The Better Brain: Overcome Anxiety, Combat Depression, and Reduce ADHD and Stress with Nutrition

Contents

Title Page

Contents

Copyright

Dedication

Foreword

Introduction

Part I: A Bold New Paradigm for Improving Mental Health

The Missing Key for Mental Health

Food for Thought: The Nutrients Your Brain Needs

Not Your Grandmother’s Peach: Factors That Have Led to Decreased Nutrient Intake

Part II: Better Nutrition for a Better Brain

The Power of the Food You Eat

Treating Psychiatric Disorders with Supplements

Tackling Life’s Challenges with Supplements

Improving Resilience to Trauma and Stress with Supplements

Part III: How to Feed Your Brain

Food First: Eating Well, Mediterranean Style

The Better Brain Recipes

Foods to Avoid for a Better Brain

Supplements: What You Need to Know

A Vision for a Happier, Healthier Tomorrow

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Resources

Notes

Index

About the Authors

Connect with HMH

Copyright © 2021 by Bonnie J. Kaplan and Julia J. Rucklidge

Foreword copyright © 2021 by Andrew Weil, MD

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to trade.permissions@hmhco.com or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

hmhbooks.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Kaplan, Bonnie J., author. | Rucklidge, Julia J., author.

Title: The better brain : overcome anxiety, combat depression, and reduce

ADHD and stress with nutrition / Bonnie J. Kaplan, PhD, Julia J. Rucklidge, PhD.  

Description: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020039114 (print) | LCCN 2020039115 (ebook) | ISBN 9780358447108 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780358449263 | ISBN 9780358449447 | ISBN 9780358447085 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Mental illness—Nutritional aspects. | Mental illness—Diet therapy.

Classification: LCC RC455.4.N8 K37 2021 (print) | LCC RC455.4.N8 (ebook) | DDC 616.85/270654—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020039114

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020039115

Author photographs courtesy of the author (Kaplan) and © Krystle Photography (Rucklidge)

Front cover photographs by Jiangdi/Shutterstock.com (cauliflower head) and Kompor/Shutterstock.com (cauliflower stem)

Cover design by Tai Blanche

v2.0521

This book presents, among other things, the research and ideas of its authors. It is not intended to be a substitute for consultation with a professional healthcare practitioner. Consult with your healthcare practitioner before starting any diet or other medical regimen. The publisher and the author disclaim responsibility for any adverse effects resulting directly or indirectly from information contained in this book. Some names and identifying details have been changed.

To all our research participants, who give us their time and trust, and to our graduate students and trainees, who will carry this work forward into the future.

Foreword

by Andrew Weil, MD

New York Times best-selling author of Spontaneous Happiness and director of the University of Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine

IN MY FOUR YEARS (1964–68) as a student at Harvard Medical School, the total instruction I received in nutrition was thirty minutes during a clinical rotation—grudgingly allowed for a hospital dietitian to talk about special diets available to patients. That deficiency in medical education persists, although—finally—it is recognized as a problem.¹ Because most physicians are not nutritionally literate, they tend not to understand the influence of dietary choices on health status and disease risks or the power of dietary change as a primary therapeutic strategy.

These subjects are key components of Integrative Medicine training and practice for dealing with physical illnesses. When I write treatment plans for patients, almost always the first items are recommendations for dietary modification; often, I find these alone to be sufficient. Combined with other lifestyle changes, natural remedies, and mind/body therapies, they may obviate the need for medication or, if medication is necessary, make it possible to use lower doses of less potent agents.

In cases of autoimmunity, for example, adopting an anti-inflammatory diet and supplementing it with omega-3 fatty acids (from fish oil or other sources) and natural anti-inflammatory agents like turmeric and ginger may reduce symptoms significantly. Together with mindfulness and stress management training and, possibly, traditional Chinese medicine, improvement may be so great that need for immunosuppressive drugs is much less. For managing gastro-esophageal reflux disease, instead of resorting immediately to proton pump inhibitors with all of their serious short- and long-term adverse effects, integrative practitioners can take dietary histories and advise patients about eliminating common irritants (like coffee and decaffeinated coffee), changing the timing and size of meals, managing stress, and experimenting with safe natural products like chamomile, DGL (deglycyrrhizinated licorice), and d-limonene.

