you most of my friends before i had this conversation with you they told me the reason why i eat something or i don't eat something in most cases is for physiological reasons i want to gain weight lose weight or put on muscle not have muscle you know or have more energy or less but not necessarily because this is going to help my brain in this specific way yeah yeah i mean food is the most manipulated substance in the world there's no doubt about that and humans are master manipulators of their brains biochemistry you know we are wired to seek pleasure and avoid pain but we forget our brain is incredibly powerful it's like the most powerful computer program in the world that we'll ever be kind of exposed to and the programming is quite deep and we play an active uh we're active players uh we're participating in the program if you like without conscious awareness so even by the choices we make you know what we put in our body and often time like when we speak about food it's addressed from the neck down you know everyone completely forgets that what you eat impacts your brain at molecular and cellular levels.

22:00It influences our neurotransmitter systems. You know, it manipulates our serotonergic and dopaminergic systems in the brain. What are neurotransmitter systems? Yeah. So let's speak a little bit more about neurotransmission, but I want to bring it back a little bit before I do that. So we were talking about my son. He had to leave the boarding school and then it was like what next you know I was studying psychology at the time and a friend of mine called Fatima who was at university with my brother had heard about some of the difficulties that I was experiencing and she said to my brother I really want to reach out to Rachel I really want to sort of like tell her something that I know that I feel I should share with her and my brother was like sure go ahead so she called me up one day rather random she was like listen have you heard of omega-3 fatty acids and i was like not really you know bear in mind i was like a psychology student at this stage and she's like you need to look them up because there's been some really interesting studies in america showing that individuals of adhd have lower levels of omega-3 and omega-3 is a brain essential.

23:20I was like, right, I'm on it. So that was the beginning, really. I started researching. I spoke to as many people as I could and I decided to study this for my master's. So I decided for my master's dissertation that I would include data from a phase three clinical trial that I was already assisting on at the Maudsley at King's College London. and I got permission to use some of the data and what we did was we took blood from children with and without ADHD and we actually measured their specific nutrient profiles and then we correlated that to assessments of brain activity using something called Electrophysiological Recordings of Brain Activities, EEG.

24:07So it's like you wear a swimming cap and you have all these electrodes which are connected to a computer and we asked the child or participant to sit in front of a screen and to complete some sort of cognitive or emotion processing task and then we record their brain activity while they're doing the task to look at different facets of their brain function like their working memory or their processing speed or how they process emotions. And then we correlated that to their omega-3 fatty acid levels And we found some really interesting results. So we found that those children that had higher omega-3 had better processing or had higher amplitudes to faces showing happy emotions, which is really, really interesting.

24:58And we published that for the first time. I was expecting like their attention levels would be better, but not happy emotions. Yeah. So essentially when they saw happy faces, the higher the omega-3, the more they focus on the happier faces. Fascinating. And we now understand that one of the key mechanistic actions of omega-3 is in the regulation of serotonin, the neurotransmitter that governs how we feel. And we all want to aim for what's called stable levels of serotonin, because when we have that kind of stable serotonin levels, we wake up and we feel okay. You know, we can start our day because happiness, we don't really want the highs and lows of happiness because then we can become manic.

25:44Yeah, that's what's implicated in conditions like bipolar disorder. We want serotonin to be stable, you know, so we can get up, we feel OK, we can start our day. But let's go back to the brain a little. So one of the questions that I love to ask people when I go to, even when I go to dinner parties, when I go into schools, when I go into prisons, because I go into prisons as well, I like to ask people, you know, what is your brain made of? So I'm going to ask you now, what do you think? What is my brain made of? Yeah, what is your brain made of? My brain is made of a vast network of different cells that create different neurological paths.

26:24And based on those neurological paths, I can connect thoughts, articulate them. Some of them would be more related to emotional aspects, maybe related to my limbic system, my amygdala. But what is it made of? What's a substance? Neurons? More than that, deeper, deeper. More than that. See, a lot of people struggled to answer that question. And it's really interesting because most people are taught absolutely nothing about the human brain. So if you think about the average primary school age child, oftentimes there's a skeleton in the classroom and they're taught a little bit about the musculoskeletal system.

27:06They're taught about the lungs, the respiratory system, how obviously the lungs help us breathe. they're taught about the heart and how the heart pumps blood around the body but they know little or nothing and they certainly wouldn't be able to tell me like the function and activity of the insula or the cerebellum or the anterior cingulate you know um i was trying to give you a fancy answer but honestly the short answer is no i don't know you don't know that's right well most people don't No, sometimes I get the correct answer, but the brain is made of fats. It's predominantly made of these healthy fats, these complex, specialized and unique fats called lipids.

27:50And I'm talking about the non-aqueous, so without water. The dry weight of the adult brain and retina is made up of specialized fats called lipids. So that's why fats like omega-3 are feeding. Are brain essential. Brain essentially. Yes. Because they feed the brain? Yes, they have many, many functions. Many, many functions, yeah. But one of the key functions is in cell signaling. So neurotransmitter function. So imagine this. How many neurons do you think you have in your brain? I'm going to give you a random answer. Billions. Yeah, 86, roughly. Billions. Neurons. And each of these neurons is coated in a myelin sheath, which is predominantly lipid.

28:33It's other things as well. but predominantly lipid made up of the omega-3 docosahexaenoic acid, also known as DHA. So what that does is it acts as an insulator across the wire, the axon of the neuron, coating it as this fatty sheath, that's what myelin is, and it insulates the neuron, making for faster and more efficient cell signaling across our neuronal network. So speeding up. What is cell signaling for a 10-year-old? What's the what say? What is cell signaling for a 10-year-old? Oh yes, of course. So cell signaling is chemical messaging. Yeah. It's everything you're doing right now, which occurs within milliseconds.

