The Better Brain

Overcome Anxiety, Combat Depression, and Reduce ADHD and Stress with Nutrition

Bonnie J. Kaplan, Julia J. Rucklidge

• Publisher: Harvest
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780358697138
• eBook ISBN: 9780358447085
• Subtopic: Women in History

A paradigm-shifting approach to treating mental disorders like anxiety, depression, and ADHD with food and nutrients, based on the original, groundbreaking research of two leading scientists.
 
We are in the midst of a mental health crisis. An estimated one in five American adults suffer from some form of mental illness. Despite the billions of dollars spent in pharmaceutical research and the rising popularity of antidepressant drugs, we are more depressed and anxious than ever before.

What if we’re looking for solutions in the wrong places? What if instead of treating mental illness with prescriptions and medication, we changed what we eat and how we feed our brains?

Leading scientists Bonnie Kaplan, PhD and Julia Rucklidge, PhD have dedicated their lives to studying the role of nutrition in mental health. Together, they have published over 300 peer-reviewed scientific papers, many of which reveal the healing power of nutrients in the form of vitamins and minerals, and the surprising role they play in brain health.  

In this paradigm-shifting book, Kaplan and Rucklidge share their groundbreaking research, explaining how to feed your brain to stabilize your mood, stave off depression, and make yourself more resilient to daily stress. The Better Brain uncovers the hidden causes of the rising rates of depression and anxiety, from the decrease of nutrients in our soil to our over-reliance on processed food, and provides a comprehensive program for better brain health, featuring
 

• The ideal diet for your brain: a Mediterranean-style diet rich in fresh fruits, vegetables, nuts, and seeds.
• More than 30 delicious, mood-boosting recipes.
• Crucial advice on when to supplement and how.

The Better Brain is your complete guide to a happier, healthier brain.
 

Part I

A Bold New Paradigm for Improving Mental Health

1

The Missing Key for Mental Health

What is probably inherited in mental illness are genes that regulate brain metabolism of essential nutrients.

—NOBEL PRIZE WINNER DR. LINUS PAULING, 1968

IF WE HAD a dollar for every time a psychiatrist has said to us: “Those vitamins and minerals you’re studying—they can’t actually affect the brain, can they?” we’d be able to fund a great deal of research!

Many people find it hard to believe that “just” nutrition could solve mental health problems. This attitude isn’t just wrong. It’s wrong, outdated, and harmful—especially because there have been dozens and dozens of rigorous scientific studies showing that nutrition can be a vital key for preventing and treating mental disorders.

But we know why these psychiatrists think this way.

Like them, we’re products of that same type of education. While in graduate school, we were barely taught about nutrition. And the few hours that were spent on it taught us that nutrition was not relevant for mental health, and that psychiatric symptoms were manifestations of chemical imbalances in the brain that could only be corrected with medications. Physicians are no different from the rest of us: for everyone, our knowledge is heavily influenced by the courses we took in school. For the last fifty years, much of that curriculum for physicians, as well as their continuing medical education, has been sponsored by pharmaceutical companies. What does this mean? It means that what they’re taught is that the treatment for brain health must focus on drugs.

It’s frustrating that physicians are usually not taught the very basics of nutrition. In the 2014 call to action entitled “A Deficiency of Nutrition Education in Medical Training” published in the American Journal of Medicine, multiple studies were summarized showing that nutrition was the single most important factor in disability and premature death, and could explain well over half of the cases of cardiovascular disease.¹ In spite of this powerful information relating diet to physical health, medical schools were devoting fewer than twenty hours of their four-year training to nutrition. And what about mental health? Our brains demand a disproportionately large amount of the nutrients we consume, so the need for nutrition education related to mental health is even greater.

The lack of nutrition education isn’t limited to psychiatrists and family physicians. Other mental health professionals usually don’t learn about nutrition either. Teachers don’t learn about it—so their students don’t learn about it in school. As a result, most Americans don’t know that the brain metabolism responsible for the production of neurotransmitters like serotonin and dopamine is dependent on an ample supply of micronutrients (which you will learn about in chapter 2).