Given the relevance of nutrition to health and the safety and efficacy of dietary modification for the management of diverse ailments, why have these subjects so consistently been neglected in the training of physicians? The only explanation I come up with is that to the academic medical mind, nutrition looks more like home economics than real science. Whatever the reason, the consequences are detrimental, limiting understanding of the causes of disease and options for treatment and contributing to overuse of medications.

Further, deficiency of education in nutrition has skewed research priorities. In the past few years, a flood of much-publicized studies—many of them poorly designed meta-analyses—have belittled the benefits and exaggerated the dangers of dietary supplements, particularly multinutrient products.² Medical journals have given these reports prominence, leading to stories in the popular media suggesting that people taking vitamin and mineral supplements are not only wasting their money but are also increasing their risks of all-cause mortality. One can speculate about the motivations for this agenda, but its influence is clear: despite evidence to the contrary, many clinicians now advise patients not to use these supplements.

Neglect of nutrition and of dietary supplementation is a serious defect in medicine generally and in the field of mental health particularly. The biomedical paradigm that dominates that field explains all mental and emotional disorders as the result of disordered brain biochemistry and relies almost exclusively on psychiatric medication to manage them. The limitations of that paradigm should be obvious: despite very high rates of prescribing those drugs, the conditions they are supposed to treat, such as depression and anxiety, remain epidemic in society. Their efficacy is unimpressive and their adverse effects significant. In long-term use, they may actually prolong or worsen the problems they are meant to relieve.³

The field of integrative mental health is in its infancy, but given the inadequacy of the pharmaceutical approach, it is attracting growing numbers of mental health professionals. Nutrition is an important focus of the field, with due attention to dietary change as a primary treatment strategy along with appropriate use of micronutrient supplementation.

The authors of this book have been studying nutrition and brain health for years. Their research provides strong evidence for dietary adjustment and supplementation as safe and effective ways to optimize mental health and treat the most common mental and emotional disorders. Yet Bonnie Kaplan and Julia Rucklidge write, We both had been taught that nutrition and diet were of trivial significance for mental health, and that only drugs or psychotherapy were of any value as treatments. In these pages, they explain how they came to question that dogma and begin their groundbreaking studies. They also discuss the opposition they encountered to their recommendations for multinutrient rather than single-nutrient supplementation.

In recent years, other lines of research have added to our understanding of the relationship between what people eat and cognitive and emotional status. Two discoveries I consider especially noteworthy are the connection between inflammation and depression and the interactions of the gut microbiome with the brain, both of which are explained in this book.

The rationale for reliance on the most commonly prescribed antidepressant medications (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) is the assumption that depression results from deficiency of serotonin at neural junctions in the brain. If this were the whole story, one would expect drugs that increase serotonin at those junctions to be more effective than they are. In fact, the more we study SSRIs, the harder it is to distinguish their effects from those of placebos, except in the most severe forms of depression.

An alternative concept—the cytokine hypothesis of depression—posits a correlation between the immune system and the brain: specifically, that upregulation of inflammatory cytokines is linked to depressed mood and the various symptoms that often accompany it, such as fatigue, decreased appetite, and social withdrawal. This suggests that moderating inflammation can help prevent and treat depression and benefit emotional well-being. One way to do that is to adopt an anti-inflammatory diet.

The mainstream North American diet is clearly pro-inflammatory. It provides fats and forms of carbohydrates that favor inflammation and not enough of the protective elements found in vegetables, fruits, herbs, spices (notably turmeric and ginger), and beverages like green tea. Using the Mediterranean diet as a reference point, Drs. Kaplan and Rucklidge discuss the importance of food choices to keep excessive inflammation in check and optimize brain health. They advise what and what not to eat and even provide easy-to-follow recipes.

Understanding of the influence of the gut microbiome on brain function has developed even more recently. As a medical student, all I learned about gut flora was that they played a role in digestion. Back then, no one suspected that the microorganisms in the gastrointestinal tract affected general health, our interactions with the environment, or the brain. Now we know those organisms produce neurotransmitters and other regulatory compounds, some of which travel to centers in the brain by way of the vagus nerve. Remarkably, the composition and activities of the gut microbiome appear to be factors in autism, ADHD, mood disorders, and Parkinson’s disease. The more diverse the microbial population of the gastrointestinal tract, the better, especially with a preponderance of bacterial species known to be associated with better health. Dietary patterns strongly influence which microorganisms thrive in the gut and which do not. That subject is also covered in these pages.