29:15So it governs our thoughts, our feelings, our behavior, our actions. Neurotransmission. So basically, if I got this right as a 10-year-old, probably even as a 6-year-old, the more fat our brain has in the form of non-liquid lipids that enables our neurons to basically communicate with one another better yes exactly that's why chemical messaging or cell signaling so let's think of a translational answer to frame it in an easy way like you said for a 10 year old in fact let's talk about 10 year olds yeah okay so there are two parents yeah and they have two children they have a girl named Cara and they have a boy named Luca okay so Cara's mom gets up at least 30 minutes earlier every day to cook a protein-rich breakfast to make sure that Cara has you know like scrambled eggs maybe she's sort of discreetly shaved some mackerel flakes into it maybe a little side of avocado if she doesn't have any food sensitivities and she's exposed her to avocado from a young age so she quite likes it and then so she has her breakfast and off she goes to school now Luca's mom she had quite a late night last night she was working on her computer until after 11 she's exhausted yeah she's really struggling to balance the demands of work and raising her son anyway she gets up 15 minutes late she goes into the cupboard and she pulls out a box of cereal it's cornflakes yeah she plonks it on the table she goes to the fridge she gets a jug of milk and she gives luca a bowl help yourself luca manages to you know put a handful of cornflakes into his bowl pour slap on some milk takes two large spoonfuls and he's done and off he goes upstairs to clean his teeth and get his shoes on meanwhile they're at school now it's nine o 'clock the teacher's giving a recap from the day before and they've learned this they they you know they spent a lot of time on this and she's asking a question yeah so she's asking a question and of course Cara has you know fully computed the question she's understood the question She's put the answer together.

31:40She's got her hand up. She's ready to give the correct answer. Meanwhile, Luca is staring at the teacher, still trying to figure out exactly what the question is. So that's a translational difference between adequate omega-3 and inadequate omega-3. It can slow down neurotransmitter function. And there are estimates that this could be the case in up to 30%. So the signaling, the connections, the chemical messaging are just not as fast and efficient. So we know that omega-3 is critical for learning, for memory, especially for a process called neurogenesis, which occurs in the hippocampus, that seahorse type structure in the brain that's critical for learning and memory.

32:25So it plays all sorts of important roles, gene expression, myelination, learning, memory, mood regulation. hence they are called brain essential essential fatty acids wow um right let me unpack this my first question would be then so basically what we eat has a an immediate short-term effect in our brain so we don't need to wait days or months or years after eating the not right things or non-omega three foods to see the negative consequences. It's just perhaps in the case of Cara and Luca, two hours after they consumed it. So this is a really important question. Okay, so in children, there are recommendations that children need to be eating 250 milligrams of the two key highly unsaturated fatty acids called eicosapentanoic acid, EPA and DHA.

33:25per day. So the body does not make these key omega-3s. They are only available via the diet. We cannot store these omega-3 fatty acids for very long periods of time. So we have to have a daily intake. For adults, we need to be eating 500 milligrams of omega-3 every day for optimal brain health. Now, the American Psychological Association and other leading bodies recommend that anyone that has a mood disorder like depression needs to be consuming a minimum of a thousand milligrams, one gram a day to alleviate symptoms. There have been several meta-analytical reviews, you know, meta-analysis is when they look at all the published clinical data and they put all the data together into a large data set and they reanalyze it to try and obtain the effect size and the effect size is just a statistical measure of how effective an intervention is like a medicinal drug or you know a food or a supplement or whatever so anyway so a study by Hallahan et al published in I think it's 2015 in the British Journal of Psychiatry reported an effect size of 0.60 in patients with clinical depression taking an EPA-rich formulation of omega-3 fatty acids.

35:00Now, that means that around 60 % of the patients with clinical depression taking omega-3 EPA-rich formulations benefited in terms of a clinically significant reduction of their depressive symptoms. now if we compare this to other effect sizes like obviously effect sizes vary and it depends on who is doing the study and there's all sorts of you know variables that play a role in this but on average cognitive behavior therapy has an effect size of around 0.20 so around 20 percent of people get better with cbt doesn't work necessarily as well in people with adhd for example and it can be higher in other populations it can be more effective he compared also those effect sizes to an SSRI so a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor you know commonly known as an antidepressant and he reported an effect size of around 0.31 saying that around 31 percent of people taking antidepressants who have clinical depression go into remission so the effect size of 0.60 is greater than cognitive behavior therapy and antidepressants individually and combined but people don't know this and this was also picked up by someone called Dr Thomas Insel who was some years ago head of the National Institute of Mental Health at the NIH and in Bethesda, Maryland.

36:36And he referenced this in one of the talks that he gave as well. And it's documented in a book by Dr. Daniel Amen as well on ADHD. So yeah, I mean, it's really, really interesting that when we go to the doctor, say we've been feeling anxious, say we've been like struggling with low mood, brain fog, fatigue, and we say, you know, I really do need to go to the doctor i need to talk to someone about this um you know the doctor is likely to read a series of um symptom you know statements out and then depending on where the patient uh scores if they meet you know or they're above the threshold in terms of the initial assessment for depression the prescription pad will come out and it's very likely that they'll receive a prescription for some type of SSRI, some type of antidepressant.

37:30And they'll be like, you know, come back in three months or come back in six months, see you then. If they're lucky, they might be referred to some type of talking therapy. They might have to wait 16 weeks. They may end up just in a group sort of talking therapy situation. But the question, the question, what do you eat? Seldom, you know, rarely ever features in that initial screening assessment. Why is this important, you might be asking. I'll tell you why. Because we know through the clinical data that there are specific brain selective nutrients like the omega-3s I've been talking about, but others, including vitamin D, for example, that have a moderately favorable antidepressant effect.

38:19You know, so if we sent that patient, person, individual simultaneously off to a dietician or a nutritionist to do some basic nutritional tests like looking at their vitamin D levels, looking at their omega-3 fatty acid levels. You know, we can manipulate those scores if they are low via supplementation or dietary advice and we can get those numbers up within the optimal or the daily recommended ranges to try and improve their symptoms and brain function i am a thousand percent convinced that i need to take omega-3 you don't take them i actually do take it i actually do take it but I am convinced.

