Mental Fitness Mastery: Build A Resilient Brain And Life You Love

Introduction to Mental Fitness and Longevity 0:00

Hi everyone, this is Doctor Joseph Antoun, and welcome to another episode of this Longevity Summit critical summit for your life. Obviously, everyone wants to live healthy long. Maybe not just long, but healthy long. And today is a big pleasure to introduce to you Doctor Ramsey, who is a unique psychiatrist. I've known so many psychiatrists, but the connection between nutrition, fasting, longevity and brain health, he is the national leader in that topic and is going to walk us today through a wonderful session on the connection between mental fitness, nutrition, brain health and longevity.

Dr. Ramsey maybe you do? Well, first of all, come and maybe you can introduce further yourself. Your accolades are so long I couldn't normalize all of them. Well, Dr. Antoun thank you so much. It's really great to be here with you and everybody watching. What a treat to get to talk mental health and mental fitness with you all is a psychiatrist. I really think that's one of the most important pieces of your longevity. And so many of these kind of players in the space maybe don't focus on it. So, just so I'm really grateful for your invitation to think about, you know, not just longevity in terms of how long, but us thinking about the mental health span of what we now understand in mental health and mental fitness. And quickly, my intro, why me?

Everyone. I've been in clinical practice for over 20 years and I've really been interested in a few things. One, I was interested in that psychiatry wasn't seeming to have like enough fun with people, and that our role in helping people lead robust, connected, purpose driven lives wasn't being utilized or emphasized enough by the public. You know, a lot of times people think about psychiatry. It's just, you know, somebody you want to avoid, not go see. And so I really hoped to change that. I noticed that we weren't talking about food.

And so I grew up on a farm in rural Indiana. I went to med school, Indiana University, and then I went on continued training in adult psychiatry at Columbia University, where I stayed on as a faculty member for about 20 years, thinking about all things from teaching psychotherapy and clinical assessment to really thinking about some of the framework of nutritional psychiatry. And really basic question, right, in clinical medicine, in psychiatry, we don't ask about food. What should we ask? What should we recommend?

And most importantly, what I was seeing in the nutrition space is a lot of people were getting experts that had strong opinions around a certain, let's say, dogma about eating. You know, in a certain camp we'd have maybe some vegetarian, let's say faculty member or prominent influencer. And, you know, that's what they promote for mental health. And it felt to me that true to psychiatry was to take a step back and be psychiatrists around nutrition, which is really understanding our patients in a deeper way.

And, you know, there aren't many fields of medicine anymore where you meet with patients really regularly, weekly, often. And it just seemed like such an opportunity to understand more about patients lifestyle. And so sorry, there's a long bio, Joseph. But the real quick version is I got interested in food and nutritional psychiatry. I've gotten to publish a number of books coming out soon as Healing the Modern Brain, which is really my most complete work trying to take what we've done for nutritional psychiatry with books like Depression and Anxiety, really trying to take what the data says and rapidly translate that to the public, and trying to take those principles and apply them to what we're calling mental fitness, which is really around helping you create a set of behaviors and habits and really the knowledge base to live and optimally, mentally fit and mentally healthy life.

Well, you mentioned mental fitness. It's this has a new expression, not to you, but to many probably listening here today. How would you define that and what is the connectivity between mental fitness and longevity? Well, I'm going to take the second question first, which is I think there's a huge connection because the quality of life and then, you know, all of the habits it takes to live a long life. And there's a number, you know, more about this and just about anyone, right? There's a number of things that you should do.

Defining Mental Fitness and Core Longevity Habits 4:08

And that takes discipline. It takes self-awareness. It takes mental organization. So these are all aspects of mental fitness, right? We do better at these aspects of caring for ourselves in a longevity. When we're in a group where groups come from, well, we've got to spend time building connection. And so we've defined mental fitness as the patterns, the knowledge, the habits and the behaviors that lead to a more mentally sound life. And we focus on nine core tenets to take some that, you know, most of us know about.

Now on the one, let's face about everybody watching, right? You know, I'm going to say sleep because we know sleep is so critical for mental health. But just just like clinical work where we want to go beyond that sound bite, you need 7 or 8 hours. Joseph, how was your sleep? You tell me. I try, doc, I get 6 or 7 hours. I say, well, you're busy executive. Good job. You know what? The data we have being able to monitor sleep with a number of medications, supplements and substances that are affecting sleep, being more regimented and understanding the connections between things like sleep quality, longevity and mental health.

