Episode 48
We Are What We Eat with Uma Naidoo, MD
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In this episode of the Mind Gut Conversation Podcast, I had the great pleasure to talk to Dr. Uma Naidoo, a board-certified psychiatrist at the Mass General Hospital at Harvard, professional chef, and nutrition specialist, who amongst many other accomplishments is the author of the recent book: This Is Your Brain On Food, an amazing look into the new world of nutritional psychiatry.
Dr. Naidoo is currently the Director of Nutritional and Metabolic Psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital, where she consults on nutritional interventions for the psychiatrically and medically ill. She is also Director of Nutritional Psychiatry at the Massachusetts General Hospital Academy, in private practice and teaches at The Cambridge School of Culinary Arts.
Dr. Naidoo blogs for Harvard Health and Psychology Today and has just completed a unique video cooking series for the MGH Academy, which teaches nutritional psychiatry using culinary techniques in the kitchen.
If you haven’t heard or seen her speak in several recent podcasts, the current MGC podcast is a must see/hear piece of information of the new and rapidly growing field of nutritional psychiatry.
Amongst many other topics, we discuss the following questions:
- Can food really influence our mental health?
- Is the Standard American Diet really contributing to our current mental health crisis, including the increase in suicide rates?
- Is it the SAD in general, or are there specific items that are responsible for the reported bad effects on our health?
- How much do lifestyle factors associated with health eating patterns, like the traditional Mediterranean diet, such as social interactions and mindfulness contribute to the health benefits of such diets?
Check out Dr. Naidoo’s website here: umanaidoomd.com