39:15Now, my questions would be, and I guess, you know, people at home listening to this would be thinking, what are some food examples that are reaching omega-3, but the two different types of omega-3? And also, I guess people, you know, at home, they cannot measure exactly the milligrams of omega-3 that a salmon philae or, you know, would have. They can? Yeah. And they can also measure their own omega-3. So there's like an online test. It's by Omega Quant but also a company called Bare Biology have it's a fingerprint test so you can buy the kit for like literally 60 quid you can squeeze your finger prick your finger a few droplets of blood on the blotting paper send it off within seven days you'll get your results and there's a scale so between zero to twelve percent the scale is and it's a well validated robust biomarker of your red blood cell omega-3 levels so between zero to four percent is suboptimal between four to eight is intermediate and between eight to twelve is optimal so for brain health we should all be in that eight to twelve percent bracket initially the test was developed by clements Ron Sharkey who is a cardiologist and he used it to as a biomarker for risk of cardiovascular disease so it's essentially for heart health first and foremost but as we know everything in the body is connected you know there's a bidirectional relationship so if you have cardiovascular disease you're 50 times more likely to have depression so what affects one affects the other both the heart and the brain are vascular you know so that goes without saying and it's also like the gut what affects the gut affects the brain again it's that bi-directional relationship and we've long known about you know the fact that everything is interconnected you know and you know if you look at science you look back at science it's kind of a shame but oftentimes we focus on isolated organs without realizing you know we only recently discovered the vagus nerve the long wandering nerve in our body that connects gut to brain you know um so and we only recently um discovered that serotonin is actually made in the gut um you know at least 90 percent of serotonin is made in the gut and that's why our gut health is integral to our brain health so yeah I think we need to stop addressing nutrition from the neck down stop framing nutrition as purely a preventative intervention for the premature development of metabolic health disease whilst that is absolutely correct nutrition does way more than just preventing type 2 diabetes or obesity or cardiovascular disease or stroke like nutrition can prevent inflammation in the body and brain which we as nutritional scientists often refer to as one of the key drivers of all chronic health disease known to mankind oftentimes it all begins with inflammation and omega-3 fatty acids are guess what good news what do you mean anti-inflammatory anti-inflammatory they resolve inflammation yeah wow all right so i was thinking on how i could convince my friends to eat more omega-3 fatty acids the two types that you mentioned and i could hear from my left here some friends saying i'm too busy to do this test and i need a simple rule of thumb on what to eat so types of food and quantities for a regular adult and then obviously my right ear was telling me i have some other friends that are on a more advanced wellness journey so they're willing to to go to those lengths yeah and and then have a more accurate understanding of how much they need to consume so for my left ear and for those types of friends what would you recommend them so types of food and how much of them on a daily basis yeah i think it's really difficult in today's society to tell people what to eat number one people don't like to be told what to eat people have complex and personal intimate relationships with food there is a psychology behind food first and foremost so we have to tread very carefully and be very sensitive when we make recommendations we can make suggestions we can educate we can inform but we certainly can't tell anyone what to eat because there'll be great resistance you know and we can show them the way but like you said you know you can take a horse to water and you can't make them drink um i think what's so important now is the nutritional education and that's what i've been doing um as i said you know i go into schools i go into prisons you know i talk to inmates about the importance of eating for their own brain health um i talk to children because I think you know the younger the child is the more receptive they are to start investing in their own health bank if you like you know oftentimes I've met people and they're super successful they've got like the latest you know Audi or BMW or Mercedes or whatever it is you know parked in their driveway they're living in a beautiful home and then you go into their kitchen you open their fridge and there's there's nothing in it you know it's like hang on a minute what's in your fridge what's going on you know and it's like why are we not investing in what we're putting in our fridge because what we're putting in our fridge goes into our bodies you know um and we need to really understand that we're letting ourselves down because then you know the scary reality is that if we're diagnosed with some chronic health disease later in life because as soon as we hit 40 that's when the risks increase for everything you know we need to start investing now we need to like build up that nutritional armor we need to make our brains resilient and we can do that through nutrition you know I like to tell people that there are certain nutrients which can act as what's called an epigenetic neuromodulator So nutrition is one of the most arguably easiest modifiable risk factors.

45:57It changes gene expression at transcriptional levels. It can silence genes through epigenetic switches. And that's really, really important, especially if you have a genetic thread in your family, like a vulnerability or a susceptibility to poor mental health. You know, that's really important. You need to add the layers of protection and nutrition offers you a platform to do so. So what I like to tell people is, for example, we're talking about Amiga, so let's stick with that. When you eat a piece of like oily fish, for example, you don't only get the Amigas, but you get the multivitamins. So you get the trace elements, the iron, the iodine, the magnesium, the selenium, and the Amiga-3 fatty acids, which work together synergistically to facilitate and synthesize absorption into our red blood cells.

46:57That's what's really important to understand that nutrients work in synergy. They don't work in isolation. That's why when people say, but I take this one supplement every day. Okay, but have you considered that it needs other nutrients to even be absorbed by your body? so when people say what do you eat is actually you know what are you absorbing that is the question yeah so basically what you're saying is that in my case i do take omega-3 fatty acids as a supplement but what you're saying is that it's better if i consume it in the form of a fatty fish like a salmon because i'm going to absorb that omega-3 better absolutely like wild alaskan salmon and we also have to be really careful because you know um the way the oceans are being like you know the oceans are almost being farmed and we have to be careful as well we are arguably destroying our beautiful oceans and i follow the work of david attenborough who's advocating alongside greenpeace for the reversal of this because we have to protect the oceans why because fish are a vital component of our own brain health.

48:15And is there a place in our lives for supplementation? Yes, there is. Absolutely. Like it's always foods first, supplements second. That's the motto. But most people don't even realize that they have nutritional insufficiencies because they're not testing for them. You know, they're putting down like maybe anxiety and depression to, for example external stressors without realizing it could be the foods that they're eating as well could be a biological sign of something deeper than that something molecular you know that's going on so it's not necessarily what's going on in your life externally but we need to look internally at our biology it's all about our biology you know and as I said there are these brain selective nutrients that play a role in regulating our neurotransmitter systems.

49:13So we need to make sure that we are supporting our brain's internal biochemical functioning for optimal brain health. The brain is an organ, you know, much like any other organ, like the kidneys or the liver. It has its own unique brain health. So we need to feed it the nutritional composition that it comprises of the fuel for it to work.

49:44And let's reverse the conversation and talk about unhealthy diets. So for example, sugar. When we eat sugar, what happens to our brain? This is a good one. And you're going to make me really unpopular. Do you know that? because no one wants to hear this no one wants to hear about sugar um but i think we all need to hear it yeah i mean it depends on the type of sugar obviously so like white refined sugar that's a big no-no and it's in everything it's in almost everything um can you give me some examples sure yeah i mean so when you go to the supermarket for example and you pick up what you want to buy obviously it's normally highly processed right if it has more than five ingredients according to the nova classification of food systems it's processed yeah so five or more ingredients a lot of people criticize the nova food system but it's a guide it's there to guide us so essentially if you look at the label the ingredients label and you don't understand some of the ingredients you need to look them up some of them are more innocent than others let's put it that way but some of them need to be avoided especially for gut health so for example a lot of foods contain dietary emulsifiers and emerging clinical research looking at the gut and our gut microbiome has reported that these may be contributing to what's called gut dysbiosis.