You know, that's really an example of one of the cause of mental fitness, where we want to go beyond a soundbite that we all need good sleeve to really helping people create active frameworks of what does that look like in your life? What's your bedroom like? You know, if you're my patient, Joseph, I, we want to hear about, you know, what's what's the light like? What's the noise quality like, you know, what do you what you know what happens at 6 or 7:00 at night when the sun goes down, you dimming your lights, or you kind of getting into that natural rhythm, or are you firing up to Netflix, getting a little certain to salivate for 4 or 5 episodes of a bender?

So mental fitness is really how we approach mental health and a preventative and proactive way. That's the other part that was really important to me. I just noticed a lot of families and a lot of patients would be in a situation like if you have clinical depression and not and suddenly, you know, you're a parent, well, is your children are growing and aging, you're wondering, what can you do? Or, you know, are kids just destined to struggle in the same way as that we do? Or are the things are the habits we can teach them, or their behaviors, or their foods they should eat, or the sleep hygiene habits you know, are there are ways we should think about their connections.

And I think we all agree, for sure. Those are huge elements of our mental health, but we don't know. We haven't focused on mental health that way. Right? We really are in this reactive. You come and seek mental health care and try to improve your mental health. You know, only when you're sick. And I just that's just an awful way for us to approach, you know, really our most important asset. Right. This is about hearing for brain health. And so that's my long winded definition. All the stuff we want you to do to take really great care of your brain, we, you know, we studied, you know, we studied longevity for for 25 years.

And then are the five pillars I always talked about in longevity is nutrition. And we're going to talk and brain. Next one is trust exercise sleep and social capital. And when you talk about mental fitness it's always that social capital giving love, receiving love, being well nested. You know, where you grow up, that aspect of praying or yoga or taking deep breath, that aspect of calm and serenity. I mean, when we study longevity and we study centenarians, people living hundred and beyond that is like core or to to their success to be 180.

Some of them eat healthy, some of them nuts, some of them exercise, some of them. That movement actually is important, some of them, you know, but that the mother of all aspects is that social capital, love, prayers, you know, can you talk a little bit about that for sure. Just and I appreciate you mentioned it because it's one of the major set of tenants in some ways. The new pieces I'm hoping to add into the conversation from my experience and mental health and thinking about what in the modern brain I call about connection, and really trying to think about that in the spheres that matter the most, thinking about our connection to ourself.

So many people struggle with a sense of, a guilt, or they worry that, you know, taking care of the self is selfish or narcissistic in some way, but really working to deepen your relationship with yourself, especially so many people fail to do that as they age. So the idea that you're, you know, you're you're a little bit of a different person in this decade of your life than you were two decades ago and your goals in another decade, and how you think about the world might shift a little bit more.

So that notion of connecting to the self and then thinking through relationships in kind of spheres ranging from that immediate close sphere family, friends, trusted confidants, the people in the book, I talk about folks, you know, the folks that being vulnerable with them work that you don't get either. You know, trite solutions, right? You get these are the folks who really know how to listen and you can trust. Those connection matters, but not all connections are like that. It's so wonderful to have friends. It's not that complicated.

You know, the the guy guys, the friends you go bike riding with or the, you know, the friends you play cards with, or maybe just a buddy. I have a lot of buddies like this. We're just kind of like co dads together, you know, we see each other at stuff that our kids do, but it's still a nice connection. It's nice to have that familiarity, that support, to see somebody who's kind of walking in a similar, you know, path and then institutional connection. I think this is today. So many people are struggling with that, especially as we age.

It's been very inspiring seeing things like the Modern Elder Academy. We pop up where people saying like, wow, there's like a lot of decades here where we're feeling like adults, we're feeling good. You know, midlife is filled with opportunity. It's very cool, you know, to kind of be this, this period of life.