In presenting this material and summarizing their own research, Drs. Kaplan and Rucklidge say they are giving us a bold new paradigm of mental health. I congratulate them for it. Making nutritional science central to the field is long overdue. It promises safer and more effective ways to prevent and treat mental and emotional disorders and suggests simple, practical steps that all of us can take to optimize brain health. I could not be more pleased to introduce it to readers.

Cortes Island, British Columbia, Canada

July 2020

Introduction

Finding Answers in Nutrition, Not the Pharmacy

THERE IS AN ENORMOUS crisis in America right now. Not just an economic crisis or an obesity crisis or an opioid crisis. A mental health crisis.

Currently, one person in every five has some form of mental health issue. This is incredibly disturbing, because a mental health challenge in one individual affects an entire family, which means that the number affected is much higher.

Yet for over fifty years, modern medicine has been trying—mostly unsuccessfully—to treat mental disorders with pharmaceuticals. For example:

All indicators across all Western countries show that mood and anxiety disorders have not decreased over the last few decades—actually, they’ve gone way up—despite substantial increases in the prescriptions of medications, particularly antidepressants. Right now about 40 million Americans take some kind of psychiatric medication: that’s equivalent to about one in six adults.¹ According to an article published in the New York Times on April 7, 2018, 15.5 million Americans have been taking antidepressants in particular for at least five years. This rate has almost doubled since 2010, and more than tripled since 2000.

Despite an ever-increasing use of antidepressants, recovery rates and relapse rates aren’t any better now than they were fifty years ago before the advent of medications.

According to the CDC (Centers for Disease Control), suicide rates in the United States have increased steadily from 2000 to 2016.

Conventional treatment helps some, but doesn’t solve the problem. Many people remain shamed by the unfair social stigma around mental health issues, putting them at risk for even worse symptoms of depression and anxiety.

In addition, the impact on healthcare budgets of these often ineffective treatments is huge. It costs the US economy tens of billions of dollars for treatments that just aren’t working well enough. Not to mention the cost to consumers who can’t afford insurance or copays.

What if there is a solution to this crisis?

What if the pharmaceuticals that are costly, ineffective for many, and laden with side effects were no longer the automatic go-to treatment for mental health issues?

What if we could eliminate that social stigma by showing that many mental health symptoms in some people are simply caused by suboptimal nutrition and not by something being wrong with you?

What if the right nutritional approach to treating mental health issues can save as much as 90 percent of society’s mental healthcare budget?

What if one solution to this crisis is as simple as changing how you eat?

Nutrition matters, much more than you may realize. We all know that eating poorly can cause all kinds of physical illnesses, like obesity, Type II diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and premature death. But poor nutrition is also a significant risk factor for the development of mental illness.

Why? Because when we eat, most of the energy and nutrients we consume are used by our brains. What you eat today will affect how you feel and think tomorrow. Most people don’t know that. They might think that a healthy diet is needed for overall health, but not realize its importance for better mental health.

The Better Brain is the first book that will tell you how and why nutrients can be used to treat mental health issues. We are scientists who’ve shown that many symptoms of anxiety, depression, attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and more are caused by suboptimal nutrition.

In other words, what if a large part of the solution to this mental health crisis is as simple as changing what you feed your brain?

This book is all about that solution.

How This Book Came to Be

With medication I got better—with the nutrients I got normal.

—AUTUMN STRINGAM

After her first baby was born in 1992, a Canadian woman named Autumn Stringam had such a severe postpartum psychosis that she was admitted to the psychiatric ward at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. On the fateful day in late 1996 that Bonnie met her, along with her father Tony Stephan (a property manager) and their friend David Hardy (a nutrition consultant and feed formulator for farm animals), she described the auditory and visual hallucinations that she had had; the five psychiatric medications she was required to take; the fact that she was not permitted to be alone with her baby in case the voices in her head returned and told her again to kill her baby; her doctors’ prognosis that she would never be well; and her determination to do whatever her doctors told her so that maybe she could have a better life.