51:30What are emulsifiers? Yeah emulsifiers are compounds that bind like fat and water together they mix ingredients together to stabilize the ingredients and also to promote shelf life um yeah like to keep it on our shelves for longer essentially um but it's very very hard arguably to avoid ultra processed foods i don't think ultra processed foods are actually going away so the question maybe that we need to ask is how can we make ultra processed foods healthier in favor of promoting metabolic health which we know well actually i embarked on a five-year project doing just this um what we did was we looked at an entire food portfolio um it's actually the kuwaiti danish dairy company kdd and i worked alongside um dr robert listick who waged the war against white refined sugar he's the the sugar the sugar guy who says sugar is the alcohol of the trials i worked with him and a group of scientists in dc and we spent like much of lockdown doing this like analyzing all the food sending them off to be tested all sorts of things and then like swapping out ingredients you can swap that for this you can do this for that and you can make this healthier and and we published on this actually um it's called the metabolic matrix it's a scientific paper it's a free download but this is how we provide the recipe you know we're hoping that this might influence other food conglomerates, you know, to take a closer look at our work and start applying it to their own foods.

53:10You know, I'm talking about the giants like Nestle and Unilever and, you know, they, you know, it can be done. We showed it can be done. You know, we've, we created the template, the model. So I think... To the average consumer like myself, let's say you want to scare me a little bit so I stay off sugar okay why should i not eat sugar yeah okay so basically let's break this down all right so new imaging studies have shown that sugar but even just pictures of sugar rich foods like pictures um that participants in the magnet in the mri machine even just to the anticipation of the food cue the pitcher their ventral striatum is activated so it lights up just in anticipation of having that food so essentially what we know is that these specific brain regions are also activated when taking you know illicit drugs you know substances like cocaine or heroin or alcohol for example so sugar acts in the same way as some class a drugs and that's not a myth that has been shown time and time again and also sugar releases dopamine so anything that releases dopamine has the potential to become addictive so it can hijack our reward circuitry and pathways and when you consume something habitually so time and time again yeah it becomes hardwired in your brain which can set you up for problematic eating later in life it can be a driver of obesity but it could also create poor gut health as well because sugar feeds the pathogenic gut microbiome which can then take over the colony if you like of unhealthy gut bacteria and what we need is we need a balance we need a healthy balance and diversity in our gut for gut health so it has all sorts of knock-on effects so if you do have a sweet tooth you know or you do have sugar cravings or sweet cravings you're better off trying to try you know dark chocolate which is super healthy actually sort of 80 % cacao it's full of flavonoids magnesium you know antioxidants which are brain supportive and also give you that dopamine but in a healthier way yeah so you want you you can release dopamine naturally so it's better to find natural ways and healthier foods that will release dopamine but I think like I said right at the beginning we're master manipulators of our brains biochemistry we seek out substances that make us feel good and then we go back for more and more and more and more and that's what happens so let me yeah attempt to articulate this uh from As if I were again, a child.

56:23so sugar is bad for us because it impacts several aspects of our biological system on one hand it impacts our reward system through increasing our dopamine levels maybe to not healthy to not not to a healthy level and then that can make us potentially then not draw happiness or pleasure from other aspects of our lives correct so it makes a bit yeah it It gives you the high, but then it gives it the almighty low. Sugar crashes. Yeah. So you've got to remember that food scientists are paid huge salaries to create very clever chemical concoctions. And they result in what's called the bliss point.

57:07It gives us that, oh, high. And then afterwards we feel, oh, awful, sluggish. and on top of that then due to the dopamine rush we are more prone to get addicted to this feeling right that's right that's right so sugar arguably has the potential to become addictive in the brain and we are rewarding children as young as two and three with sugar rich rewards essentially you know I see oftentimes I see children like eating a packet of crisps in their buggies or sucking on a lollipop or if they do well it's like have a reward you know have some more sugar and this is why Robert Lustig, Dr. Robert Lustig says sugar is the alcohol of the child because it has that potential to be addictive and you know we need to stop rewarding children with food substances we need to give them non-edible rewards and that's really really important I think I think parents and just completely obviously oblivious.

58:12I was myself as well, my own son, you know. And then you also mentioned that sugar impacts the health of our gut microbiome and also it lights up a part of our brain mimicking the same reaction as a class A drug. Why is that bad, that last part? Why is that negative for our brain? So lighting up that part. Yeah, well, I mean, hijacking the reward systems, um, pleasure kind of area is something that can cause, can be incredibly problematic later in life. If you're taking a substance habitually over, um, you know, weeks, months, years, you are going to be addicted to that substance. And what do we know when you have too much sugar?

58:56You've got cavities, you know, you've got, uh, you're putting on weight, you know, You're disturbing your gut health. Your brain health is suboptimal. You've got brain fog. You've got fatigue. Sugar is the driver of inflammation. There are so many reasons why we need to restrict the amount of sugar that we have. You know, this cake smash phase that's sort of gone global. My cousin, Imogen, I saw she posted the other day when her baby got to one, she gave um her gorgeous little baby a watermelon and the baby was like sucking on the watermelon like this this watermelon cake and just loving it and couldn't get enough you know so naturally occurring sugars fructose in fruits and vegetables are great because they contain vitamins minerals you know fiber which is gut healthy and so much more so yeah i'd much rather we had watermelon and cake smashes at one years of age rather than, you know, these cakes that have kind of artificial food dyes.

1:00:06And also some of the food additives, which also are known to negatively impact gut health, like some of the dyes, you know, there's been outrage in America, I don't know if you've been following this at all, with Trump's Let's Make America Healthy Again campaign. They're actually now banning some of the food dyes that Europe and the UK banned a long time ago. You know, things also like yellow six, which we know can cause hyperactivity in children. What is yellow six? Yellow six, so it's a food additive, essentially. So most foods, ultra processed foods, have food additives. Some of them are potentially harmful to children, but we're including them in foods that children are eating.

1:00:51So like yellow six is in the States. It was in margarine. it was in multivitamins you know also things like sodium benzenate a preservative which also can you know upset our gut microbiome as well so there's you know there's lots that we need to do and think about before we reach for foods that contain things that may not be helpful. I was thinking about the reasons why people don't consume sugar and I was particularly thinking about the traditional reasons and I immediately thought of my grandparents. So if my grandparents don't consume sugar for a given period of time, it's because they want to control their weight.

1:01:32So that is the traditional reason why they should not consume sugar. But they never entertained the, or more than entertained, they were never educated about other reasons that are equally, if not perhaps more important than our weight management. So our mood regulation through our dopamine receptors but also I would assume that it impacts our attention and focus levels right because if our mood is low and we are dopamine depleted I would assume that by design we are not going to be as prone and active to be able to focus and absorb as much information which is very much needed for our everyday life.