Connection, Purpose, and Social Capital 9:58

But how we attach to institutions and the ways, especially as a psychiatrist, I look to help people do that, whether it's our educational institutions or whether it's that part that so many of us struggle with disappointment and institutions. Right. They're not servicing us. Well, it's something that's very important to consider. You know, your doctor, Antonio, a great example of this. You've created an institution, right? So, you know, in our brief time talking together, I've seen you light up so much talking about your colleagues, the research, the things you've accomplished together.

You know, I would say if I were working with you, those would be central pieces. Kind of almost like vital signs of your mental fitness, right? The way that you light up the affect, the connectivity, the working on something together. It also speaks to another very important tenant of mental fitness, which is about our sense of purpose in life. And so often find people, you know, have been a little misdirected with this idea of like, you got to know your passion. And I've never, you know, passion is for like, I don't know, 1930s romance novels and movies and melodramas.

I mean, I like passion, it's great, but it's not a particularly honest emotion, passion. You know, being passionate really actually doesn't describe what I think people are hoping to describe there, which is much more around feeling purposeful, feeling that our time, our efforts are connections and our will amounts to something and being more clear of what that is for you and being, I say, gentle in the discovery of that. And the evolution of that is a massive piece of mental fitness that so many folks are missing.

You know, they left in this like kind of place of like, well, you don't know your passion, so you don't have purpose. So your life sort of adrift and, you know, and healing the modern brain. I really create a framework around people having pleasure. So often that's just about like people partying or having sex with, not what I mean, you know, my pleasure. I mean, well, like the expression I see on your face when you talk about your team, you talk about prolonged, right? There's a deep sense of satisfaction and pleasure when you see people talk about meaningful long term accomplishments, you know, deep sense of pleasure and purposefulness.

One of the major supporter of prolonged or the fasting nutrition that we have is Jay Shetty and is now his podcast called On Purpose. And it is an you know, I don't know if you know Jay, but his background, he was a Buddhist monk, I think, and then went into into podcasting. And he's now the number one wellness podcast in the world. I interviewed Jay for Men's Health magazine about a year ago, and it's been really interesting. I think is one of the folks who, you know, was speaking about quality and connection a lot.

And I also think as an individual who's really encouraging all of us to to double down on our connections and mindfulness, you know, along with his wellness and his podcasting, I think he and his wife also wrote a book on, yes, relationships and marriage, you know, so, yeah, that's kind of new generation we're seeing of a lot of men and male influencers or like talking about feelings or talking about emotional sophistication and psychological development and projection and defenses and narcissism.

And, you know, as a mental health person, I think this is great. I mean, a lot of people worry and, you know, kind of think this should be the language of clinicians and all that. And I just feel the more we get a conversation going, the more there's opportunity for people to really hear the hopeful message about solutions. There's a lot of good work being done out there in a lot of people. Healing. I agree, again, I go back to to centenarians that we study extensively, and some of them we interview, they're smoking, some of them they don't like to walk, some of them they like to eat fried, whatever.

But they're all happy. They're all you feel that mental happiness, serenity, purposefulness. They feel safe. They feel serene. They're calm and they're smiling. That is a big secret, because if you're in that mental state, you're actually exercising the other pillar functionality, then you're actually stressing less. Another pillar of longevity. You're sleeping better on the pillar of longevity. You're eating healthier on longevity, you're exercising more, right? So that you know the brain is always a neurology medicine.

When I went, it's always the most complicated and seemingly with less solution discipline. But it's unlocking everything in life and longevity. I mean, in today's session, I cannot emphasize more because I've witnessed this again with the Sentinel and with our trials, mental fitness, mental health and nourishment actually feeding a lot of that. It's not just the but adding to that, the social capital, the love. This is unlocking every pillar of longevity. So it's critical to fix that, especially in this period that we're living in, where loneliness is actually the number one disease out there, depression and anxiety.

I mean, I don't know, a third of every young kid is on an anxiety or depression pill already or seeing someone. Parents are feeling very, very anxious and depression, and the elderly within us are suffering from loneliness and us as well, our generation. So it's interesting how we can help people without. Again, I hate throwing everyone on medications because I think it's just solving. It's a Band-Aid that is going to create another. And again, some people do need it. But how can we, us humans help each other cross this line of anxiety, depression, loneliness into a line of love, purposefulness, meditation and prayers, etc.

and help help with mental fitness and mental health in that aspect. It's a great question, and I think and part of it is understanding is, you know, kind of alluded to, you know, some people it's very hard for their nervous system, their minds, their brain to kind of be in a place that isn't ruminative worry or depressive thoughts to kind of engage in some of this. So for some people, you know, as much as, you know, I feel it's sort of a challenge around getting proper treatment sometimes. And a lot of times treatment is like, you know, as you're noting, people, I think when it's a band aid is when we don't combine treatment with a more robust wraparound set of interventions.