Like almost all scientists, we both struggled with the concept of nutritional treatment when we first began our research. Once we engaged with the science, however, its potential was undeniably clear. We now know that there are many people with underlying risk factors, often genetic, that may make them more vulnerable to emotional distress when their diet is poor. Improve and fix their nutritional needs, and many of them can and will get better.

First the Bad News: The Tsunami of Mental Disorders Has Hit

Despite billions of research dollars over the years, we still don’t know what precisely causes mental illness. Science has uncovered some clues, like our genetics, our childhood environment, exposure to traumas, poverty, social deprivation, and the effects of toxins on neural development. And the numbers appear to be rising.

Some of the most sobering data on the prevalence of mental disorders come from a book by Dr. E. Fuller Torrey and Judy Miller published in 2001. They collected government data from all over the world and found consistent evidence for a mental illness prevalence rate of 1 in 10,000 up to the year 1750—but that rate tripled from 1 to 3 in 10,000 between 1750 and 1960. This increase worried them so much that they entitled their book The Invisible Plague.

Prevalence of Diagnosed Mental Illness

What about now? Actually, 3 in 10,000 sounds wonderful in comparison with the latest World Health Organization report of over 2,000 in every 10,000. That’s a shocking one in five, or 20 percent of us! If you look at the lifetime occurrence, the CDC says it is 5,000 in every 10,000. Yes, 50 percent.

If our current treatments are really effective, why isn’t the rate of mental disorders going down? Why has the diagnosis of mental health conditions increased so dramatically in the last sixty years?

All of this means that the rates of people on disability as a direct consequence of a mental disorder are on the rise. Insurance costs are on the rise. Treatment costs are catastrophic.

The plague is no longer invisible, and it is continuing to get worse. This really is a tsunami. Although some of the increase is certainly due to our more open society, more mental health professionals diagnosing disorders, and a willingness of people to seek help—which is a really good thing, of course—such staggering numbers suggest that other things are going on. Like how and what we eat.

How Mental Health Problems Are Categorized

Why do you need to know how mental health symptoms are classified? Because health insurance companies will not reimburse for medical appointments without a diagnostic label.

The diagnostic reference for medical practitioners in the United States is the DSM, or the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, currently in its fifth edition.

The DSM presents a classification system, prepared by committees who try to come up with a consensus. The increase in the diagnostic categories from the first edition in 1952 until the most current edition in 2013 is startling: the number has quadrupled from 128 to 541. One of the reasons for these updates is that the definition of a mental health disorder reflects the times and the culture. For instance, homosexuality was classified as a psychiatric disorder from 1968 until it was removed in 1987. Did homosexuality change? No, our culture did. Also, some new categories have been added, recognizing that meds can cause adverse side effects.

The most familiar categories are:

• Anxiety disorders, including panic disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, and phobias
• Depression, bipolar disorder, and other mood disorders
• Eating disorders
• Personality disorders like narcissistic and antisocial personality disorders
• Psychotic disorders, including schizophrenia
• Neurodevelopmental disorders like ADHD and autism spectrum disorder (ASD)
• Medication-induced movement disorders, and other adverse effects of medications

Why Our Current Approach Isn’t Working

Julia’s TEDx talk was about her research establishing that many of the people given extra minerals and vitamins showed a reduction in their mental symptoms. Since the talk went public at the end of 2014, she has received thousands of phone calls, emails, and messages on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter telling her detailed, painful, and deeply personal stories, and asking for advice. They tell of lives being devastated by mental illness and the ensuing treatments. They tell of trying to cope with multiple medications that create increasingly problematic side effects, like weight gain and diabetes, and how they’re then given more medications to address the side effects of the other meds. They tell of the years wasted because treatments didn’t give them the quality of life that all of us aspire to. They tell of becoming a shell of who they were and getting further and further away from their full potential.