1:02:09Yeah and if you're eating a lot of sugar like you said you are going to feel sluggish you are going to have that brain fog slash fatigue you may even have irritability and low mood and that means you're going to be less likely to do things that are going to support your brain health like going to the gym or exercising because you're already feeling that kind of dopamine depleted motivational deficit state so it's going to be even harder for you to do the things that will make you feel better and you've got to push through all that resistance so when you eat smart you feel great you know i don't know if you've like if you juice sometimes and you put you know some really amazing like fruits and vegetables into a juice do you ever do juicy i used to do it but then i was told a long time ago that you're removing all the fiber once you blend the juice it depends what juicy you've got it depends if you're having a juicer that removes fiber then yeah it's not ideal like juicers or blenders that preserve the fiber yes Yes, yes.

1:03:12So it just depends on what you're using. Is there a brand you can recommend me? Well, they can pay me commission. Yeah, so essentially, like, if you prepare a really super healthy smoothie or juice, a lot of people like to start the day with one, you know, like beetroot juice. I love, it's delicious. Have you ever had beetroot juice? Not in a juice form. Oh, it's so healthy. And then you can put a little, like, ginger in there if you want, you know, give it a little bit of spiciness. And why is this good for us? Oh, it's good for us in so many ways. Vitamins, antioxidants, you know. You've heard of healthy aging, right?

1:03:47No. No? Okay, so now this is this thing, it's kind of swept America. Like, everyone's talking about healthy aging because in some countries we're living longer, yeah, which is good. Is it the longevity trend? Yeah. Okay. So everyone wants to live longer, right? Yeah. Most of us. Yeah. But imagine you are living longer, but you're immobile. You've got chronic metabolic disease. You are injecting yourself because you're a type 2 diabetic every day. You feel terrible. You're depressed. You still want to live longer? No, you want to live a quality life. Exactly. So healthy aging is all about promoting longevity, but also preserving our bodies and brains.

1:04:32Listen, when I go to the gym, I see 85-year-old women with six packs. This is achievable. For real? Yeah, for real. Yeah, and it could be an exception to the rule, but it happens. It is possible. The human body is remarkable. So we need to start investing in it. So what we can do is when we eat healthily, certain foods, especially colorful vegetables, beetroots, they contain antioxidants. And what antioxidants do is they preserve the integrity of our neurons. So they protect against something called oxidative stress that we pick up through the environment, through pollutants. You know, living in London, there are lots of them.

1:05:17So what you want to do is keep your brain cells healthy by increasing antioxidants to prevent oxidative stress, which eventually can lead to cell death. So that's what we want to be protecting. And why, like a very basic or even dumb question, why is cell death bad for us? Because it's theorized to be one of the contributing factors in dementia and neurodegeneration. Yeah. So for example, eating. The decline of your brain essentially. Yeah, exactly. So consuming. You don't want to start forgetting things, do you? No, no. When you get to like 60, 70, you want to remember why you walked into the supermarket.

1:05:59it you want to remember like who you're about to phone you know so eating antioxidant food which polyphenols yeah would prevent that like yes it can help prevent it yes all of that yeah so berries every day um hence why i have a strawberry as my logo for my charity nutritious minds yeah um because yeah it's full of like polyphenols and antioxidants super healthy berries These are like my go-to. And they're also naturally sweet. I mean, they're delicious. You know, if you like Greek yogurt, you know, you can add some hazelnuts and other nuts that contain omega-3 fatty acids like walnuts. And, you know, these are super healthy as well.

1:06:40But they contain alpha-linolenic acid, which is the plant-based version of omega-3s. Chia seeds, all of that. I want to talk about another maybe taboo type of product or a product that we all have a love and hate relationship at the same time, which is alcohol. People drink it and while they're consuming it, they love it and they love themselves. But then, you know, quickly after that, you don't feel great. So when we're talking about the brain, how does alcohol affect both in the short term and the long term brain's health? yeah so um alcohol the big a we all have a love a hate relationship with alcohol most of us in our lifetime at some point or another there's several things alcohol is neurotoxic so it's toxic to our brain and our brain's health number one any form and any quantity yes correct good even one glass sorry so you're gonna everyone's gonna hate me now um so alcohol is neurotoxic um that means it's harmful for your brain even in small quantities um it shrinks the brain you know obviously when our brains are dehydrated they shrink and alcohol accelerates that process hence why people get headaches um the shrinking brain um also alcohol is a depressant so it makes you depressed quite literally um i um would highly recommend non-alcoholic beverages as an occasional treat you know there's some really great brands out there occasionally i will drink the naughty uh it's called naughty o-u-g-h-t-y um it's like a non-alcoholic prosecco okay um it's delicious it's incredible i love it and there's also um seed lip drinks that were created by by the wonderful Ben Branson that have just gone absolutely viral.

1:08:45Again, really delicious, containing botanicals. There are so many drinks now, non-alcoholic base, that you can really enjoy. So many. I had one the other day, which was called Mother Root, which was a ginger-based drink. It was lovely. And there's also some wonderful botanical drinks by Brookside Botanical. um so yeah i mean i think the thing is that ethanol is highly addictive number one obviously you drink it neat you're dead you drink it diluted you throw in some sugar and um caffeine you drink ethanol neat you die yes of course and that's what we're drinking in a diluted form yeah in the alcohol yeah and we're putting in like other neurotoxins you know like very high amounts of sugar for example which are not brain healthy either so we have to be careful because um like i mentioned earlier you know alcohol activates the reward centers of our brain as well it makes us feel good right that's why we go back for more and more and um people with adhd are more likely to use alcohol to normalize their brain's biochemistry they are more likely to seek out alcohol um and it increases this for addiction in fact you're 50 percent more likely if you have adhd to develop a substance use disorder so or to have some type of alcohol abuse which can lead to dependency and all sorts of um other problems and also people that drink alcohol oftentimes that goes hand in hand with like smoking so you know nicotine and then cocaine for example and then you've got all three addictions to try and manage and it can be incredibly difficult for for people to get out of the trap um the alcohol trap for someone that is not perhaps a heavy drinker and they drink just a one or two glasses of wine yeah over the weekend are they still going to to experience the same negative effects like the shrinking of the brain or the bad emotional regulation?

1:11:03I think there are people that can safely enjoy a few glasses of wine especially red wine with a meal and it's fine it's not a problem at all but then other people like I said if you have a specific vulnerability like you may be neurodivergent you may not even know you're neurodivergent you may be undiagnosed you have an increased risk of gravitating towards substances that you know can become addictive and then problematic so I think you have to be careful I mean for optimal brain health Dr Daniel Amen in California always says that you should completely avoid alcohol some people may feel that's really extreme like I said if you can drink safely then it shouldn't be a problem.

