Foods That Fight Depression & Improve Sleep

Coming up on this week's episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy.

This is fascinating. So the diet that prevents cancer, heart disease, dementia, depression, and fixes most chronic.

Illness is the same diet. Hi, I'm Kasia Perowiet, one of the producers of the Doctor's Pharmacy podcast. We all know that eating well is essential to optimizing our physical health. Now we are learning that what we eat can also have a major effect on our mental health and the quality of our sleep. Dr. Hyman recently sat down with Dr. Drew Ramsey, a writer, farmer, and psychiatrist who practices nutritional psychiatry to talk about what foods increase your risk of depression and what foods can be used to prevent depression.

Let's listen in. What does the data say? If you eat highly processed foods, you have, you know, 50 to 100% increased risk of clinical depression.

Oh.

The food that we've created in the last 100 years leads to an increased risk or increased risk in that population of depression, same data for ADHD, not as much data for anxiety disorders, which is interesting, but certainly feels true to me clinically.

So Drew, you wrote this paper, it was published September 2018 in the Psychiatric Journal, and it was really quite detailed in terms of its analysis of the types of foods and nutrients. So help us take this home. What are the things that you learned from there that are the most important nutrients we need and what are the most important foods to help us get those nutrients and just in general to help us.

The food categories that people should be looking for are things like leafy greens, the rainbow vegetables, more seafood. And if you're eating meat and red meat, to look more towards wild red.

Meats or grass-fed red meats. So this is fascinating. So the diet that prevents cancer, heart disease, dementia, depression, and fixes most chronic.

Illness is the same diet. This isn't rocket science. This is like get rid of refined processed foods, get rid of garbage. Eat, you know, I quote you all the time with that, Eat the food that God made, not the food that man made. That's one of my votes. You know, and I don't, and with your psychiatric license or psychology license or your, you know, wherever you are in the mental health care system, to just encourage patients, as we do with so many other lifestyle factors, give them that nudge. I prescribe a lot of Zoloft and I find it to be a helpful medicine for some people, for the right people. But, you know, the thing that we don't do is we don't say, Look, I'm also prescribing you exercise. I want to report next week. Some wouldn't feel as empowered as they should to say something. That some of it is complicated, some of it's cool biochem, but a lot of it, eat more leafy greens, eat more rainbow vegetables, the kind of things we do in both Eat Complete and Eat to Beat Depression of thinking in.

Food categories and thinking in basics. It's hard to not be depressed if your thyroid's not working or your vitamin D is low. All that stuff's good. You can work on your beliefs, on your your past history, your lineage, all those things really are great, but it's so much easier if you're not struggling against these physiological.

You actually can't do that. I would argue that you can't engage in your mental health if you are nutritionally depleted, if you have really awful sleep hygiene, if you, I mean, you can engage, but you're not, you know, if you're in a bad mood and irritable or have low energy because your thyroid is off or your B12 is low, we're gonna spend a lot of time talking and theorizing why that might be when actually there is no psychological reason for it. Your cells are thirsty and hungry. It's an exciting time between the new knowledge of the microbiome, the psychiatric genetics, which it's not there yet, but man, it's getting close. We're, I hope, gonna see the tide turn on our mental health epidemic.

We are gonna see the tide turn.

On our mental health epidemic mark.

We won't rest until it does, deal? No, no, we can. No, it's, I mean, it's the food stupid, as you know, to paraphrase a former president. But it's like, people don't get how powerful it is and how impact on how quick it works.

It's where we got off in medicine. We kind of separated out mental health and brain health from the rest. Like you're saying, somehow the blood-brain barrier was like, thou shall not pass. We didn't think that, sure, all those same activities that we think about in terms of our general health and the foods we want people to eat and the things we want people to do, move their bodies, connect, be part of their community, Yeah, that's key to your brain health and your mental health. As soon as you experience that, that extra energy, what I find is the better sleep quality. I'm expecting to hear more mood, more energy, and people are like, you know, Doc, I'm really sleeping better. Nothing affects mood, I would say, like sleep.

