Food For Thought: How What You Eat Affects Your Mental and Emotional Health

Episode Transcript

Dr. Daniel Correa:
From the American Academy of Neurology, I'm Dr. Daniel Correa. This is the Brain & Life podcast.
Looking back, one of our most listened to episodes was our brain health and nutrition episode featuring Dr. Achari this last February. But you know what? Like you, I also wanted more information about how we can all eat to promote our brain health and better mood. Similarly, Washington Post writer and executive producer Mary Beth Albright has dedicated her interests in public health and delicious food to research and reporting more on where our nutrition and brain health intersect. So she put all of this work and time into her new book, Eat and Flourish, How Food Supports Emotional Wellbeing, which was recently published this last November, and we really enjoyed this book so we're looking forward to bringing this interview and discussion with her today, to you, our listeners.
Now, I also want you to stay tuned and coming up on June 8th, we are joined by Dr. Sarah Song who will be interviewing Dr. Roy Hamilton on Agnosia. A lot of people might be like, "What is that?" Well then definitely check out that episode and learn much more about how your brain perceives the world around us. On June 15th, we'll be featuring an interview with Travel blogger Corey Lee, who has traveled the world in his wheelchair and talks about living with a condition called spinal muscular atrophy. I'll have a detailed discussion with medical expert and a colleague of mine, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Dr. Leslie Delfiner, who's been at the forefront now of helping deliver some of these new treatments for this special condition to babies and adults with spinal muscular atrophy.
Welcome back to the Brain and Life podcast. Today I'm joined by writer, editor, executive producer at the Washington Post, Mary Beth Albright. She has worked as a project director and subject matter expert in public health for the US Surgeon General and then later appeared as a finalist in the Next Food Network Star. You may have also seen her award-winning video series, including The Secret Table, Teach Dave to Cook, Food Hacks and Food Diaries. But most recently, she has released a book, Eat and Flourish, where she discusses nutrition, health and emotional wellbeing. In her book, Mary Beth Acts as a tour guide where she helps and clearly translate the amazing anatomy of the brain and nerves, the reason we're all here today listening to this, and the connections to hormones and chemical responses that drive moods, emotions, pleasure, energy, and our mental health, truly helping all of us learn how to live better with our own body's abilities and your next meal. Thank you Mary Beth for joining us.

Mary Beth Albright:
Oh, Dr. Correa, I'm so thrilled to be here and I appreciate what you're doing here because talking across disciplines is extraordinarily important and it's hard to do sometimes because we're afraid to admit what we don't know. So I really appreciate that you're doing this.

Dr. Daniel Correa:
Well, I'm excited to be here with you. So Mary Beth, what brought your interest to the topic of crossing your interests in food and what's going on in the brain?

Mary Beth Albright:
Well, like a lot of people, I think I grew up in a family of origin with all kinds of mental health issues, not just my immediate family of origin, but going back generations and I was curious about that. It's funny because I say that I've struggled with food issues, I need to stop putting it that way because we all have challenges surrounding food. It's a real pleasure to be able to combine curiosities from different fields and look at the explosion of research that has happened in the past 20 years. So you could barely have kept me away, I guess.

Dr. Daniel Correa:
And you were working with public health at the Surgeon General's office. Did that already expose you to concepts about how food impacts our public health and individual health?

Mary Beth Albright:
Yes. So I started out my career in journalism a long time ago, but went to work right after that for C. Everett Koop who was Surgeon General in the late eighties. And he really became my mentor. I'd worked with him starting after he left the office, but he was really somebody who was very open to new ideas but very grounded in science, and he was a medical doctor who crossed over to be the chief public health advocate of the United States. And so that combining of disciplines, to me, was so important. And as I said, it's hard to do it because we're afraid to say what we don't know. And people like neuroscientists and people like biologists and chemists and physicists are so specifically learned in their position that it's hard to just jump over to food. Maybe you don't know a lot about the food system. Or jump over to any one of those other disciplines. So I think it's really important to talk across disciplines.