1:11:58I want us to move a bit away from describing the problem and defining it there is definitely consensus that there is a problem in the negative things that we're eating or perhaps not eating the right things and how these have a direct effect into our brain's health and our overall life performance from our mood regulation how happy or sad we are and how focused we can be in different tasks. If you were to give someone three rules, those rules could be either in relation to do something or not do something when it comes to eating and how it affects our brains. What would those three rules be? So I think, you know, life is hard.

1:12:42You know, life is tough for a lot of people. It's not so forgiving. we're not so forgiving on ourselves oftentimes we're not our own best friend and we need to be you know we need to learn to speak to ourselves in a way that is compassionate empathetic and caring I always say to people before you do anything you need to be your own best friend you you know your internal dialogue which we can pick up neuroscientifically during an MRI session is called the default mode network and oftentimes it's your inner voice it's that dialogue that narrative that can be shame-based it can be you know we can be our own kind of saboteur we can self-sabotage by the way we speak to ourselves so self-care and self-love and not in a narcissistic way is super important you know we kind of come into this world with no one really we go out the same way we need to protect ourselves and that's really important we need to like stop being our own worst enemy we need to ask ourselves be mindful and say you know is this going to help me is this going to harm me and that goes for the people that are in our lives the company we keep because we become um essentially um we pick up the traits personalities and habits of the five most closest people in our lives so you need to look at everyone individually and say do I want to become that person you know and and question it you need to be the CEO in terms of you know promoting and demoting and taking a step back from people sometimes so there's lots of different areas in our lives so we have like the biological how do we maintain ourselves you know we are biological organisms we've learned today you know we need to think about our nutritional biochemistry and so that includes food exercise sleep all of which need to be prioritized you know we need to have eight hours if we can of sleep sleep is protective it's how our body heals you know all this are only sleep four hours a night it's terrible You know, you have an increased risk of Alzheimer's.

1:15:00You need sleep. You need to consolidate. You know, your brain needs that time to repair. Also, exercise is super important. You know, we have evolved to basically move. Our body requires movement. And things like stress, whilst we can't necessarily reduce it or avoid it, we can release it and how do we release it by moving you know you've heard of chi like tai chi chi means energy so emotions are energy emotion so when we can't release stress we store them in the body we store uncomfortable difficult emotions in the body that's why people eventually over time start to feel pains and specific regions of their body oftentimes it's repressed emotions you've heard of that dis-ease of the mind is disease of the body and that's really really important so I strongly encourage movement even if it's just putting on your favorite playlist and dancing around the living room like no one's watching you know release those emotions I do yoga because it's a wonderful healing tool and mechanism you know it puts the body in uncomfortable positions but your body learns it can move through those uncomfortable positions you know prana breath life force breathing learning to breathe correctly oftentimes people don't even know how to breathe you know do a simple breath check which is like one hand on your chest the other on your on your stomach and take a deep breath in see which hand moves first is it your chest in which case you're not breathing correctly this is shallow breathing you know it can cause anxiety over time we need to fill up our belly we need to expand it that's how we breathe learning to control our breath is so powerful and it's one of the things that practices like yoga teaches us so movement breath work being mindful asking yourself that question before you reach for your sixth glass of alcohol.

1:17:19Is this going to help me? Is this going to hinder me? By then it's probably too late anyway. But yeah, just mindfully eating when you're going to the supermarket, again, seeking out foods that you know are going to be supportive. You're building your nutritional armor. I like to frame it like this, It's kind of healthy eating is an act of self-love. Yeah. And love is a doing word. It requires an action. So that's really, really important. Yeah. So much food for thought. Like some of them literally food for thought. But thank you. I would like for us to do a little exercise. So I'm going to list some human functions.

1:18:14So my first human function is memory. So what should we eat? What's a food example or type of nutrient that would help with our memory? So as I mentioned earlier, the hippocampus is critical for memory and learning. So I think omega-3 fatty acids are right up there in terms of choline as well, phosphatidylserine, B vitamins. I have a little bit of a cheat and I have caffeine because it's a cognitive enhancer. But you can have mushroom coffee. I think mushroom coffees are super helpful because they're adaptogenic as well. So, yeah. And what about brain fog? so um i'm a huge subscriber to magnesium i take my magnesium every single night not only does it help um with keeping my brain alert and focused it also helps with sleep especially um but choline in eggs so i start my day i don't have breakfast straight away but i normally have like a brunch and it will almost always include eggs because they're super healthy.

1:19:26But also mushrooms. I love mushrooms. So should take mushrooms or lion's mane. These are all super healthy as well. And focus. How can we stay more focused? So what should we eat? What nutrients should we consume? Yeah, I think women especially have to be really careful for this because when they're iron depleted, this can really impact them, especially with like chronic fatigue and actually it's very dangerous. Brain functioning is impacted by lower iron levels. So always get your iron checked. Very, very important. I think ash gawanda is super helpful as well. You can have like herbal teas from the Herb Tender.

1:20:15They're great as well. Again, I mentioned sort of caffeine. is just a personal favorite of mine even though some people warn against it for like adrenal fatigue as long as it's in moderation and again um you can get coffee from like london nootropics which is adaptogenic kind of mushroom blends coffees which help as well and my next one is probably one that everyone would be very interested to know. It's mood regulation. I feel like in this day and age with how much stress we get from our lives, this is something that we need to keep in check. So how can we regulate our mood through what we consume, what we eat?

1:21:01Well, I think it's really important to look at the nutrients that make the neurotransmitters. So you need to make sure, for example, that you're getting adequate vitamin D, we've mentioned that, adequate omega-3 adequate b vitamins adequate folate all of these help produce serotonin so personally turkey is a favorite of mine yeah because obviously it contains tryptophan which is a precursor to both serotonin and melatonin so melatonin for sleep which is naturally produced by the pineal gland however can decline as we age so you know having a direct source of turkey will help produce both serotonin making us feel great and melatonin helping us go to sleep at night and if i am stressed and a bit anxious what should i eat to reduce that so for me again um i am a big fish fan as you as you know so i like a nice sort of um wild alaskan fillet which will contain um the omega-3s and the multivitamin together question so you you're you said wild yeah does it make a big difference when it comes to the type of omega-3s that fish carries?

