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 Anton and welcome to another episode of the Fasting and 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 psychiatrist. But the connection between nutrition, fasting and longevity and brain health, he is the national leader in that topic and is going to walk us today through a wonderful session.

The connection between mental fitness, nutrition, brain health and longevity, that's where I would say may be, you do a well, first welcome. And maybe you can if, introduce further yourself. Your accolades are so long, I, I couldn't memorize all of them. Well, doctor Anton, 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 off, I'm really grateful for for your invitation to think about, you know, not just longevity in terms of how long, but, thinking about the mental health span of what we now understand in mental health and mental fitness. And 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 and 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, a vegetarian, let's say faculty member or private 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 a psychiatrist 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 does seem 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.

Defining Mental Fitness and Core Life Habits 3:25

I've gotten to, publish a number of books, coming out soon is Healing the Modern Brain, which is really my, most complete work trying to take what we've done for nutritional psychiatry with, books like YouTube, depression and anxiety. Really trying to take what the data says and rapidly translate that to the public, 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 an optimally mentally fit and mentally healthy life.

Well, you mentioned mental fitness. It's this is 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 don't think the second question first, which is I think there's a huge connection because the quality of life and then all and all of the habits it takes to live a long life, and there's a number, you know more about this, just about anyone, right? There's a number of things that you should do.

And and it 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 our self and our longevity. When we're in a group or a groups come from or 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 tenants to take some that, you know, most of us know about now in the wellness space.

So 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, we want to go beyond that sound bite. Right. You need 7 or 8 hours just of how is your sleep? You tell me. I tried to I could 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 medication supplements and substances that are affecting sleep now, 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 the sound bite that we all need good sleep 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 do you know what happens at 6 or 7:00 at night when the sun goes down? You know you're dimming your lights or you kind of getting into that natural rhythm?

Or are you firing off the 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 in 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 and suddenly, you know, you're a parent, well, is your children are growing and aging, you know, wondering, right, what what can you do?

Oh, you know, our kids just destined to struggle in the same ways that we do or the things or the habits we can teach them, or their behaviors, or the foods they should eat or their sleep hygiene habits, you know, are there 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. Well, I haven't focused on mental health that way. We really are in this reactive. You come in, seek mental health care and try to improve your mental health.

What? How? 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, is about caring 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. And yeah. We, you know, we study, as you know, we studied longevity for, for 25 years. And there are the five pillars I always talk about in longevity is nutrition. And we get to talk nutrition and brain. Next there's stress exercise sleep and social capital and and when you talk about mental fitness it's it's always that social capital giving love receiving loving well nested you know where you grow up.

That aspect of praying or yoga or taking deep breaths, 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 core 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? Yeah.

For sure. Just and I appreciate you mentioned it because it's one of the major set of tenants and in some ways, the new new pieces. I'm hoping to add into the conversation from my experience in mental health and thinking about what what in, healing 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. You know, so many people struggle with a sense of, a guilt for 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, fails to do that as they age.

And so the idea that you're, you know, you're a, a, 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

Connection, Purpose, and Social Capital 9:20

immediate close sphere of family, friends, trusted confidants, the people. In the book, I talk about folks, you know, the folks that being vulnerable with them were, that you don't get either. You know, trait solutions. Right. You get these are the folks who really know how to listen and that you can trust, those connection matters, but not all connections are like that. It's so wonderful to have friends where it's not that complicated. You know, the guy has the forensic go bike riding with or the, you know, the, you know, 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, past, and then institutional connections. I 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 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 reconceptualize in this, this period of life. But how we attached 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 or disappointment in institutions. And then not serving us. Well, it's something that's very important to consider, you know, your, doctor and I, you know, great example, since 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 trend of mental fitness, which is about our sense of purpose in life.

And so, yes, if if 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 describe there, which is much more around feeling purposeful, feeling that our time, our efforts, our connection and and our will amounts to something and and being more clear of what that is for you.

And being it's a 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. Yeah, they're left in this, like, kind of place of, like where you don't know your passions, you don't have purpose. So your life sort of addressed and, you know, and healing the mind and body. And I really create a framework around people, having pleasure. So often that's just about like people partying or having sex, but that's not what I mean, you know, but pleasure.

I mean, well, like the expression I see on your face when you talk about your team, you talk about pro line, right? There's a deep sense of satisfaction and pleasure. What do you see people talk about meaningful long term accomplishments, you know, deep sense of pleasure and purposefulness. Well, is the, one of the major support of prolonged, or necessary nutrition that we have is Jay-Z. And Jay-Z is now his podcast called On Purpose. And it is. And, you know, I don't know if you know Jay, but his background is he was a Buddhist monk, I think, and then went into into podcasts and and he's he's now the number one wellness podcast in the world.

