S9 Ep26: Gut Feelings: Exploring the Profound Influence of Digestive Health on Mood and Cognition with Dr. Edison de Mello Part 2
“The food that you eat affects everything, including your mental health.” —Dr. Edison de Mello
Gut, Food, & Health series
What if the key to better mental health was as simple as the food on your plate? Emerging research reveals the profound influence of gut health on cognitive function, mood, and emotional resilience. By nourishing the body, we may unlock the path to nourishing the mind.
Dr. Edison de Mello is an integrative medicine specialist and the founder of the Akasha Center for Integrative Medicine. As a physician and psychologist, he has dedicated his career to exploring the intricate connections between physical, mental, and emotional well-being.
Tune in as Dr. de Mello shares his insights on leveraging the power of nutrition to support brain health, combat depression, and optimize cognitive performance.
Connect with Dr. Edison:
Dr. Edison de Mello, MD, PhD is the founder and Chief Medical Officer of the Akasha Center for Integrative Medicine. He is a board-certified integrative physician and a licensed psychotherapist. Dr. de Mello completed his residency at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York City, where he trained in a biopsychosocial model and integrated complementary medicine into Family Medicine.
Inspired by his grandmother, Nana, who practiced natural healing, Dr. de Mello's approach combines Western and Eastern medicine, focusing on treating the mind, body, and spirit. He has written several articles and contributed to Dr. Andrew Weil's upcoming book on the microbiome and food addiction. Dr. de Mello is also on the advisory board of several organizations and a member of various professional associations.
Episode Highlights:
02:16 the Impact of Diet on Mental Health
05:35 Dietary Reboot
08:46 How IV Therapy Works
14:22 Addressing Memory Issues and Depression
19:53 Gut and Mental Health Connection
Tweets:
The gut-brain connection is no longer a mystery— it's a symphony. Discover how nourishing your body can unlock the path to a healthier, happier mind with @jreichman and @AkashaCenter Founder, Dr. Edison de Mello. #podcast #entrepreneurship #socialgood #inspiration #impactmatters #NextGenChef #EssentialIngredients #Season9 #GutBrainConnection #FoodForTheMind #IntegrativePsychology #GutHealthTips #HappyGutHealthyMind
Inspirational Quotes:
06:13“Inflammation is what links every condition… eat foods that help you decrease inflammation.” —Dr. Edison de Mello
07:55 “We have to know what we're taking. They can be as serious and as helpful as something else in maybe a lower dosage, and they can have contra interactions that can be problematic.” —Justine Reichman
09:46 “When you take a vitamin or an herb, it needs to go through your gastrointestinal system, and the gastrointestinal system is the seed of your health. Its job, among many other functions, is to protect you.” —Dr. Edison de Mello
13:59 “Look at fear not as an enemy, but rather as something that is here to allow you to get from point A to point B. It is temporary.” —Dr. Edison de Mello
15:59 “You are what you eat; you become what you think.” —Dr. Edison de Mello
18:26 “The gut informs the brain when it's satiated, the brain tells the gut when it's hungry.” —Dr. Edison de Mello
19:36 “If there is inflammation, there is decreasing serotonin and more depression.” —Dr. Edison de Mello
21:51 “The food that you eat affects everything, including your mental health.” —Dr. Edison de Mello
Transcription:
Justine Reichman: Welcome to Essential Ingredients. I'm your host, Justine Reichman. With me today is Dr. de Mello for part two of our series. This one's focusing on food and brain health.
Welcome, Dr. de Mello.
Edison de Mello: Nice to be here again with you.
Justine Reichman: Likewise. I'm super excited. I love chatting with you before, understanding how we can use food to feel better, be more aware, and tailor our diets accordingly. By listening to how the food makes us feel, we can eliminate it. It sounds really easy.
Edison de Mello: It is easy. We make it difficult, I think.
Justine Reichman: We're talking about food and brain health. I just want to take a minute to let you introduce yourself for those that might have missed the first part of this series. So Dr. de Mello, if you could just give me your name, your title, and your speciality?
Edison de Mello: I'm Dr. Edison de Mello. I'm an MD, and I'm also a psychologist. My specialty is integrative medicine. I'm the Founder and the Chief Medical Officer of the Akasha Center for Integrative Medicine here in Santa Monica.
Justine Reichman: Wow. Okay, awesome. I know that some of our folks listening and watching may be familiar with you. But for those that weren't, I just wanted them to get a sense of who we're talking to. I know that we touched on your interest in GI because you do have a focus there. You've done more research on it, and it's now really been very prevalent in your practice. And as it relates to how people feel, am I correct?