And then she told Bonnie what happened when she took a broad spectrum of micronutrients—the term we use for minerals and vitamins—as recommended by her father and David. She began to feel well, like herself again. She was able to gradually eliminate her medications. Her hallucinations disappeared.

And her psychiatrist threatened to stop seeing her if she continued with micronutrients instead of medications.

Autumn’s family, the Stephans, had several members suffering from bipolar disorder, psychosis, and depression—serious mental health issues. Conventional treatment did not restore them to normal mental health, and there were many challenging side effects and constant relapses. In desperation, and supported by David Hardy’s nutrition knowledge, along with Tony’s children and others, they began using over-the-counter pills and liquids containing micronutrients. Much to everyone’s surprise, they got better. A lot better!

The idea of using micronutrients to improve emotional stability was well established in animals used in laboratory research, and in the 1990s supplemental micronutrients were used in farm animals across Alberta. In humans, the pioneering work of Saskatchewan-based Dr. Abram Hoffer in the 1950s showed clinical benefits in people given large doses of niacin, later leading to a strong orthomolecular community in Canada, which continues to this day to focus on nutritional treatments of mental health problems.

When Tony Stephan’s children improved sufficiently to be able to function normally without psychiatric medication, Tony and his friend David anticipated great interest within the psychiatric and scientific community. To attract the attention of a local academic neuroscientist, Bryan Kolb, David and Tony collected data from some friends whose children had ADHD and emotional outbursts. Dr. Kolb analyzed the data and sent the results to Bonnie in August 1996, because he knew she had published on nutrition in the past.

Shocked yet intrigued, Bonnie knew she had to investigate this further . . . and that was what started her, and soon Julia, on the improbable path toward upending conventional beliefs about the treatment of mental illness.

A dual American/Canadian citizen who earned her academic degrees in America as an experimental psychologist, with postdoctoral training in neurophysiology, Bonnie had been working as a professor in the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Calgary in 1993, studying neurodevelopmental disorders (such as dyslexia and ADHD), when Julia started her PhD under her supervision while also training to become a clinical psychologist. Like all students of psychology, and like all medical students at the time, we both had been taught that nutrition and diet were of trivial significance for mental health, and that only drugs or psychotherapy were of any value as treatments.

After Julia earned her doctorate in 1998 (based on research looking at the psychosocial outcomes of women with ADHD), she moved first to Toronto for postdoctoral training at the Hospital for Sick Children and then in 2000 to New Zealand for an academic post at the University of Canterbury. She stayed in touch with Bonnie, who continued to study the biological basis of learning and attention problems. Bonnie’s postdoctoral training in neurophysiology and her work in behavior genetics generated her interest in the underlying physiology behind human behavior and mental health, and along with some of her Canadian colleagues, she started studying the effect on mental health of the micronutrients used by Autumn. Bonnie began publishing data in 2001, with results showing that with micronutrients, these people not only got well, but stayed well, and with none of the horrible side effects that commonly occurred with psychiatric meds.

After Julia nominated her for a visiting fellowship in New Zealand, Bonnie went to the University of Canterbury in 2003 to teach about the role of nutrition in mental health. When she presented her preliminary data, Julia was fascinated—but it was both the remarkable turnaround for people who were so severely ill and the replications observed across a number of different scientists and clinicians that really gained Julia’s attention.

From Julia’s perspective—based on her own work and that of many others around the world—conventional treatments were not making enough people well. It is the role of scientists to be the critic and conscience of society. It’s also our role to investigate new ideas, no matter how controversial, and no matter how much the idea might contravene the current way of thinking. So Julia thought, what do we have to lose? We either discover these micronutrients aren’t helpful, which the public might like to know; or we find out they are helpful, which both the government and the public really should know.

Julia began to publish the results of her own studies starting in 2009. And she observed exactly what Bonnie had seen already: micronutrients worked. Her first case was a teenager with OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder) whom she had been treating for over a year with CBT (cognitive behavior therapy) with minimal change. He went on the micronutrients, and within a week, his symptoms had virtually disappeared. She observed others showing dramatic improvements. The micronutrients helped many people recover from what seemed like intractable and chronic conditions.

Both of us continued to study the role of micronutrients and brain health, Bonnie at the University of Calgary in Canada, and Julia at the Mental Health and Nutrition Research lab at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand.