Dr. Daniel Correa:
And then later that took you to working at the Washington Post where you covered all kinds of writing, but including food. How was that transition?

Mary Beth Albright:
It was interesting. Journalism is in a really interesting place right now, and so coming from being a food policy attorney, which I am, and having written and being in public health and then transferring over to journalism was fascinating. And the Washington Post is such a great institution and it allowed me to really look internationally, not just at the research that was happening in the United States, I looked internationally at what was happening around the world and was able to really connect with a lot of the top researchers in the area of brain science and also food science. So it was a really extraordinary opportunity and I'm very happy for my six years there.

Dr. Daniel Correa:
So Mary Beth, in your book, Eat & Flourish, as I was going through it, I mean I think the most clear and present connection of emotion to food was when I was reading about, when you talk about and describe the reminiscence bump in psychology. It made me think of and actually even tear up, and when I was thinking of the morning walks from the subway to work at the hospital that I'm at in the Bronx, and initially as some people might think, "Well, why would you tear walking into work? That sounds kind of sad", but it's actually that a whole reason I came to the Bronx was to be close to the sounds and the smells of the Latino community I grew up with. And in the mornings walking down those streets, smelling the sizzling pans and the things coming out from the windows makes me very clearly think of my Abi and my abuela and just what it smelled like sitting at the counter with my grandmas making food for me when I was growing up.
And then coming home from work back to the subway, I smell the picaridas and the dinner sauteing and smells and just takes me to memories of childhood and different stages in my life. How do these memories of food affect how we describe food and our experiences with a meal?

Mary Beth Albright:
I can't thank you enough for sharing that. That was beautiful what you just talked about and that reminiscence bump is real. At presentations that I do, I put up a pie chart showing the 35,000 years of the modern human brain, and that's conservative as you know, it could be more like a hundred thousand years of the modern human brain. And for most of that time, we were surrounded by people who we ate with, who we cooked with, and we smelled those things. I mean, it's always interesting to me when I walk into a restaurant and you don't smell anything. You know what I mean? It's like that's part of the experience. And so that reminiscence bump is something that happens. Our brains put a specific kind of emotional memory on memories that we have from childhood and adolescence, and there's nothing we can do about that but a lot of times people be like, "Oh, well, I have this comfort food issue because of these things that I used to eat when I was a kid."
And it's like, "Yes, and there's a lot of beauty in that. There's a lot of strength in having those memories around us." The interesting thing about the brain is that because flavor is created in the brain, the principles of neuroplasticity apply to our food memories too. And so you'll have often a memory of something that you used to eat when you were a kid and you were like, "Oh my gosh, it was so good." And then you'll eat it as an adult and it's like, "Eh", it's not exactly the same. That's your brain responding to those memories, but also to how you've grown, how you've changed. And so I think the most important thing that comes out of the book is that flavor is created in the brain, not just created on the tongue and not just created by what we smell because a lot of people talk about the olfactory senses and how they affect flavor, but really flavor is the entire experience around us. Exactly what you're talking about.

Dr. Daniel Correa:
Your interest on this topic and it's connection to our emotions and everything in our experience, basically the flavor of life, literally drove you over miles and time to get it in an MRI machine. Now, many of our listeners are used to what we typically think of as an MRI, where a magnet helps take pictures of the body, including the brain, and then there's something called a functional MRI that estimates basically how blood flow and activity changes in part of the brain when you're doing a certain task. And most people don't even like the idea of a single MRI and an FMRI actually even takes longer, and you have to be even more aware of where you are. And despite all those challenges, you got into an FMRI machine to pursue understanding how your brain reacts to different foods. Where did this idea come from?

Mary Beth Albright:
So there's a gentleman named Dr. Eric Stice out of Stanford University who puts people into FMRIs and feeds them milkshakes to see how their brains respond to-

Dr. Daniel Correa:
There are easier ways to get milkshakes.