Edison de Mello: Yes, indeed. It is very prevalent. Not only my practice, but for the whole clinic. We have a whole clinic where GI issues and ways to help them with their gastrointestinal issues is actually a big focus for us.
Justine Reichman: So let's talk about gastrointestinal issues, mental health, and how it affects it. You had mentioned a study to me where we talked about the impact of what we eat and how it affects our mental health. Can you talk to me a little bit about that?
Edison de Mello: First, I would just like to let you know that this topic has been a great passion for me since graduate school where I set out to show how the gut is connected to mental health. That was during my doctorate studies. I wrote a dissertation, PhD dissertation called Gut Feelings: Psychosocial Factors in Gastrointestinal Disease. And back then, this was in 1996 when I finished. People are looking at this and going, what is it talking about? Today, it is part of an everyday discussion that most people have in an integrative medicine space or functional medicine. The study that you are alluding to showed that up to 20% of people with mental and emotional issues. The study showed that a lot of those issues were connected to how they eat. And for those of us who have had children or have taught children, we know that when they have attention deficit disorder, attention deficit disorder is very prevalent. And when you remove those foods, the symptoms tend to get better. I'm not going to go as far as to say that they become completely cured of the attention deficit disorder, but it's clear that the symptoms really ameliorate quite significantly. And so the studies show that in the 20% of people with mental health issues, they were able to link that 20% of them were able to get better or have--
Justine Reichman: What percent of what population?
Edison de Mello: The population with mental health issues. 20% of them were connected to how they felt connected to what the food they ate.
Justine Reichman: So interesting facts or interesting notes. I think I mentioned to you that I did a little stint at acupuncture school. It was in between one startup and another. But I was always interested to learn more, because I was always interested in food and health, and the connectedness, or interconnectedness between East and West medicine, Eastern and Western medicine. But what was funny was I had a final project, and it was all about the impact of food on health, and so I created a website called The Good Mood Food. It doesn't exist anymore, but I had found that blueberries would help for depression, and mushrooms help with depression. I'm not talking about the medicinal mushrooms, I'm talking about the mushrooms we buy in the grocery store. I thought it was super interesting that these foods, and this was me doing, I did some scientific research. I was in school, so I'm not a doctor. I did not do a study, but it was interesting information to have at hand. And I think the interest, if I was still there, would pique me to find out if there are any studies done on it to see what they find out for this. Were these isolated instances? And so my question to you is, what is your knowledge based on this? Is this something you're familiar with?
“Inflammation is what links every condition… eat foods that help you decrease inflammation.” —Dr. Edison de Mello
Edison de Mello: Quite familiar, actually. In fact, we have a program that we designed several years ago called The Reset Program, how to reboot your system for whatever condition may be facing at the time that you came in to see us, that diet and rebooting the system becomes vital to the success of the treatment, along with everything else that we want the patient to consider doing. Which may include medication. But diet is essential, and we know that. We know that inflammation is what links every condition. You sneeze because you're inflamed. You get cancer because you're inflamed. It's multifactorial conditions or factors that lead to the disease, but inflammation is the common denominator. So when you eat foods that help you decrease inflammation, such as the blueberries of the world, all the berries or mushrooms that you talked about, or foods that have been proven effective. Garlic has a substance in it called allicin that is anti microbial. So when you understand the power of these foods and you go back to Ancient Medicine when modern medicine was not available, how do they treat these conditions? Through herbs.
Justine Reichman: Herbs and foods, and all sorts of things.
Edison de Mello: You can go as far as saying that most, if not all, but let's say most medications came from botany. They look at a plan from the Amazon, they find a substance that can be helpful, and they look at that. They studied it, and in assembly, they did the double blind studies showing that this benefit, and hold and behold, before you know it, the drugs in the market right after several stages of testing the drugs. So without botany, we wouldn't be here. Without botany, I think our world would be very different. Aspirin comes from botany.
“We have to know what we're taking. They can be as serious and as helpful as something else in maybe a lower dosage, and they can have contra interactions that can be problematic.” —Justine Reichman
Justine Reichman: And it's interesting, because when people learn about supplements, they're like, they're just herbs, they're safe. But I think it's more than that. I think we have to know what we're taking, what they are. They can be as serious and as helpful as something else in maybe a lower dosage, and they can have contra indications that can be problematic. So understanding that the medicine that we take comes from botany, and then realizing that those herbs also come from botany is kind of an aha moment, I think, for people because I don't know that they realize. I don't know if the majority of people realize.