So that, you know. I interviewed Jay for Men's Health magazine, about a year ago. And it's been really interesting. I think it's one of the, the folks who, you know, is speaking about quality and connection a lot. And I also think is an individual who's really encouraging all of us to, sort of double down on our connections and mindfulness. You know, a lot of the listeners podcasting of The King and his wife also wrote a book. On, yes. Relationships and marriage, you know, so, yes, kind of new generation we're seeing of a lot of men and male influencers really talking about feelings, talking about, emotional sophistication and psychological development and projection and defenses and narcissism and I, you know, as a mental health person, I think this is great.

If 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 to conversation going, the more there's an opportunity for people to really hear the whole message about solutions. A lot. There's a there's a lot of good work being done out there and a lot of people healing. I agree, again, I go back to, to centenarians that we we study extensively in. Some of them, we interview their smoking. Some of them, they don't like to walk, some of them they like to eat fried, whatever.

But they're all happy that all of you see that mental happiness, the reality, 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, then you're actually stressing less. Another pillar of longevity. You're sleeping better under the pillar to ensure that you're eating healthier and longevity. You're exercising more so that you know the brain is always. And neurology and medicine, 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 I've witnessed this again with this entities and with our trials, mental fitness, mental health and and nourishment actually feeding a lot of that is not just the but adding to that the the social capital, the love, the serenity is, 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.

You know, depression and anxiety. I mean, I don't know, a third of every young kid is on an anxiety or depression bill already or seeing someone, parents are feeling very, very anxious and depression and, and the elderly within us are suffering from loneliness and us as well, our generation. So it's is interesting how we can help people with that. Again, I hate throwing everyone on medications because I think it's just solving. It's a Band-Aid that's going to create another. And again, some people do need it.

But how can we as humans help each other across this line? Us 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. That's a 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 full of 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 a sort of a challenge, around getting proper treatment sometimes. And a lot of times treatment is like, you know, as you're noting, people,

Nature, Sauna, and State Shifts 17:20

I think when it's a band aid is when we don't combine treatment with a more kind of robust wraparound set of interventions. And right when my treatment for depression is anxieties, you just take this pill. It's not really recognizing. Well, well, how long have you been depressed or three years. Wow. About 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 my favorite stack. I talk a lot about this in 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, move and hang out, move their bodies. And it doesn't have to be exercise, you know, is it exercising? When I'm out? You know, backcountry split boarding? Yeah. I mean, we're burning thousands of calories. It doesn't feel like exercise because we're laughing and we're out in nature. The data on 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 is everywhere. If you want to get obsessed by nature, you don't have to go outside. And 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 is 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 of this nature, in particular what I call big nature, you know, 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 forests 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 forest. Actually, there's, there are certain molecules that you had a float around in a forest that the trees admit to. Is you inhale them, you generate a little blood level, and they're quite good for mental health in our brain health. So getting out to nature is one. And the other was I've been a fan of recently is saunas. I really, found for my own mental health and especially for sleep and sleep quality. I found ending the day with, you know, a nice sauna, maybe some reading 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 I want to conclude today with a big section on your probably deep specialty, which is nutrition and mental and mental fitness. And I know you're very passionate about it. And why write books about it? So,

Nutritional Psychiatry and Brain Health 21:05

this is one of the things that most mental experts, they don't even consider, right? Starting from the microbiome to leaky gut, all of you know, and now we're calling all the way all the time. Just, you know, we're calling it diabetes type three. So it's such a such a, a natural thing to look at. Yet it's overlooked by most experts. If you can a little bit teach us and tell us about how you approached 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 was 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 of how often we think about brain health or mental health as like, oh, you know, 20% of people are struggling. And, I really like this notion, like, all of us have got to uplevel 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 of hours playing with AI, you know, you kind of you kind of feel it afterwards, like, whoa, what was that?

You know, there's a and there's a way that, you know, there's just a new, set of challenges for, 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 don't know the nutrients. Right. Everybody listening knows. If I say, what are some of your favorite brain health nutrients? Omega three fats, B12, magnesium, folate. Right. We've got to vitamin E. Well, get a nice list. Zinc. Don't forget zinc.

Or as you've noted, the microbiome. The good bugs now eating more fermented foods. But I just had a I had a question early in my career, like what foods would be the best for me to recommend medications? 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 who be very focused on calories. And I really wanted people to focus on nutrient density, meaning what foods have the most magnesium, folate, B12, omega three fat per calorie.

