Could Changing Your Diet Improve Your Mental Health? Latest What Your GP Doesn't Tell You Podcast
Psychiatrist Dr Georgia Ede argues the medical profession has completely underestimated the effect of diet on mental well being
The latest episode of the What Your GP Doesn’t Tell You Podcast - Could Changing Your Diet Improve Your Mental Health? is now available on Apple, Spotify and other podcast platforms. And you can sign up to the podcast mailing list at What Your GP Doesn't Tell You, where you can also find out more about the pod. The next episode of the podcast will go out on Tuesday 6th February.
This week, I’m talking to psychiatrist Dr Georgia Ede, who in her new book, Change Your Diet, Change Your Mind, suggests improvements we can all make to our diet. She has also developed three dietary approaches for those looking to improve their mental health. Ede believes for optimal health we should all include animal foods in our diet. She argues plants don’t contain all the nutrients humans need, and even when they do contain useful nutrients, these are not so easily absorbed by our bodies, as she explains in this clip.
Ede also says it is important to limit the amount of carbohydrates we eat to protect our brain health. When we eat carbohydrates, a large portion of these turn to glucose in the bloodstream. If we eat too many - or for a number of other reasons including old age - our ability to tolerate carbohydrates can deteriorate, causing our glucose levels to rise. That means our bodies have to produce more and more insulin to control the glucose that is produced.
And as Ede reveals, there comes a point at which the brain simply can’t cope with the level of glucose that is flooding into it.
For people with a range of mental illnesses, a number of researchers including Ede, are finding that very low level carbohydrate, otherwise known as ketogenic diets, that push the body into ketosis, causing it to use fat as its main fuel - not sugar - have produced promising findings.
Early results from a range of trials using this approach to treat conditions from bipolar disorder to schizophrenia, suggest a greater effect, in fact 6 to 10 times that seen in any comparative drug trial.
The other discovery in these studies has been that the patients’ metabolic health has improved too. So Ede argues that it is essential when dealing with any patient with a mental illness to first assess their physical or metabolic health to establish what effect this may be having on their mental condition.
One of the greatest dilemmas for a psychiatrist like Ede is managing the psychiatric drugs her patients take. For the irony is, that these medications, which she argues can also be useful, can at the same time actually worsen metabolic health, which then has a negative impact on brain health.
You can hear our full conversation on this week’s podcast.
Change Your Mind, Change Your Diet by Dr Georgia Ede is published by Yellow Kite Books, and is out on 30th January 2024.
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