Right. When my treatment for depression is anxieties, you just take this pill. It's not really recognizing, wow, well, how long have you been depressed? Oh, three years. Wow. I bet your social connections and social capital is really not great, because when I've been depressed, I don't do a good job socializing. Right? I bet your nutrition stinks because when people are depressed and anxious, you know there's a lot of carb craving, there's a lot of self-sabotage. There's a lot of emotional eating, you know, as you're kind of saying, just like social connection kind of helps with all the pillars of longevity.

You know, there's a way that when we take care of our mental health, it begins to do a similar thing, right? You just begin to live in that more active, more intentional lifestyle. I would say, you know, what do I see making the big difference in terms of people's commitment? I see where people are stacking things. You used to be talking about, like stacking supplements, but I see people being much more intentional, like my favorite stack. I talk a lot about this, and my books in my work is trying to stack social connection, nature, and movement.

It's actually one of the reasons I moved out to the mountains of Wyoming is I just realized I kind of found a community, and I realized, well, these people, they like to get together and exercise and hang out, move their bodies. Yeah. And it doesn't have to be exercise, you know. Is it exercising when I'm out, you know, back country, split boarding. Yeah. I mean, we're burning thousands of calories, but it doesn't feel like exercise because we're laughing and we're out in nature.

Nature, Sauna, and Rapid State Shifts 17:28

The data on nature just like quick hack for everybody. I mean, this is just one that's so easy. Yeah. I love the nature therapists who remind us nature's everywhere. If you want to get obsessed by nature, you don't have to go outside. Right? I've got a plant behind me here. You could examine the nature and biology of yourself, which is just wild and detailed and so often ignored. But nature in green spaces is just a wonderful state. Shifting medicine for people. You know, when we're feeling badly, we're feeling anxious and depressed.

You know, a lot of the complaints about treatments as they take a while, which, you know, a lot of them do, we're we're changing the brain. It's going to take a little while. But in terms of immediate state shifts, there are a few things that really help. I think getting out into nature, particularly what I call big nature. Now, ideally a place where you're not going to see somebody. Now, that sounds a little tough, but even when I was living in Manhattan, there's a couple little places. The very northern tip of Manhattan is one of the largest, oldest urban forest out there.

You know, same thing with the northern part of Central Park. You can really get deep into the woods, kind of get that experience for us sexually. There's a there are certain molecules that had to float around in a forest that the trees had met. Do is you inhale them, you generate a little blood level. And they're quite good for our mental health and our brain health. So getting out into nature is one. And the other one I'm going to found a recently is saunas. I really found for my own mental health and especially for sleep and sleep quality.

I found ending the day with a, you know, a nice sauna, maybe some reading, you know, or just kind of settling down, trying not to take the phone or, you know, any devices in there and just really work on settling down before bed. I find that again, to be something that kind of shifts states quite quickly and again, has that stacking effect of helping things like sleep. I want to conclude today with a big section on your probably deep specialty, which is nutrition and mental and mental fitness. And I don't even very passionate about it and write books about it.

So this is one of the things that most mental experts, they don't even consider, right? Starting from the microbiome to leaky gut to all of, you know, and now we're calling all the way out of this, you know, we're calling the diabetes type three. So it's such a natural thing to look at. Yet it's overlooked by most experts if you can. A little bit futures and tell us about how you approach that chapter and what are the important things to to look forward there. Yeah for sure. And I hope that's changing.

Joseph, you know that as we think about what we call nutritional psychiatry, and I define nutritional psychiatry as using food and I really instead of supplements, I really I want to be your guy who's like telling you lentils more than I'm telling you to go get a magnesium supplement. But with the use of food to optimize brain health, I really like that, because often when we think about brain health or mental health is like, oh, you know, 20% of people are struggling. And I really like this notion, like, all of us have got up level our game when it comes to nutrition and when it comes to health care of our mental health.