And I want people to focus on a dietary pattern. I have 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 in a food history and their dietary pattern, and 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 long chain omega three fats and things like anchovies and sardines.

Seafood, greens, greens, leafy greens just demonstrated a nutrient density 20 to 30 calories per cup. And wow. And just like, bring the nutrition to the table, whether it'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 because 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 almonds, big time. We even have a product that we call the longevity spread. I don't if you know about it. It's 74% almonds. Yeah. And and almonds have the right fats, weight, the healthy fats and the protein. Yeah. The oleic acid is incredibly sort of the same fat as an olive oil. And as you note, the just incredible nutrients, typically fat soluble nutrients, you know, because coming out of this, we were 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 there's a New England Journal of Medicine article in the Journal of Medicine for those who were 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 all the high end nuts as longevity nuts, you know, 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 spread and have 74% of it is is almonds 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 decreases 9% to help ones is okay. This 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 nutrition and brain health in this case.

And that's really the, you know, the 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 is 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 are 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. You know, 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 that 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 who were eating a most traditional Mediterranean style diet had a 35 to 50% decreased 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 bestselling, most profitable medicine ever in the history of world.

Because, yes, venting depression, I mean, that would be the most powerful public health intervention one could really ask for today. So that those are the basics of nutritional psychiatry. Joseph, I think the 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 serotonin. I'm a big believer in that hypothesis or how it's involved in moody 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 to tell you, hey, eat more fiber foods for your microbiome. Well, I 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, thinking about inflammation and the reason I 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 is kind of only one way to do it, right through what you eat.

Fasting, Ketosis, and Eating Windows 29:25

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 aid, 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 closely with nutrition, why don't we test a little bit on fasting?

And I'm pretty sure the last few years you had a lot of patients asking you about fasting and or other. 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 a story. I remember when I was fasting to get my blood lipids taken, some years ago, and I washed 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 said, are you feeling closer to God?

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, and so with patients being a clinician, one of the wonderful things in psychiatry is really getting 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, 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, as opposed to thinking about some of the ways that food powerfully influences us and and in our brain physiology and there's really not much as powerful in terms of, you know, shifting brain physiology is going from running on key glucose to running on ketones.

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 of a few case reports out of, Louisville, University of Louisville. About a decade ago, some patients with bipolar 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.

I have 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, you know, some type of program or system like rollout is a great example, right, where there's education.

And also I find these days a lot of programs like yours are 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 it's 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 that's some of how I think about fasting and really.

Yeah. Health and Doctor Missy, thank you so much today for for the. Well that's 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, you coordinate that kind of that subdiscipline in a health, hopefully it's going to just grow and have more research linked to it and evidence based, you know, medicine to support a lot of the early discoveries as you're helping your patients with.

Yeah, it's an exciting time. I really appreciate you focusing on. Yeah. And and, you know, I didn't even get in. There are now been six randomized trials kind of showing if you have depression you're in treatment. You shift your diet towards a mediterranean pattern. About a third of people go into full remission. So, you know, we're finally getting some very. Interesting. Data where, you know, when I started this, people were like, yeah, sure, you're healthy, but you know, now there's a way that, you know, we have there's there's real robust evidence.

We did that. We partnered with the University Palermo in Italy, and we did a randomized clinical trial on depression withdrawal, on the fasting mimicking nutrition. And there was statistical significance, right after three, if I remember, 3 or 4 cycles of prolonged, into that, that we're going to do a bigger one. Now. 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

Resources, Books, and Closing Remarks 35:05

concerns, their 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 fits, you know, which fits perfectly for you or fits well for you. Right? Maybe Mediterranean diet is it, you know, maybe you're somebody who really does great in ketosis. Maybe in ketosis. You really miss your bagels and you're more of an intermittent fasting person.

But, yes. You know, it's a cool time to be in practice. And it's a it's a wonderful time to be thinking about mental health and nutrition just because there's so many cool studies being assigned. So, so much, great leadership. That's, Yeah. And I hope everybody can use my hopefulness and encouragement. And I didn't say lentils or wild salmon enough, Joseph. So I just want to say those two, those, This is what I wanted to mention is if people want to read more or and 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, dreams md.com. It's also my Instagram handle where I'm probably most active. Healing the Modern brain is on its way out. I just actually sent it out a couple of days ago. So you can, please check that out for for ordering and pre-ordering. We also have an E course Healing the Modern Brand on my website. And then E 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 premier package. Joseph. And look, thank you so much for including mental health is 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 is 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.