Mary Beth Albright:
But none more informative, and that's what I was looking for. And so he'll show people a picture of a milkshake and then feed them a milkshake through a straw. It's especially fitted FMRI because there's a straw that goes into your mouth and it just drips chocolate milkshakes into your mouth. Really fascinating. But to show how people who eat ice cream on a regular basis actually anticipate the ice cream more because they have that flavor memory, but they get less pleasure from actually eating the milkshake. And it's about your brain getting used to those pleasures and the importance of variation in diversity. And he's trying to put this into an app that relates to how we view different foods. For example, he's doing tests about showing people a picture of a fatty liver and then a picture of ice cream, and do you have that bad relationship between those and does that decrease?
I showed up on his doorstep and I was like, "Okay, put me through the FMRI." And he did, but I also showed up with a glass of pure kale juice. Luckily it was easy to find kale juice around where he works, and a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon, and I was like, "Okay, can you feed me all these things and see what happens?" And of course, it's a sample size of one, so there's not a lot that you can extrapolate from it but it was interesting to see how my mind anticipated and then perceived pleasure in different ways depending on whether I saw a glass of wine and then got wine or a piece of kale and then got kale juice or a picture of a frosty milkshake and then I got a milkshake. But it shows how hard food studies are because short of putting a webcam on someone's head and recording everything that goes into their mouths, including the lick of the brownie batter spoon, the piece of gum, science is about controlling things and about learning from what is controlled and what changes.
And the human body is an ecosystem. I mean, it's not like, and you know this better than anyone else, it's not like the brain just exists on its own and the body exists to serve the brain. It's all an ecosystem. And in an ecosystem, when you change anything, everything changes. That's what the ecosystem is. And so I think it's really important, both to continue these lines of study and also to acknowledge that all the studies in the world won't tell you what you know personally and what you know about your own body. And so I think those are some takeaways that I got from that FMRI trip.

Dr. Daniel Correa:
I wanted to build on something that's really important because I think the quality of the time that you took to look at quality science and peer reviewed science in the book is unique. And I think it's important for us to have an understanding of really the difficulties and the challenges of food science. Whether you're going out for a run and you're using some electrolyte tab or sports drink or you're taking a look at the next supplement for your memory, many of these things are often based on tiny little studies where we're not comparing this to really how we study medications and treatments and understand public health. It's about 13 individuals who took something for a few weeks and didn't really have the typical assessments that we think of. Speak to some how you chose what things you looked at in reference for your book.

Mary Beth Albright:
Well, that was incredibly important to me, coming from a public health background, having C. Everett Koop as my mentor, everything had to be evidence-based. And my research into this started 20 years ago when I was at the Surgeon General's office and there was a journal article across my desk about how omega-3 fatty acids reduced aggression in men with aggression problems. It was a small study, but it was the first I'd ever seen of its kind. And until then, all of this had been relegated to complementary and alternative medicine, which is great if you want to try it, but not on the first line of defense. And we have so much fantastic evidence about pharmaceuticals, about talk therapy, about other things that have to do with mental health that it's easy to say, okay, here are our tools and we don't need any more tools.
Now, what we've seen over the past 20 years is an expansion of those tools into food, a tool in our toolbox. The message is not throw away your pharmaceuticals. Those are evidence-based. The evidence does not show, oh, you know what? Eat three walnuts and you don't have to go to talk therapy anymore. This is not the message from any of it. It's a tool in a toolbox at a time when we really need all the tools we can get. And so often when we think about mental health, we think about the neck up. And because the body is an ecosystem, everything does have an effect on the brain. And so I only used peer reviewed studies, a lot of them are epidemiological... A lot of them are studies of large groups and associations because as I said, with food studies, it's very difficult because you're relying on self-reporting most of the time and you are not with that person all the time.
There was a great study that was done by Kevin Hall at NIH a few years ago that was a four week study, and they put people in lockdown at NIH for four weeks.

Dr. Daniel Correa:
Who chose to, yes, I wanted to clarify that for people.