Broad-Spectrum Multinutrients

Our research never would have come to be without the astonishing discovery by Tony Stephan and David Hardy in southern Alberta. At the time, they knew that mainstream medical practitioners considered only two nutritional options when trying to correct brain dysfunction: treatment with a single nutrient at a time (the way nutritional research had been conducted since the 1920s), or treatment with a select favorite-few nutrients (the way many clinicians approach mental health even now). Tony and David’s breakthrough—which in hindsight seems so obvious!—was their decision to provide all the major minerals and vitamins together, in balance, at appropriate doses, in one supplement, which we will refer to as broad-spectrum multinutrients.

They only had to look at Autumn for proof, as she hasn’t needed any psychiatric medication since she started taking micronutrient supplements in 1996.

After that eureka moment, Tony and David quit their jobs and formed the first company, Truehope Nutritional Support, to manufacture a broad-spectrum multinutrient formula—meaning that it contained thirty or so dietary minerals and vitamins, along with some amino acids and antioxidants. It was initially called EMPower; over the years small modifications resulted in amendments to the name (EMPowerplus, EMPowerplus Advanced). We refer to it in this book as EMP.

After working together for about fifteen years, David and Tony completed a planned business separation, where David started an independent company, Hardy Nutritionals. Their supplement, Daily Essential Nutrients, is very similar, containing the full spectrum of essential minerals and vitamins. We refer to it throughout as DEN.

With this kind of broad-spectrum supplement in hand, Bonnie and Julia, as well as additional scientists, finally had reliable products to use in their research. Because EMP and DEN have been studied in academic settings in three countries, the government health regulators in all those countries have examined and approved the formulas for research. That approval affirms the quality and stability of the ingredients, which is required by university research ethics committees. EMP and DEN have been the subject of more than fifty peer-reviewed publications ever since.

Have you ever felt frustrated when you read vitamin D is good for depression followed by vitamin D has no effect on depression? So often, the science is inconsistent because the studies used different formulations and different doses. This is why there is such a huge advantage in having a reliable product used for multiple studies, scrutinized by governments for the ingredient sources, purity, quality, and stability. Now, with the Alberta formulas, scientists around the globe have a way to study the full spectrum of micronutrients that every brain requires, and a way to compare their findings and replicate each other’s work. The result: a clear message is provided for the public—and now, for you, in this book!

On the other hand, there is nothing in this research that says that only EMP and DEN benefit mental health. What both David and Tony taught the researchers was that we’d all benefit from having more high-quality formulas for independent scientists to study. These two families didn’t go into business to monopolize the field or to scam consumers, but to help them; their goal is to change the way people with mental health problems are treated, and to give them an alternative to prescription meds. When Tony and David realized that psychiatrists would rarely support patients desperately trying to decrease or get off psychiatric meds that had given them debilitating side effects, they set up telephone lines with product specialists to help people who wanted to try broad-spectrum multinutrients. We know of no other natural health product companies that have chosen to focus on developing this kind of product for mental health or support for families.

What Is Micro and What Is Multi When Referring to Nutrients?

In chapter 2 we will provide some standard definitions of nutrients, vitamins, and minerals. But in the meantime, we need to clarify the use of two terms used throughout the book. Micronutrient in general refers to minerals or vitamins or both together. But as you will see, the two of us have done quite a few studies of some products that contain lots of micronutrients, and sometimes a few other things in addition—such as amino acids. How can we talk to you about a formula containing around thirty micronutrients alongside other nutrients in a way that specifies its breadth? We have settled on the term broad-spectrum multinutrient formula, or just multinutrient formula, to indicate that it contains lots of nutrients.

Why Don’t You Know About This Powerful Treatment?

Does the mental health world celebrate these multinutrient companies? No, it does not. Instead, it is highly suspicious and dismissive. Mental health clinicians have been slow to acknowledge any published scientific research on any aspect of nutrition’s role in mental health, not just the fifty peer-reviewed publications on EMP and DEN.