In addition to food's effect on our mental health, new research has revealed that choices around what we eat can also have a major impact on our sleep. Author of the international best-selling book, Sleep Smarter, Shawn Stevenson recently sat down with Dr. Hyman to share his findings on how to eat to improve your sleep.

The biggest thing in my opinion is avoiding things that mess it up. All right, so one of those would be eating processed foods. So your gut cascade, your microbiome has a huge impact on your sleep quality. And so now the question is what do we do about it? How do we protect or support our microbiome? And that's one of the things that's going to help to improve your sleep quality. So let's just go through a couple. What I want people to do is support their microbiome by, you know, and this should be, just Captain Obvious at this point. Me working at a university for so long as a strength and conditioning coach before I did my clinical work, I worked with people from all over the world and I would ask them about their fermented foods and every culture had something. Yeah. Right? So whether it was like some kind of kefir or like pickled whatever, right? And so making sure that we're getting at least, you know, every couple of days get a serving in of some fermented food or beverage.

Got to eat the kimchi. Yeah, I got a jar in my fridge.

That is a big component here is like, shifting gears and having a more targeted perspective about supporting that gut microbiome. But also, and this is a really cool takeaway for everybody today, is making sure we're getting in servings of what I call good sleep nutrients every day. Yeah.

What is that? Because eating for sleep, nobody really talks about that.

So what does that look like? The first one I'd share, and this one is from the Public Library of Science, but they found that folks in their, in this particular study that were deficient in vitamin C had a tendency towards waking up more frequently. and getting vitamin C levels elevated reverse their symptoms. All right, so that's just one example.

So iron is the other one. If you have a little ferritin.

Iron is another one. Yeah, that's oh my goodness, that's huge and especially more so for women. Yeah, it tends to be. And another one, this was published in the journal Sleep, calcium. Right, so this goes back to that story that I was told about calcium. It is important for sure, but folks who are deficient in calcium, had more interrupted sleep patterns as well.

When you look at the data on calcium, it actually isn't as great as we thought for bones, but the best absorbability in use is actually from greens like arugula and greens that we can have dark green leafy vegetables. Also, there's some great sources like tahini, which is basically ground sesame seeds. Also, different things people might like, I like which is sardines with the bones in them and salmon with the bones in them, like canned salmon. Those are really great to eat because.

They have a lot of great absorbable calcium. Exactly. It's this really fascinating process It's kind of like a biological transmutation of sorts where certain things come together to create bone, right? So like you need silica, you need- Boron. Boron.

Boron, vitamin K2, yeah.

All of these things come together to make this magic happen. So by the way, I wanna give some sources with vitamin C. Obviously we know about citrus, fruits like strawberries, sweet peppers, but there are these, quote, superfoods as well, like camu camu berry, this might be the highest botanical source of vitamin C. Super tart, tangy fruit. It's like a Amazonian thing. Amla berry, Acerola cherry, those are super, super high sources of vitamin C. Another one, and this was, this is the last one I'll share. A study conducted by University of Oxford found that Omega-3s can help folks to get deeper, more restful sleep. The body is just incredible. So eat plenty of good sleep nutrients every day.

Magnesium, no.

Oh, that was the last one actually.

Okay, I was like, that's the first one I go to with my patients.

This is the big one. I was saving the best for last.

And by the way, magnesium deficiency affects 48% of Americans. And it's caused by stress, chronic magnesium deficiency. It's caused by stress, it's caused by coffee, alcohol, and not having enough in our diet, which comes from mostly plant foods, beans and greens, nuts and seeds.

Yeah, absolutely.

By becoming more mindful and intentional about what we eat, when we eat, and why we eat, we can create balance and harmony physically, emotionally, and mentally. As Dr. Hyman says, think of your kitchen as your pharmacy. Whether it be for your physical health, your quality of sleep, or your mental health, it all starts with taking out the bad stuff and putting in the good stuff. I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy. : Thanks for tuning in.

Don't forget, there's a way to listen completely ad free. With Hyman Plus on Apple Podcasts, you can enjoy every episode without any breaks. Just open Apple Podcasts and tap Try Free to start your seven-day free trial.