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Why Nutrition Is A Mental Health Issue
How what you do- or don’t- eat impacts your brain
Introduction: The Disconnect Between Gut and Brain
A few days ago, I took a long walk through the streets of San Francisco with a nutritionist a mutual friend put me in touch with. In the beginning, we had a typical networking conversation: Linda (name changed) told me about her work as a nutritional consultant to various companies, I told her about my work at a mental health startup. But with a single question, we broke the ice and the conversation became personal for both of us.
When I asked Linda what nutrition meant to her personally, she suddenly opened up about the medical struggles she went through before discovering a severe gut imbalance and a set of food sensitivities. As she put it, “Soy destroys me. If I have even a little, my mood tanks, my body bloats, and I’m in too much of a fog to do anything all day.” Her history was surprisingly similar to mine, and I told her about how I unraveled the systemic inflammation, Lyme disease diagnosis, and food sensitivities had left me similarly depressed and incapacitated. Though her experiences had led her deeper into nutrition and mine had led me into mental health, both of us considered the two fields inseparable.
