Most Replayed Moment: Your Food Could Be Making You Depressed! How Diet Impacts Mental Health!

**Steven Bartlett** (0:04)
You know, we talk a lot about diet and food on this show. As it relates to metabolism and mental health, diet.

**Chris Palmer** (0:14)
So diet is huge. And most people have no clue that diet plays any role in mental illness or mental health.
95% of mental health clinicians think it's laughable that anybody would suggest that diet can play a role in mental illness. They think it's laughable.

**Steven Bartlett** (0:40)
What do you think?

**Chris Palmer** (0:41)
I think if you do a deep dive into the science, all of the science that we have accumulated over the last 100 years and longer sometimes, that if you do a deep dive into all of those neuroimaging studies that we've been doing, all of the genetic studies we've been doing, all of the neurotransmitter and hormone studies and trauma studies and adverse childhood experiences studies, if you do a deep dive into the science and you understand what is happening in the brains and bodies of people as a consequence of those things, or what could be causing those things. If you put it all together, you come to this sound bite that mental disorders are metabolic in nature, and there is no questioning whatsoever. It is incontrovertible that diet plays a massive, huge role in metabolism.
And therefore, I believe very strongly that diet might be playing a role in the mental health epidemic that we are seeing, and it also might provide an avenue of hope and healing and recovery. And I use the word might as the scientist in me, is the clinician in me, I know without certainty, it can heal and recover people who have had chronic, horrible, debilitating mental illnesses. And I know from my own personal story, when I was in medical school and residency, I'm still suffering from low-grade depression, OCD, other symptoms. But I also developed what's called metabolic syndrome. I developed high blood pressure, high cholesterol, pre-diabetes. And I wasn't really overweight. I was exercising, I was following a low-fat diet, mostly of processed foods because they're cheaper. But that was the diet that was touted as a healthy diet. It was low in fat. And as long as it was low in fat, that was supposed to be good for us. And my metabolic syndrome just kept getting worse and worse. And so at some point, in order to treat my metabolic syndrome, I changed my diet to essentially a low carbohydrate diet. And within three months, my metabolic syndrome was completely gone.
But the thing that just dumb founded me was that my mental health was better than it had ever been in my entire life. And I just couldn't believe what I was experiencing. I didn't know that I could be that kind of a person. I didn't know that I could be happy and positive and energetic and confident. I had no idea. I didn't think that was in me. And by changing my diet, all of those things happened.

**Steven Bartlett** (4:11)
At the level of the mitochondria, are you saying, do you believe that because you changed your diet to more sort of natural, healthier foods, at the level of the mitochondria, the mitochondria were able to function more naturally themselves and in a more functional way, which meant that the chemicals they released and the processes they go through were more consistent with positive mental health. Is that like the simpleton's way of understanding it? And before then, you talked about manmade compounds in the foods, et cetera. I'm assuming you're saying that some of the modern foods that we eat, the ultra processed foods that have all of these random named chemicals inside them that we see on the labels. The mitochondria don't know how to deal with that, so it's causing the same sort of dysregulation and dysfunction that they might see if we'd gone through like an extreme trauma or something else or some other adverse environmental situation. It's just this dysfunction of the mitochondria, which is causing the knock on effects we see. But there's many things that can cause dysfunction in the mitochondria. And we went through a bunch of them earlier. Is that like a simple way of understanding it?

**Chris Palmer** (5:22)
100%.

**Steven Bartlett** (5:22)
OK, great. Perfect. Super interesting. OK, so on that point then, we have to zoom in on this thing of diet. If you wanted my mitochondria to be perfect, and maybe even give me a case study of patients you've worked with, that you've prescribed a certain diet to, what diet, what food would you tell me to eat? And what would you tell me not to eat?

**Chris Palmer** (5:47)
So I actually don't have a one size fits all prescription. And so I want to say that up front. So I would want to know who am I working with, and how is their mental and metabolic health now?