Edison de Mello: And listen, herbs and supplements are the cornerstone of my practice at the foundation of what we do, because we try to help people get to their health that they dream of through natural ways whenever possible. And then when it's not possible, we will utilize technology, usually Western medicine, to help us get to that point. But the truth is that you don't need to choose a supplement like a shot in the dark anymore, for those people who have the means to afford doing a nutritional assessment, where we take your blood, and through your blood, we cannot see the levels of vitamins that are present in your blood. That will be the best way to look and see, oh, you are deficient in zinc. You're deficient in vitamin C.
Justine Reichman: So with that being said, we have our lovely little lady here.
Edison de Mello: This is Kiana. Kiana is one of our incredible medical assistants.
Justine Reichman: I think we discussed having key auto participate and to do this IV, as much as my palms are sweating. I am the biggest baby, and I know that. I'm sure that a lot of viewers and listeners also don't like needles, but it's important. Why is it important to have this in addition to changing our diets?
Edison de Mello: I'll tell you why it's important. Because when you take a vitamin or an herb, it needs to go through your gastrointestinal system. In the garden of the intestinal system is the seed of your health. It's clear that it's the seed of the house for some of us, but its job among many other functions is to protect you. So absorbing some of those things in your gastrointestinal system takes a lot of steps. When you do an IV, it goes directly into your cells, directly in your system, and it bypasses the gut. So therefore, the asset base that most of us have in the medical world has to balance and control. We take the kind of the variable out, and 100% of what we give you goes straight where it needs to go, which is into your cells.
Justine Reichman: What are we doing here today?
Edison de Mello: You're doing two things. First of all, you're doing phosphatidylcholine.
Justine Reichman: That's connected directly to my brain health. We had talked about the challenge I have with word hardening and short term memory as a result of the time I took Topamax for my migraines. So what can I expect for this? I mean, obviously, not just in one treatment, but as a support to my endeavor to maybe recover some word finding issues or my short term memory.
Edison de Mello: Great question. So your brain needs food, and it needs food usually in the form of amino acids and fats called phospholipids. And so phosphatidylcholine is a precursor to this incredible neurotransmitter called acetylcholine. Acetylcholine is the element in your brain that allows you to think sharply for yourselves to fire your neurons.
Justine Reichman: I'm not excited about the needle, but I'm excited about this. So let's continue this conversation while I give my arm.
Edison de Mello: Your arm, she's gonna take good care of your arm.
Justine Reichman: I'm not gonna cry. Tell me a little bit about what we're getting here. What can I expect?
Edison de Mello: So you're getting first with your choline, which is the precursor to acetylcholine, which is a neurotransmitter, phospholipid that allows your brain to function better.
Justine Reichman: Okay, fantastic. I feel fine. Thank you. I get a pretty pink thing. What am I going to feel like? What are the benefits for the short and long term?
“Look at fear not as an enemy, but rather as something that is here to allow you to get from point A to point B. It is temporary.” —Dr. Edison de Mello
Edison de Mello: It's not that one shot will fix all the memory issues that you may have, but it's a beginning. Phosphatidylcholine is food for your brain after a while, I'd say after three to four treatments, you start to feel that your memory is getting better. But alone, you will have a benefit. It's going to have even better benefits if you're also looking at your diet. If you're doing phosphatidylcholine and you're eating inflammatory foods, or foods that lead to inflammation such as the big culprit out there. Sugar, right? This will be useless. It's no different than somebody going to the gym, working out, coming home and eating a lot of unsaturated fat, or drinking out of control because you are adding calories into a system that you're trying to remove calories from. So this alone will not do what it's designed to do at 100% so I recommend that people do what I say, brain exercises. Do you do puzzles? Do you have something that you use in your downtime to really exercise your brain? Do you play games? A word game. Puzzles are very good. What do you do to stimulate your brain? And the other thing, I think, to remember, especially because we were talking about fear, is to look at fear not as an enemy, but rather as something that is here to allow you to get from point A to point B. It is temporary.
Justine Reichman: My mom likes to say it's over before you know it. The next time you're thinking about it, it's over. The needle part is out, right? What scares me is the pinch, and that was a lot better than the other needle I had in my head today. I've got a lot of needles today. But anyway, in any case, let's go back to the food and the brain. So if somebody was to ask you, they were having memory issues, whether it's a disease like Alzheimer's or something, there may be a no to this, I don't have any preconceived ideas. So if you have Alzheimer's or dementia, is there a way to slow down or help people that are having those kinds of memory issues?