Mary Beth Albright:
But they were housed in NIH, for two weeks they were given whole foods and another two weeks they were given ultra processed foods and the same calories, the same macronutrients, the same micronutrients. They were always offered the same with every single meal, but the people who were offered the ultra high processed food gained weight. And we don't have a mechanism for that, we know they ate more calories even though they were offered the same amount. They wound up taking in more calories with the ultra high processed food because it's so delicious and it's engineered to be so delicious. But we don't know the mechanism of that, and I don't think we will in my lifetime. I don't think we will know the mechanism for that in my son's lifetime because the body is a complicated place. And so finding the studies that have sound protocols was a challenge and also really rewarding because I'm very proud of the references that are in the back of the book and I encourage everybody to read as many of the original studies as you have a stomach for, because they're very readable.
There are going to be words that people don't understand, who don't have science backgrounds, but they're extremely readable. And going and reading the study for yourself and making a decision, I think is the next wave in information curation in science that I'm really looking to help people do.

Dr. Daniel Correa:
Now, when we were just previously talking about that NIH study and some of the differences in processed and other whole foods, you brought up that idea of how some foods are engineered certain ways to both be appealing or to have us eat more of them. Can you speak a little bit more about that and what you found in your research?

Mary Beth Albright:
Yeah, I want to preface it by saying we have a world of almost 8 billion people and we have a food system that has evolved to serve 8 billion people. That's a lot of people and a lot of food. And so I want to make sure that, we talk about processed food and ultra processed food in the framework of it's complicated, and you might think it's a scourge or you might think it's a miracle, but that modern food system that we have has bombarded our senses with, I mean, if you have access to it, but it's bombarded our senses with choice. And if you go back to what I talked about, the 35,000 years of the modern human brain, we are working in a sliver of maybe the past hundred years of the introduction of ultra high processed foods. And that's in America. Internationally, it's much less.
And so when you talk about the seismic changes that happen in humanity, when we went from a hunting gathering society to an agricultural society, private property and legal systems and more connection to family and all those things, the same thing is happening now. We are having a seismic change in our food supply and in what we are eating, and there are going to be changes over generations that are going to happen to our bodies and likely to our brains. And part of that is that those foods are created by companies whose job it is to make money. That is not a secret. Everybody knows that. Food companies are for profits. So what they do is make foods as delicious as they can. And there are a lot of food companies that are now starting to see that as, "Okay, well you know what? We would like to be a little more attentive to public health."
And there are absolutely food companies that are doing it. I think it was just a couple days ago, Nestle, which is a company that's now based here in Washington DC, announced that they were going to be doing some re-engineering. And I get it that there's mistrust of food companies, that it's like, "Oh, they're going to say that", it's like greenwashing something. But I also think that there's a lot we can do. And because flavor is created in the brain to change how we consume ultra high processed foods and so one example that I'll give is something called mouth geometry. In food pleasure science, mouth geometry means that your brain perceives flavor differently when it hits your tongue differently. The example that I bring up is in the 2010s, Cadbury, they make a different kind of milk chocolate over in the UK. It's called Dairy Milk. It's delicious because they're allowed to use ingredients that we're not allowed to use in the United States because of food standards of identity.
They changed the shape of the pieces from angular, from rectangles, little rectangles to rounds. And the consumers bombarded them saying, "Why did you change the recipe for Dairy Milk? It was perfect. Why did you?" The thing is they didn't change the recipe, they just changed the shape. And your brain perceives round foods as sweeter than angular foods. So everybody was saying, "You made it too sweet. Now it's too sweet." It's not that. And so. For me, with my public health mind, I pipe up and I'm like, "Well, look, if there is a way to change just the shape of the food and have less sugar in that food", and believe me, I'm not somebody who's like... I am very realistic about human pleasure. We are born loving sugar, so I'm not going to tell people that you must get rid of all sugar in your diet but if there's a way that we can just change the shape of the food and encourage a healthier public, that to me seems like something research that we should be following.
That, to me, seems like policy that we should be following. And because I also have a policy background that's important, I think

Dr. Daniel Correa:
We can hope that moving forward we use more of these food engineering and processing concepts to reach more a healthier balance in our diet.