1:22:23I think farmed fish is slowly improving however it has been problematic in terms of what they're feeding the fish for example it's really important as well because there's omega-3 fatty acids there's omega-6 fatty acids so both are essential but too much omega-6 which is pro-inflammatory yeah means that um the omega-3 you are taking even if in small quantities will not be absorbed so when you have too much omega-6 it may increase inflammation if you're eating lots of ultra processed foods that contain like omega-6 rich products like soybean oil then it can switch on inflammatory markers called prostanoids and leukotrienes in your brain so omega-3s come along and they resolve inflammation like there are derivatives of DHA which are neuroprotective so you do need a balance of both omega-6 and omega-3 so omega-6s are often in ultra processed foods so I always say to people like you really do need to reduce your intake of omega-6 seed oils especially if they're like partially hydrogenated or they're industrially refined like these cheap vegetable oils that are sludge and they're really no good for our brain health so if you are having omega-6 oils make sure it's raw organic cold pressed then they're healthy you know then we don't need to avoid them but yeah and if i want to be energized what should i eat i think complex carbohydrates what are complex simple carbohydrates they're very different to other types of carbohydrates to look at well let me give you one what just one my favorite which is sweet potatoes which are complex carbohydrates so they contain vitamin c antioxidants vitamins and loads of fiber so they're super healthy for you so we need complex carbohydrates for our gut health especially and they give us lots of energy and they're they're digested slowly so they keep our blood sugar levels stable for longer yes that's right yeah so um when you have like a bowl of pasta even though it might be delicious and try and switch to spelt pasta by the way if you can okay um so yeah even though they're like super delicious they can spike your blood sugar level so they can become problematic if you're having large quantities over time but you know if you enjoy a plate of pasta that's fine you know we have to also not become too obsessed in terms of food can lead to obsessions we can become incredibly like oh my gosh you know especially with all these influences on instagram telling you what you should eat shouldn't eat as long as you're eating in a healthy way if you occasionally want to have something like i said like chocolate go for the dark chocolate you know the darker it is the better it is you know you can still enjoy baking like you can switch out ingredients you can bake your favorite brownies or whatever it is you enjoy but you can use coconut sugar or you can use an unrefined flour you know like spelt for example you don't have to have shop-bought shop-bought to me is not going to be the healthier so you know get the kids in the kitchen put the aprons on put the chef's hats on talk about the origin of the foods like get your child to pour in the ingredients stir the bowl you know we need to get back to basics get back in the kitchen start having fun and enjoying food you know what are some other good examples of complex carbohydrates um well there are many mainly like the vegetables and fruits um there's also probiotic and prebiotic vegetables that i would highly recommend for gut health like chicory root or onions or leeks or jerusalem artichokes or asparagus all of these onions super super healthy um for the guts and have these kind of prebiotic benefits to our gut health which are much better than taking like i know something in the shop that says you know it contains live cultures it's better to go to the direct source i i feel yeah and then my last one yeah is if i'm feeling sad or even depressed yes what should i eat to lift me up yes in a healthy way yeah so there's lots of recipes in my book smart foods for adhd and brain health um in terms of depression the research has shown that people following the mediterranean diet are much less likely to be depressed it has all sorts of benefits as well as promoting longevity and you know who doesn't want to live longer as we've discussed so you want to be like having the olive oils that are bioactive and contain bioactive compounds like the polyphenols that we discuss the monounsaturated fatty acids you know you want to be having those oily vegetables those green leafy you know greens the kale I love when I bake something like I like to do a one dish bake for example so I'll chop up sweet potatoes into tiny little cubes you know I will put all my favorite vegetables like she take mushrooms asparagus red onion cherry tomatoes on the vine like a piece of i don't know wild sea bass or something i'll put a whole lemon um i would just take off some of the um skin but you know keep the pulp and i would put that in the tray i'll put in like about three or four pieces of whole garlic slightly crushed i'll put some paprika and cayenne pepper and like you know whatever seasoning and then i would literally bake the whole lot in the oven in a pyrex dish um for about i don't know 20 minutes so easy you know preparation what 15 minutes max yeah you know and then you've got the most delicious you know meal which is full of everything you need you know and it's super healthy um so yeah that's what i recommend try these kind of like one dish meals that are so easy to do and super healthy and make you feel great I'm definitely gonna give it a go I was thinking about an advice or more than an advice a my grandmother used to like sort of force me when I was a kid and also my twin brother to eat so many walnuts because she claimed that walnuts were and bless her but like I mean she she had good intentions but she claimed that walnuts are good for our brains they are and i asked her why and her non-scientific answer was because they look like a brain so what's the science behind walnuts it's very true actually and you see a lot of this on instagram as well don't you like this food is like the shape of our ear this is the shape of our lungs but yeah walnuts are in fact it's not just an old wives tale you can tell your grandmother um so walnuts are super healthy nuts i love nuts and seeds and that's what i normally snack on if i if i want to have a snack um i'll have like you know a handful of mixed nuts especially almonds but walnuts contain alpha linoleic acid as well which is the head of the omega-3 family so arguably yeah brain food but in the kind of the non-meat way.

1:30:16So you do need more of them. You just validated my whole childhood, by the way. Yeah, thank you. And also things like magnesium as well and zinc and stuff, obviously it contains other minerals as well. So they're super healthy. So we spoke about eating. Now let's speak about not eating. What are your thoughts on the different forms of fasting? Fasting. So intermittent fasting doesn't work for everyone. And I think that's really, really important, especially for perimenopausal aged women so women that are going through that hormonal transition it's really really important I think we've got to think about it like this a lot of dietary advice is male-centric so and a lot of like weight loss advice is male-centric and I think women are slowly beginning to kind of better understand their bodies and hormonal influences which play a key role in in these types of things so i think intermittent fasting can have benefits um i think it's something that people should dip in and out of um fasting yeah i think and especially um unfortunately at a time where maybe someone needs more nutritional support maybe they've developed like an autoimmune disorder or something like that or crohn's or something like that or alterative colitis or you know sometimes fasting under medical supervision can be super helpful in some of these conditions but we do need more clinical research to support that but as I said like when women are going through perimenopause for example it may not be as helpful it just depends it depends on the stage of life and there are many different factors that play a role but women that enter perimenopause do tend to find it incredibly difficult to lose weight.

1:32:09Some find intermittent fasting to be helpful because around this time due to the changes in hormones like estrogen, the cortisol switch can increase so we can become more stressed, which means that we store more fat and especially around the abdominal areas, which can be very difficult to lose. And I think women go for a really hard time because they try and do everything and they're following all this advice on social media and they can literally tear their hair out. And I think we have to be really careful understanding that it's not a one size fits all because suicide rates among 45 to 55 year old women have rocketed.