Because, again, this part of the modern brain and the modern brain is because the brain is living in a new environment. And we often focus on like direct toxins, like microplastics and pollution. And I certainly talk about that in the framework. But also there's just all of the kind of content and information and exposure and emotional bandwidth and images. And, you know, you can anybody who's spent like a couple hours playing with AI, you know, you kind of you kind of feel it afterwards, like, whoa, what was that?

You know, there's an and there's a way that, you know, there's just a new set of challenges for the human brain. So nutritional psychiatry is about, again, five out of five of us optimizing brain health using the best foods possible. What are those? What are the foods? We all know the nutrients. Right. Everybody listening knows. If I say what are some of your favorite brain health nutrients? L Mega three fads B12, magnesium, folate. Right. We've got the vitamin E. Well, got a nice list. Zinc. Don't forget zinc.

Or as you noted, the microbiome, the good bugs. Now eating more fermented foods. But I just had a question early in my career, like what foods would be the best for me to recommend to my patients? And that led me to this notion of nutrient density. And I talk a lot about this in Eat to beat depression and anxiety. Whereas I met patients, people be very focused on calories,

Nutritional Psychiatry and Brain-Healthy Foods 21:38

and I really wanted people to focus on nutrient density, meaning what foods have the most magnesium, folate, B12, omega three fatty per calorie. And I wanted people to focus on a dietary pattern of this little rhyme seafood, greens, nuts and beans and a little dark chocolate. And that comes from my clinical practice of when I just over and over again, you sit with patients and you look at their kind of food history and their dietary pattern. It's missing some of these most important food categories.

Seafood. This is where we get things like iodine, kind of a sleeper nutrient really needed for the brain and for thyroid health. We also get the wanting omega three fatty and things like and sardines, seafood, greens, greens, leafy greens just demonstrating a nutrient density 20 to 30 calories per cup. And wow there's like bring the nutrition to the table. There's vitamin C, vitamin K, fiber, folate, all the phytonutrients and greens, nuts and beans. Just really great sources of for the beans and legumes, particularly lentils.

I love fiber, but also lots of interesting phytonutrients and just great great fiber for the microbiome. And nuts. I mean, nuts are like an amazing snack. It's like a little packet of olive oil you get to carry around filled with interesting nutrients like almonds being really one of the top sources for vitamin E, I mean, we, we love we love big time. We even have a product that we call the longevity spread. I don't know if you know about it. It's 74% almonds. Yeah. And almonds have the right fats.

Right. The healthy fats and protein. Yeah. The only acid is incredibly sort of same fat as an olive oil. And then as you note, the just incredible nutrient fat soluble nutrients, you know, because coming out of this, I mean, we're out of it for a while now. But there was such an anti fat movement. And if you don't eat fats and fatty foods, you're not getting these fat soluble nutrients like vitamins, healthy fats. Yeah the healthy fats for sure. I mean there's a there's a New England Journal of Medicine article being Journal of Medicine for those who are not familiar with it, it's the number one medical journal in the world.

And it was looking at almonds and hazelnuts. And these were called the high end nuts as longevity nuts. Yeah. And they they showed and I think it was over 9000 individuals that they had 20% less risk of heart attack if they were consuming six days out of seven nuts per week. This is why actually we developed the El spread and have 74% of it is is almond is to have that longevity pattern. So 20% decrease in cardiovascular risk if you eat six days out of seven hazelnut and or and or almonds. Just to give you a comparison like the big movement today with GLP one and all that, it's just the craziest 9% to one is off.

This is injecting a biologic in your body every week versus eating nuts, eating almonds every week. And this is the power of nutrition and longevity and attrition and brain health in this case. And that's really the you know, the thrust or the hope of nutritional psychiatry is just to have clinicians and patients and people who caring about mental health include what they're eating as part of the equation of how to optimize things that, you know, it's not that you can't eat a piece of cake, or if you have some pepperoni pizza while you're going to be depressed, it doesn't really work like that.