Most heartbreaking is that they tell of hopelessness.

Julia is also a practicing clinical psychologist, and she has seen that psychiatric medications can help some people tremendously, saving their lives. But in twenty-five years as a practicing clinician, this happens less frequently than we would hope.

When she was recently a collaborator on a study looking at whether genetics or personality could predict who would develop side effects to antidepressants (they didn’t), Julia was dismayed by one of the most telling points. About two hundred people were in the study; 70.8 percent of them fell above the “high psychological distress” range, with half of these people falling in the “very high distress” range (indicative of a severe mental disorder).² But most of them (84.5 percent) were already taking antidepressants—the typical, conventional treatment—so the medications clearly were not resolving their mood problems!

Why has our society not noticed that our current conventional approaches don’t lead to recovery? If these drugs were conventional treatments for an infection yet the infections continued, people would be demanding something better. But when it comes to mental disorders, we seem to accept that partial or minimal recovery is adequate. Well, it isn’t.

How Conventional Treatment Failed a Little Boy—but Nutrients Didn’t

Andrew was a ten-year-old boy who suffered from anxiety and symptoms of psychosis, coupled with frequent intrusive thoughts and compulsions typical of OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder). He had spent six months in a children’s hospital, with no improvement whatsoever, when his mother, who’d heard about micronutrient treatment, telephoned Bonnie in desperation.

She was not just desperate to find a treatment that would help her child; she was desperate for an expert to validate the use of these nutrients. They had an appointment scheduled with Dr. Megan Rodway, a child and adolescent psychiatrist, but were afraid that she would refuse to help them if they wanted their son treated with nutrients. Thankfully, Dr. Rodway, although highly skeptical of the efficacy of the multinutrient formula (she called it “snake oil”), had the integrity to acknowledge that medications had not helped Andrew . . . so why not try the nutrients?

Improvements in Andrew’s mental health began very quickly after starting the broad-spectrum multinutrient formula. Within ten months, his OCD symptoms had virtually disappeared. Over about eleven months, so did his symptoms of psychosis.

What six months of inpatient treatment couldn’t resolve, minerals and vitamins were able to fix. Not only that, but the nutrient treatment cost less than 2 percent of his inpatient treatment.³

A decade later, Andrew still takes his nutrients, and when he does, he has no symptoms of psychosis—meaning that he is able to function in the real world—although he is still challenged by anxiety. He graduated from high school (which is very rare for someone with childhood psychosis), works part-time, volunteers at his church, and has friends.

Yet, even after Andrew improved so drastically, and everyone in the psychiatry department at the hospital knew this, they did not change their mental health treatment practices. (Read about what happened to Dr. Rodway in chapter 12.) In fact, Bonnie asked a young psychiatrist at that hospital if he would then consider using nutrients with any other cases, knowing how well they worked for Andrew. His response was no, not until nutritional treatment was in the clinical practice guidelines (CPGs). This is unlikely to happen anytime soon, because it all boils down to money (more about this in the section “One Way Money Influences Diagnosis and Treatment” later in this chapter). And his comment revealed a disheartening double standard, as psychiatrists often go outside the CPGs, such as using meds for children that have been approved only in adults or using meds “off label,” which means prescribing them for an illness that has insufficient science to support this prescribing.

Good Nutrition = Good Brain Health Has Been Known for Centuries!

That nutrition is relevant to health is not a new idea. The father of modern medicine, Hippocrates (c. 460–c. 370 BCE), knew what he was talking about when he said, “Let food be thy medicine and medicine thy food.” Although we’ll never know whether he considered mental health, he certainly had the right attitude about nutrition.

Our more immediate ancestors have known for many centuries that nutrition was a big part of the mental health picture. During medieval times, for instance, physicians stressed climate and exercise, alongside diet and herbal medicines, for the promotion of health and for the treatment of di...

Table of 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