1:32:54Wow. Yeah, and this is because there's so many pressures. not only are you dealing with quite intense hormonal changes and trying to adjust to that you've got all sorts of horrible symptoms you've got increased depression stress anxiety you've got weight gain then you've got people saying oh no but you need to do intermittent fasting you need to take cold plunges you need to you know blah blah blah and it's like a lot of these people often are not qualified you know they've done some sort of coaching course in six weeks you know which has given them some sort of like flimsy certificate and then they're now going around coaching other people telling them what to do without realizing that it can be quite you know dangerous and also we have to be careful also because in the wellness industry unfortunately you have a lot of unwell people that have gone into the industry maybe trying to seek answers for their own problems and then deciding to qualify using some type of unregulated course that they've paid thousands of pounds for obviously in a misguided way oftentimes so they've they're also quite vulnerable and then they start coaching other very unwell people just after six weeks giving them dietary advice and giving them sort of psychological kind of advice which is often completely unregulated not based in any scientific grounding or training so we have to be so careful in terms of the advice you know I studied for 15 years it doesn't mean that I'm you know an expert in everything you know I know a little maybe about a one air one small area you know neuroscience nutritional neuroscience or you know it doesn't if I always say to people like if I get diagnosed with schizophrenia it doesn't make me a leading authority on schizophrenia if I get diagnosed with clinical depression it doesn't make me the leading authority or the fountain of knowledge on everything to do with depression whilst kind of like um these lived experiences are incredibly powerful and valuable i think we just have to be careful within the wellness industry like who we are taking our advice from i think that's really really important like is this person um you know trained to help me ask that first like do a little bit of research an investigation like don't just follow people because they've got you know a million followers on instagram it doesn't mean they're the expert yeah i agree with you i think we should be more careful in the type of advice and the form of advice that we ingest from a non-expert but i think that these i feel like people in this time they're just very hungry i also feel like it is just easier to consume advice from someone who they can relate to and also someone that may be able to articulate the problem and the solution in the simplest way and it is often the case of which in which scientists or doctors are explaining things in ways that are overly complicated for the average person to understand and hence perhaps they cannot implement their advices into their daily lives but i agree with you so this is my advice yeah um there is no one size fits all approach the future of medicine arguably is integrative it's holistic it's personalized we need to move beyond the prescription pad and start writing prescriptions that include food, nutrition, and other things.

1:36:47If you were to design the perfect brain boosting day, so from breakfast all the way until dinner, how would it look like? That's all in my book. I've done that. If you were to give it just for our audience, so they can go and buy your book, a quick snapshot of how that would look like, just one day. So a day in the life of Dr. Rachel Gowell nutritionally. okay so I wake up normally very early I do love a coffee but I'm not necessarily recommending that this is what I do personally I will have my breakfast slash brunch normally around mid morning especially if I'm at home because I'll take time to prepare that what do I include I normally have some like shittake mushrooms um I will have eggs in some form maybe a poached egg maybe scrambled egg I like to have a little bit of smoked salmon I always include some greens even if it's just a small handful of like rocket wild rocket for example um yeah so that's kind of like what a brunch might look like or it might be like a spinach mushroom red onion omelet which I love as well and then I will snack on nuts I'm a big fan of almonds in particular I will take some supplements at night time like omega-3 and magnesium at a minimum my evening meal is normally like a one dish recipe like I mentioned earlier in a pyrex dish really really important what you're cooking with as well um and yeah i just love things like a piece of fish like sea bass or wild alaskan salmon or um some soul or you know i love cooking with like lemon and herbs and if i have chicken i'll always make sure it's organic and free range because that's really really important and it's not being a food snob it's literally incorporating the ethical conditions in which an animal is raised and i don't believe keeping chickens in cages for example and oftentimes you know what they're fed is really important when a bird is allowed to roam free and forage in the woods you know it can peck on the natural environment rather than being fed like soybean oil pellets that then we then ingest in our bodies um and yeah loads of fruits and vegetables an occasional treat is um some homemade granola which i love to bake myself like loads of different like oats and pumpkin seeds and maybe some cranberries and maybe a drizzle of dark chocolate over the top of it um and some greek yogurt with blackberries i'm actually my latest fad is blackberries and blueberries together i love them i'm very happy to hear this response because it is fairly simple so you're keeping things simple yeah keep it simple foods yeah one ingredient yes so i think anyone at home can follow this it's not something that you need to have a big budget to adhere to or have a very you know complex cooking understanding or technique or a technique yeah so that that's very encouraging and frozen berries are actually quite affordable you know you don't necessarily have to get fresh fruit you can get frozen fruit especially if you're having smoothies like a berry smoothie some people like to start the day with that um so yeah that's important as well and tinned fish as well you know if you want to get oily fish tinned salmon sardines you know maybe you know yeah so you can also buy like tinned mackerel and things like that and this is when you go to france for example i love france i'm a bit of of Francophile.

1:40:41When I go to France, there are actually shops full of tinned fish. They are remarkable. Yeah, really healthy. My wrap up question for you has now become a bit of a tradition in our show. And I really like to ask this question to experts and scientists and doctors like yourself. So Dr. Rachel, if you had to compress all your knowledge that you've gathered in the so many years that you've been working in this particular field, and you were to compress all this into one essential piece of advice that we must implement into our daily lives what would it be be kind to yourself simple because if you're kind to yourself you will adhere to most of the suggestions that i have made because you will care for yourself you will love yourself you will be kind to yourself and that's really really important i've enjoyed this so much, Rachel.

1:41:36I thank you for coming. As I told you before, I've been so much looking forward to this conversation. My fiance too, her mom too, my friends too, because I feel like everyone wants to just know more of this topic because we go through life and especially the early stages of our life in which we're taught at school or at university things like math or geography, but nobody's teaching us the most important things like this. So how, or basically, how is the food that you're eating going to affect your brain? And then by default, everything else that you do in your life, nobody's teaching us this.

1:42:14So thank you for, for revealing this to me and my audience. And I'm definitely going to start implementing some of the advices that you've shared with me. Thank you. For our audience, we're going to leave a link to Dr. Rachel's book, which is Smart Foods for ADHD and Brain's Health. So you can follow her work and obviously deep dive into more details of this area of expertise. And as I personally believe that this is one of the spaces, the wellness space that is evolving the fastest along with AI in our world, I would very much love to do this perhaps in a year or so and see where we are and what are the new discoveries that you have made along the way and share it with me and my audience.

1:43:01Thank you so much for having me. It's been wonderful. I've really enjoyed it. Thank you.