There's certainly some foods that can make us a little anxious in the short term, but mostly it's about helping people see one again. The modern world has really done a number on our physiology. You know, the majority of our population is struggling with obesity and diabetes and at increased risk of depression and dementia. We know that depression is the most disabling illness in the world right now. And so really, you know, doing everything you can to better insulate yourself, protect yourself from these illnesses is, you know, it's like required reading, right?

It's just you kind of you can't just kind of wander through the grocery store, pick up whatever safe calories there are that are cheap, you know, and delicious and go home. You'll end up eating a set of foods that you know pretty clearly in the data. These modern diets are highly correlated with depression. There's a study, 2009, looking at 10,000 university students, followed them for four and a half years in college, found that those were eating a most traditional Mediterranean style diet, had a 35 to 50% decrease risk of depression over four and a half years of college.

I mean, if that were a supplement, if that were a medicine, I mean, that would be like the best selling, most profitable medicine ever in the history of world because preventing depression, I mean, that would be the most powerful public health intervention one could really ask for today. So those are the basics of nutritional psychiatry, Joseph, I think just the other quick part is so often we approach depression, anxiety. So people are very much in a kind of single molecule, serotonin focused hypothesis kind of model.

And I'm a big fan of their tone and I a big believer in that hypothesis or how it's involved in mood and mental health. But, you know, a lot of times we don't consider some of the new science, right? These new big ideas that just didn't exist in mental health 15 years ago. Right? 15 years ago, no one talked about the microbiome. No psychiatrist told you to eat fermented foods or take probiotics. No psychiatrist or mental health professional would tell you, hey, eat more fiber foods for your microbiome.

Well, not like every every headlines about the microbiome. And so there's new science, right, about neuroplasticity and that the brain grows and changes in adult life and how we eat, how we move, how we sleep, how we socialize. It affects that. I'm thinking about inflammation. I never used to think about inflammation. But this idea that, yeah, peripheral inflammation, inflammation in your body does trigger the inflammatory system in your brain in ways. So these new concepts, just as a kind of last point that I think nutritional psychiatry helps us consider them.

Right. Because if you want to shift your microbiome, this this kind of only one way to do it right through what you eat. If you if you want to have less inflammation, one of the major players in that is going to be what you eat. And so that's where nutritional psychiatry kind of melds this ancient wisdom. Kind of eat like grandma eight, which, you know, for this generation really doesn't work that well. But combining ancient wisdom, combining basic nutrition with this kind of super cool new science of neuroplasticity and the microbiome and inflammation.

Well, since we're closing with the tradition, why don't we touch a little bit on fasting? And I'm pretty sure in the last few years you had a lot of patients ask me about fasting and or I don't know if you use it in your clinic. Can you tell us a little bit about your impression with the connectivity of fasting, mental fitness and longevity? For sure. And I start with the story. I remember when I was fasting to get my blood lipids taken some years ago, and I walked into my primary care doctor and she said, what did you remember to fast?

I said, yes, doctor. And she looked me in the eye and Carter and she said, are you feeling closer to God? And and it was kind of funny because I was I had a little spring in my step. I think, personally, I've always enjoyed some periods of, of hard work and kind of limited food intake for a morning, for an afternoon. I've always really kind of felt the power and the concentrating, focusing power of a little bit of what I've always felt was probably some ketones floating in my blood. And so with patients being a clinician, one of the wonderful things in psychiatry is really going to meet such a diverse set of opinions and ideas about health.

And that certainly included people who are curious about fasting, asking about fasting, and asking about intermittent fasting. And I love those conversations because what it creates is a framework for change. And so I think a lot of people make a mistake in mental health, as you know, they think it's like I'm all about maybe a vegan diet or a carnivore diet, or not eating this or not eating that is opposed to thinking about some of the ways that food powerfully influences us and and our brain physiology.

And there's really not much as powerful in terms of, you know, shifting brain physiology as going from running on key to glucose to running on ketones.

Fasting, Eating Windows, and Ketosis 29:28

I've been really curious about fasting, intermittent fasting, and somewhat more ketogenic diets related to my patients with bipolar disorder and bipolar two disorder in particular, where there's both some data emerging pilot trial out of Stanford. But, you know, all of us in clinical practice for, I don't know, 15, 20 years, there's just been a little bit more. There are a few case reports out of Louisville, University of Louisville about a decade ago, some patients with bipolar two disorder just doing a little bit better, both in terms of metabolic markers but in terms of mood.

