Welcome to week four of the Feed Your Mental Health Nutritional Psychiatry Challenge. I’m Dr. Drew Ramsey, board-certified psychiatrist and Nutritional Psychiatrist, brain food aficionado. This week we’re going someplace a little bit different. We’re going to talk about gut health and how gut health impacts brain health and probably the most important food and the food I prescribe the most when I want to improve somebody’s microbiome.
We are going to be talking about your gut because right now, in this moment, your gut is talking to your brain and sending all kinds of information, and you have a very, very powerful intervention to improve the way your body regulates information and to improve the quality of information that’s going from your gut to your brain.
One of my favorite ways to think about the gut-brain connection is through this wonderful simple food, kefir. We’re going to be focusing on kefir and other fermented foods for our week four Feed Your Mental Health Nutritional Psychiatry Challenge. And let’s get into why, because likely this is the most powerful food in the challenge if you’re just going to kind of think about it broadly.
Why kefir? Now let’s start off. Kefir is a fermented dairy drink, usually milk, but there’s also coconut kefir and water kefir. And the reason I want to talk about kefir is it allows us to think about fermented foods, and kefir has more colony-forming units, CFUs, than any other food that I’ve found. It’s in every grocery store, and it’s a delicious way to improve your smoothies, your salad dressings. It’s a wonderful thing to cook with, and it’s a great way to add more live microbes to your diet. Now, why do you want more microbes in your diet? It’s a great question.
So let’s talk about a Stanford study that looked at people who were given more fiber and compared their gut health and diversity of the organisms that live in their gut to people who were given more fermented foods. It was a small trial, but it was quite striking. The people who got more fermented foods had more diversity in their microbiome. And this is one of the larger ways we think about health of the microbiome. You want more different organisms down there, which represents more genetic diversity.
The way to do that is both to eat more plants. The fiber in plants is what the microbiome needs to thrive, but that’s not enough. You need to eat more fermented foods, according to the recent research. Now, why do we care about the gut brain access? Because we’re looking for ways to better regulate inflammation and also ways to approach mental health. The more that we’ve understood about diseases like depression and anxiety and bipolar disorder, the more we’ve known that inflammation plays a role in these illnesses. Now, what does your gut have to do with inflammation? Well, it turns out the largest part of your immune system is your gut. And what helps regulate the signals that your gut is kind of interpreting and then how it deploys the inflammatory system in your body, a lot of that is regulated and assisted by your microbiome.
So, changing the organisms in your gut and eating a more diverse set of fibers is one way that we impact mental health and brain health by regulating or better regulating inflammation. At least that’s the theory right now, and what’s happening. And there’s been a lot of excitement, I’m going to say about 20 to 30 years on this gut-brain axis. You’ll hear a lot about it in the wellness space, but remember, in Nutritional Psychiatry, we have real simple idea about this. It’s not a ton of different probiotics. It’s about eating more fermented foods like kefir and trying those to get those into your daily dietary pattern.
So, why kefir specifically? Kefir has a lot of different probiotic strains, a lot of different types of live bacteria, and it’s very concentrated. You get more than, let’s say, in yogurt or in sauerkraut. And so while I encourage all of these fermented foods, I think kefir is a really high-yield, high-impact way to start. You can have a little sip of a flavored kefir, you can add eight ounces of kefir to your next smoothie, you can even put a little bit of kefir in a nice creamy ranch type dressing.
There are lots and lots of different ways to use kefir. I highlight this in my cooking book, Eat Complete, and also in some of the recipes in Eat to Beat Depression and Anxiety. Kefir is a great way to start with fermented foods. We love them all. Sauerkraut, kimchi, yogurt, natto, little fermented crudité vegetables. But kefir has more bang for your buck. It has more colony forming units than really any other food on the planet. And it’s a really easy and simple food that you have available to you in your grocery store right now today.
I really recommend this as a place to start before getting into probiotics or probiotic pills. That’s certainly what is researched, and in some of the larger meta-analytic studies, there is a positive effect of people taking a probiotic pill for eight to twelve weeks, but I think you’re going to get the same effect, and probably I’d even argue a better effect of incorporating more fermented foods into your diet. And fermented foods like kefir are bringing more probiotic colony forming units to the table than a probiotic pill.
Now, if fermented foods are new to you, just start with a small serving, see how it goes. This is about dietary pattern. It’s not do you feel amazing after one little shot of kefir. It’s about incorporating fermented foods into your diet, noting how it maybe shifts or changes your digestion, and how over time this helps us have a dietary pattern the research tells us best supports mental health. Week four, Feed Your Mental Health Nutritional Psychiatry challenge is kefir. And remember, I want you to go out there and ask these three simple questions. Did you try it? Did you like it? And would you eat it again? Or in this one, would you drink it again?
Everyone, I hope you’re feeling it. Week four, I hope you’re feeling new foods. I hope you’re feeling more effects of all this fiber and phytonutrients and all of the wonderful foods we’ve talked about so far. Kefir is really going to supercharge things for you by improving the diversity of the microbiome and over time helping you have a set of organisms in your gut that better regulate inflammation. They also send better signals to your brain saying keep at it, grow more, connect more, and feel more. Everybody, I’m Dr. Drew Ramsey. I hope this Nutritional Psychiatry challenge is just making your fall delightful.
Please sign up for the emails if you’re not getting all the information about the challenge. You’re also going to get a lot of other free information to help you with your mental health and mental fitness. Please share the challenge with anybody who needs seven of the most powerful brain foods for your mental health. I’m Dr. Drew Ramsey. Thanks so much. I’ll see you in the next video.