Mary Beth Albright:
And I think companies are open to it. It's just a matter of all of us. We can't sit in our echo chambers just talking to other people who want to get rid of sugar. We need to expand the science and talk to everyone about it, as I said, across disciplines.

Dr. Daniel Correa:
Yeah, I mean think it depends on what we show them we value in terms of our purchasing power.

Mary Beth Albright:
A hundred percent because we create the food system every single day by what we purchase.

Dr. Daniel Correa:
Now, I think it's important we also make clear that people understand there's a difference when we say processed food versus ultra high processed food. Technically, last night I made a salad. I processed some several fruits, ingredients, things together. I've processed multiple ingredients to make a salad dressing. Unless you actually are eating the fruit from the tree, generally are likely eating a process. Now the difference is when you take those processing choices up to the point where it's tricking your brain to want to eat more.

Mary Beth Albright:
And peeling a banana is processing a food because you're getting rid of the inedible parts so I'm glad that you brought that up. Thank you.

Dr. Daniel Correa:
Now, in your book, you mentioned food engineering is even going to the next step. I mentioned that a whole fruit itself isn't a processed food, but there are food engineers now looking at actually even altering certain foods to have higher chemicals. And you talk about how one of them is considering taking a look at how to engineer food to increase gabapentin in food. Can you describe some about that avenue and the future of possible research and food hitting us that has been engineered in that way?

Mary Beth Albright:
Well, that's interesting and I do write about the world's first GABA tomato. I think that was from last year or two years ago. What's interesting to me is that science clearly is a passion of mine. Another passion of mine is using what you got. And so I feel that right now we're not using the food system and what the food system can give us to its full extent. So before you try to enhance a tomato, how about trying a diversity of vegetables to supplement, if you're just eating tomatoes? How about going back and eating some of those whole plants? Trying out lentils, trying out nuts. And to me, I don't want to call it obsession because that sounds negative, but the single mindedness about increasing the value of the foods that exist, rather than saying, "Okay, well I'm going to increase the amount of vegetables in my diet."
That to me seems, I don't want to say counterproductive, but it does seem to me like there's a lot we can do to encourage people to use what is there rather than putting a lot of resources toward trying to engineer things to be better. I mean, look, I'm not against it, but I do think a lot of that money could be used to improve access for people to fresh fruits and vegetables. And we've had this explosion of evidence about the gut microbiome in the past 20 years is because a bunch of researchers said 20 years ago, you know what? "We've mapped the human genome, where do we go next?" And there's a lot of discussion about whether the human genome was actually mapped, but they saw there are only 25,000, about 25,000 genes that make up humans. And so what is it that changes how our genes express themselves?
And so the gut microbiome project at NIH, the Human Microbiome Project is the inheritor of the human genome project. So I think in a lot of ways we go from trying to figure out engineering to being like, oh, well, let's discover what's already there and see how we can use what's already there.

Dr. Daniel Correa:
So depending on how you count, of course there's varying numbers, but there's billions of neurons in the brain, and we've spent a lot of time thinking about and talking about that, and there's a focus on that but most people often don't really realize that there are hundreds of millions of neurons throughout your abdomen and your gut or your colon. And that on sometimes is actually even thought of as a second brain, and there's a substantial connection. And then everything within your gut microbiome being the different microbacteria and organisms that are there also have a communication and a connection. So talk to us some about what you found in your research about these connections and what it's turning out for us as a society.