Edison de Mello: There is a way to slow it down. It's genetically induced. I think we have to be realistic that once you have a genetically induced condition, it's there to stay. But you can remove it, or you can decrease the effects of it in your health, in your life. And it always starts with your belief system. And again, this is the therapist in me speaking. Now, if you ask me, this is my protein drink that I'm about to have in a little bit. If you asked me if this was a medication, you asked me, Dr. de Mello, is this medication going to help your headache or my headache? The first thing that I would ask you is, do you believe it's to help you? We always think of placebo as a negative thing, right? But there's also placebo that is positive that allows us to believe what is in front of us and to move with it. So I think the first thing that people need to understand is that you are what you eat, and you become what you think. What are your thoughts about the condition that you're facing? Are you angry at it? Are you kicking and screaming? Are you going, okay, I've got this. I'm gonna have it, but it's not gonna have me. And then you do the things that we've been talking about in the second segment, which is, watch what you're eating, watch if you are exercising, watch if you drink enough water. What are the stresses in your life? What is your vitamin level? What does your poop look like?
“You are what you eat; you become what you think.” —Dr. Edison de Mello
Because if you have a car that is very expensive, with leather seats, great body, but the carburetor is not working, the whole package doesn't mean much. The carburetor is off. You have a carburetor in your system with your gut. Everything starts in your gut. Again, good old Hippocrates Health starts in your gut. He also said that 500 years ago, and other stuff followed. So the idea is to step back and say, how can I optimize all the other elements in my life? All the other factors, my exercise, which is good for my mind, my immune system, how am I boosting it up? What vitamins am I taking? Do I know what I'm deficient in? And then doing things like using phosphatidylcholine. If your doctor, your primary care provider agrees with that, if you trust her to make a decision with you, then I think it's really good to combine the incredible technological advance of Western medicine with their wisdom and ancient knowledge of Eastern approaches.
Justine Reichman: So I have two last questions for this segment. One of them is, what would you share with somebody that was having depression? Obviously, everything's tailored. But is there some sort of food you might recommend avoiding? Can you mention that and maybe share a story if you have one about somebody that had depression and benefited from them?
Edison de Mello: Again, let's go back to the brain gut axis. There's a highway of information going back and forth. The gut informs the brain when it's satiated. When you need something, the brain tells the gut when it's hungry. The same is true with depression or any kind of mental imbalance. We all have heard one time or another something called serotonin, also known as the happy hormone. And 95% of serotonin is metabolized and produces your gut. Not in your brain. When you think about it, 95% it's a huge amount. So when somebody comes to me and says, I've been feeling depressed. I don't know what's going on. We are going to talk about life events first. Certainly if you lost a loved one, if you're going through a breakup, if you lost a job, it's cause and effect. It's right there. So eliminating those and coming back to you, then we need to say, what do you eat? How much water do you drink? What's your go-to food? What's your comfort food? Because we know that those foods will lead to inflammation. If there is inflammation, there is decreasing serotonin and more depression, and more depression. So I had a patient who had been on Prozac for about 20 years, and she came in to see me. This was about five years ago. A really brilliant woman, head of a big company that she was working for, suddenly said, I've been on Prozac and feeling really well balanced for the last 20 years. And in the last six months, it's not working. I would like for you to switch me to another type of depressor. And I said, well, we may do that later on, but let's look under the hood. And that's the question. If you've been doing this thing, this medication for 20 years and suddenly it's not working anymore, why is it not working? Now, long story short, she had gone through a divorce. And before when she was married, she was a vegetarian.
Justine Reichman: Oh, interesting.
Edison de Mello: And then after they divorced, she was living by herself. Her ex husband was the cook in the family. He was actually a chef by trainee so she didn't have to worry about food, and he was very much into healthy food, mostly vegetarian. Simply, she's by herself, not with a partner anymore. She's the head of this big company. She's eating late. And when she's eating, she's eating on the fly. She's not really thinking about what her body needs. So whereas making the decisions about what to eat when she was hungry.
Justine Reichman: Wow, that's really life changing for her, I'm sure.
Edison de Mello: So once we take a step back and we say, why don't we try this for 21 days? Just 21 days. Let's clean this up a little bit. We're not going to cook, but let's look for a food delivery service. They can deliver food to you at home and at your office. She got better.
Justine Reichman: Amazing. I really appreciate you sharing that story, because I think it's really something that people can latch on to, and it makes it doable.
“The food that you eat affects everything, including your mental health.” —Dr. Edison de Mello
Edison de Mello: It is doable. It's not the answer to everybody, of course. I want to just disclose that everybody's different. You should never stop taking medication. Make any changes without consultation with the person that you trust in your corner, your medical person. but the food that you eat affects everything, including your mental health.
Justine Reichman: (inaudible).
Edison de Mello: Wow. Impressive. I like your Portuguese.
Justine Reichman: Thank you so much for joining me on this second segment Dr. de Mello. I'm tasting vitamins, by the way. We'll talk about that in segment 3, so stay tuned. Thanks again for joining me.
Edison de Mello: It's a pleasure.