So those are the ways that kind of fasting comes in. Is one of those, you know, of trends to get into that are more supported by science. It's one that I tend to like out of the usual suspects, I think, particularly one that I see people doing a lot more of is eating windows, and I see that being really helpful. It's kind of, you know, when you're in clinical practice and people talk about the GOP ones, a lot of that commentary is around food noise, right? Patients saying, oh, I just I don't worry.

I don't think about it on that deliberation. Should I have it or not? And, you know, and that's in some ways how I think about the, the eating windows. Is it just, you know, kind of sets you up for success because you spend you almost get habituated to not thinking about the food because it's just it's not an option. And after and so I find those are some of the ways that I'm seeing this use. I find the easiest. And what I recommend in practice when people are curious about it is either trying some type of program or system, like rely on a great example right where there's education.

And also I find these days a lot of programs like yours or sophisticated in terms of offering some community, some coaching, some help, right, where you're not like alone in it. So that's huge. The other is, is just a simple like going over some basic low carbohydrate dinners and no carbohydrate breakfasts, you know, having some eggs and some coffee, for example, and not really breaking that fast until, you know, early afternoon ideally. So that's some of how I think about fasting and relationship.

Yeah. Health doctor MC thank you so much. Today for for the wealth of information, I hope nutritional psychiatry becomes a big discipline because I think, you know, we're poisoning our brain with our food, obviously, for all the reasons that we talked about that kind of that subdiscipline. And I hope hopefully it's going to just grow and have more research link to it and evidence based medicine to support a lot of the early discoveries that you're helping your patients with. Yeah, it's an exciting time.

I really appreciate you focusing on. Yeah, man. And, you know, I didn't even get in there. And now been six randomized trials kind of showing if you have depression you're in treatment. You shift your diet towards the Mediterranean pattern. About a third of people go into full remission. So, you know, we're finally getting some really cool data where, you know, when I started this, people were like, yeah, sure, eat healthy. But, you know, now there's a way that, you know, we have there's there's real robust evidence.

We did we partnered with the University of Palermo in Italy, and we did a randomized clinical trial on the withdrawal, on the fasting mimicking nutrition. And it was statistical significance right after three, 3 or 4 cycles of prolonged into that. And we're going to do a bigger one now. And I think what we're going to see is an emergence of something we saw with the ketogenic diet in the single arm trial out of Stanford, where, you know, what I'm hopeful of and where I hope particularly patients listening or people who have mental health concerns and our family, what I hope emerges is not that there's just like one diet, but that you as an individual have access to a number of different evidence based diets, which then you can get support around and try to find out which one fat fix, you know, once it fits perfectly for you or fits well for you.

Right. And maybe Mediterranean diet is it, you know, maybe you're somebody who really does great in ketosis. Maybe in ketosis is that you really miss your bagels and you're more of an intermittent fasting person. But, you know, it's a cool time to be in practice. And it's a wonderful time to be thinking about mental health and nutrition just because there's so many cool studies being signed, so much great leadership. It's. Yeah. And I hope everybody who is my hope and encouragement and I didn't say lentils or wild salmon enough, Joseph.

So I just want to say those two things. Those a this is what I wanted to mention is if people want to read more or get your recommendations in more detail, like which website or book or what would you refer them to? Yeah, thank you so much, everyone. I'm Drew Ramsey, MD. That's my website. drewramseymd.com. It's also my Instagram handle where I'm probably most active. Healing the modern brain is on its way out,

Resources and Closing Remarks 33:58

so you can please check that out for ordering and pre-ordering. We also have an E course Healing the Modern Brand on my website and then Eat to Beat. Depression and Anxiety was my most recent book, hopefully really easy to find. We've got some great free downloads, things like brain food on a budget. We'll share some of those with you for folks who sign up for the premiere package. Joseph. And look, thank you so much for including mental health as an important aspect of longevity. So often it gets ignored.

And so I really appreciate being part of your summit, getting to talk with someone who's so esteemed within the longevity world. It's just been absolute treat for me to get to know you a little bit. And thanks so much for taking care of mental fitness and mental health. Thank you very much, sir. We'll see you soon.