We should consider three reasons for this selective dismissal of nutrition:

• The first reason is the inadequacy of nutrition education (discussed in chapter 1). Bonnie used to end lectures on her early research with the following topic: Why it all makes sense. She did so because twenty years ago, people seemed to think that resolving mental health problems with nutrients was very close to magical thinking. Western society had been taught to focus on eating a healthy diet to have strong muscles and bones (obviously important), while not being taught to feed their brains (discussed in chapter 2). Sadly, years of funded research devoted to manipulating a single nutrient at a time—what we call magic bullet thinking—has also contributed to the impression that vitamins and minerals are trivial factors in brain health.

Education for our physicians is a particular problem, as it is often delivered directly or indirectly from pharmaceutical companies. And the scientific research is too. When Bonnie was trained in the 1960s and 1970s, no scientist with integrity would ever take money from any company. It’s almost comical to remember those days! Now pharmaceutical companies are the major financial driver of all clinical trials in mental health, leading to an era of misrepresentation of the efficacy and safety of meds.² Chapter 1 reviews other ways in which the information about safe and efficacious treatments has been skewed by pharmaceutical funds.

For this reason, we have chosen to have absolutely no financial ties to any supplement company. From the beginning of our research on EMP, DEN, and other nutrients described in this book, we decided to go back to the good old days. We have no commercial ties and no conflicts of interest.

Who benefits from misleading the public? For one, the pharmaceutical companies who make psychiatric medications. And the supplement companies selling their single-nutrient formulas, which may not be bad, but aren’t good enough to resolve mental health challenges, as we’ll explain. People buy a bottle of a single vitamin or two, try them, are disappointed, and this failure usually leads them back to the psychiatric meds they were desperate to stop taking in the first place.

We hear about this desperation all the time. People come to us for advice because we have written extensively on this topic in scientific journals as well as through blogs and newspaper articles, and we have spoken publicly even more about how vitamins and minerals and better nutrition improve mental health. We’ve also both given hundreds of lectures all over the world at universities, at conferences, and to the public. In October 2014, Julia gave a TEDx Talk on The Surprisingly Dramatic Role of Nutrition in Mental Health and it has since gotten over 1.6 million views on YouTube. It’s proof of how strongly our message resonates with the public.

Since we’ve been working together, time and again, in lectures to audiences ranging from 25 to 1,200, we’ve asked the listeners to raise their hands if they or people close to them were struggling with mental health challenges. The response has always been close to 100 percent—which in itself is shocking. Then we ask: Please raise your hands again if the people you’re thinking of have found that conventional treatments resolved their problems. Almost always, not a single hand is raised. One time, when Bonnie saw three hands in an audience of 1,200 mental health clinicians, she said, wholly without sarcasm, Wow—three! That’s pretty good! The audience burst out laughing in nervous camaraderie, but they knew it wasn’t really funny.

The public is longing for new and better ways to resolve mental health challenges. For alternatives to conventional treatments. We frequently get asked questions about our findings. What all these people really need to know is: it is likely that many mental health problems might emerge because our brains aren’t getting the nutrients they need.

• They won’t often hear that from their mental health clinicians, because of a second issue: the persistent focus on life’s stresses rather than how nutrition is the foundation of resilience. We hear all the time from people who want us to acknowledge that life is more complicated now: stress is everywhere, people are bullied and harassed, everyone is short of funds, and there is so much to worry about the future health of not just our bodies but of our planet. Our reaction? We tell them to think about their grandparents’ generation who had the Great Depression, World Wars I and II, and the Holocaust to deal with. They didn’t have many of the vaccines and antibiotics that we take for granted, since many of our most astonishing scientific discoveries and breakthroughs have come in recent decades. They didn’t have computers or the internet for keeping in touch with family they left behind when they moved to North America.

Are our lives really more stressful than in previous generations? Or is our resilience lower due to our poor nutrient intake?

This book explains that optimal nutrition is fundamental for our brain cells to function well, so it just makes sense to focus on nutritional treatments. Even though they’ve been ignored or dismissed by many mental health clinicians, the data that have been published for years prove this. When emotional or mental health problems emerge, improve your nutrition first, before turning to medication. Optimizing nutrition is a safe and viable way to avoid, treat, or lessen mental illness. It is the magic ingredient for your resilience.

• A third reason nutrient treatments have not yet received the attention they deserve involves our system of health care. Pharmaceutical companies have a vested interest in patients being prescribed psychiatric medications. It earns them billions in profits, whereas they cannot make the same level of profit from most