How long has Nutritional Psychiatry been around? Well, it’s been at least a decade. This is the 10 year anniversary of my cookbook, Eat Complete, the first Nutritional Psychiatry cookbook. I wanted to talk to you about this book and about this project and a lot of people haven’t heard about it. It’s just absolutely wonderful if I do say so. It’s filled with these amazing pictures by a top food photographer, Ellen Silverman. And the book goes over 21 nutrients. It really shows you my early thinking about Nutritional Psychiatry.
Back then, boy, this is 10 years ago, I mean, just turned 40. And I’m thinking there are these nutrients that people don’t know enough about things like potassium, selenium or iodine and the impact on our mental health is just incredible. It also seemed to me then very clear that people were eating more and more of these ultra processed foods. We were losing food tradition and people were losing the ability to nourish themselves. That knowledge of what these nutrients do for your mental health. Once you learn it, you just can’t eat the same because you know you need the right nutrients.
And so these 21 nutrients, are what we highlight in the book. I talk about each one, why it’s important for your mental health, some of the research behind it, but then we get to the most important aspect for a Nutritional Psychiatrist. What foods have the most of these? Each nutrient has a couple of foods, five or six or ten, that are just more packed with that nutrient than anything else. Selenium is a great example, Brazil nuts. In fact, if you eat more than one or two Brazil nuts a day, you’re going to get selenium toxicity. Or iodine, which I mentioned earlier, there’s just a couple of foods, seaweed is one, that if you’re a vegetarian, you’ve got to eat seaweed or you’re not going to get any iodine. Why is that important? Well, iodine deficiency is the top cause of intellectual disability worldwide. So these nutrients are just absolutely important. Iron, magnesium, omega-3 fats and we thought about which fish has the most of these.
So we go into it in the book and through the sections, I talk about each of these really important foods. I give you top recipes in the book for each of the nutrients, because what we do is we take the top foods that have the most of let’s say potassium or magnesium, and we combine them in a way so each recipe has 40 to 50%, more than 100% in a lot of cases, than a few of these nutrients. The idea is that you’re eating for nutrient density, that each bite is just packed with the nutrients, the specific nutrients that you need for mental health and brain health.
This book came alive when my agent Joy Tutela and I went to see Karen Rinaldi, my publisher, and I pitched this big book about all kinds of things. You can see I was a young guy going to farmers markets, a young psychiatrist. And from the whole pitch, she said, Drew, I’m really interested in the food. Could you do a book just on the nutrients in the food? And could we do it as a cookbook?
We walked out of that meeting and Joy just couldn’t believe it. She said no one gets a four color cookbook anymore. We just walked into what was really one of the most creative projects that I’ve been involved with, getting to work with a food stylist, a chef, a recipe developer, an amazing photographer, an incredible editorial team and create really the first Nutritional Psychiatry cookbook. As you can see, the book is just filled with some of the most interesting recipes that I’ve ever gotten to collaborate on and develop. It’s been an absolute treat to see those come to life and to think about how we can combine these different foods, how maybe this book can help you expand your palate a little bit, and most importantly, how this book right here can help you get all of the nutrients that you need for your brain health and your mental health from the foods you eat.
That’s really been my goal in this space as a Nutritional Psychiatrist is to help you feed your brain, feed your mental health with real wholesome foods. I wanted to celebrate 10 years. Thank you Harper Books and Harper Wave. Thank you Joy Tutela and Karen Rinaldi. Thank you Jennifer Iserloh and the team that came together to cook and execute this incredible cookbook. Thank you for everybody who supported Eat Complete. It’s been a decade and I wanted to celebrate. Check out the book. Let me know what you think.