Mary Beth Albright:
Well, and not to get into the competition, but there are millions of neurons in your abdomen, as you were saying, and colon. There are billions of neurons in your brain. There are trillions of microbes in your gut microbiome, and they're not human. There are all these non-human genes living inside of you and these non-human organisms living inside of you and every single day, just like you, they eat and they metabolize and they expel things that influence your body. So the gut microbiome is this collection of trillions of microbes that exist between your digestive tract, that's your mouth, all the way down to the other end. And they are bacteria, they are viruses, fungi, archai, just all different kinds of microbes, and they influence how we experience the world. We are just at the very beginning of people accepting that the gut microbiome does influence. We are getting into how, and that is very complicated, but we do know that people with more diverse gut microbiomes, that means different kinds of microbes and different amounts of those microbes, more diverse gut microbiomes are better health outcomes, including better mental health outcomes.
And the gut microbiome, everyone's is like a fingerprint. You have one, I have one, and no two are the same. A healthy person in Canada will have a very different healthy gut microbiome than somebody in Singapore, someone in India, someone in Australia, because it's just the environment affects us so much, what microbes we have living in the air around us and on the surfaces around us. And so those microbes, as I said, need to eat and what they eat is fiber and if we don't have enough fiber in our diet, then those microbes are going to be starving and they're not going to be able to perform the functions that allowed us to evolve. Those microbes have been with us since the very beginning. And so a lot of people think to themselves, "Okay, well I'll eat yogurt once a week, and that's enough." The beneficial bacteria found in food are called probiotics. But those probiotics that you eat don't take up residence in your gut, they help the microbes that are along the way, but they don't take up residence.
And so you need to continually, you need to have yogurt or fermented vegetables or kafir, something that has those live active bacteria to come through and help out your gut microbiome on a regular basis.

Dr. Daniel Correa:
Yeah, I mean, I think most people don't nearly think about or realize that everything we experience out in the world alters each of our own perspectives. I think most people are aware of the cold and the sensation on your skin and things that you see around you, and really your colon and everything from, as you said, from your mouth to the other end is a whole nother surface that your body experiences and interacts with the world around you. It seems that the gut microbiome and everything you eat is another way of centrally experiencing the world around you, just internally.

Mary Beth Albright:
I love the way you just put that. I've never heard anyone say that before. It's informing what's happening on the inside of your body that you're giving them information in the form of food. And in the same way that we get information in the form of our senses from the outside of the body. And one of my favorite fun facts about the gut microbiome is that diversity is its strength and the more diverse your diet, the more diverse your gut microbiome will be. And there's one study that, the American Gut Project, that people eat 30 different plants a week, have vastly better health outcomes and more diverse gut microbiomes than those who eat 10 plants a week. Now before people are like, "Oh my God, 30 plants a week, how am I going to do that?" And you're probably already eating 10 plants a week because wheat is a plant, corn is a plant, soybeans are a plant. Lettuce, tomato, onion, banana.
But when you go up, when you make a concerted effort to include other types of things. And it doesn't have to be, I mean, we're so into these large portion sizes now, and it's not just for unhelpful things, it's for helpful things too. You don't need to eat beets every day for 30 days, you know what I mean? I go to a salad bar very often and I just fill up on stuff that I haven't had in the past week. And it's just a tablespoon of each. And just to get that variety inside of you and to, as you said, give the inside of you a diversity of experiences.

Dr. Daniel Correa:
Now, I'd like to take us to biological and food triggers for our emotions. In your book, you talk about omega-3 fatty acids, and you also talk about the idea and the portmanteau concept of hangry neurons.

Mary Beth Albright:
Hangar is so interesting because, for a long time, we thought it was just associated with blood sugar levels. But we're now seeing that there are neurons, specialized neurons called AgRP neurons that the researchers themselves, I did not make this up, call them hangry neurons because it's a neuron that controls both hunger and anger at the same time. And so when it's activated, when you're hungry, you automatically get angry at the same time. And then when you get enough food, both the hunger and the anger subside. And so why is that interesting? Because it's both in the same neuron. So there is a theory that as we were evolving, the signal of hunger wasn't enough motivation for us to eat. You feel hunger and it's an uncomfortable feeling, but you're also sort of like, okay, well maybe I can wait, whatever, that evolutionarily, the people who combined anger and hunger were the ones who got fed because you are demanding food right now.
So in a way, we can think of ourselves as evolutionarily superior, those of us who've hangry. So the research there is fascinating. And again, only starting to blossom with AgRP neurons.

Dr. Daniel Correa:
And you also talk about in the book about omega-3 fatty acids and several studies who've researched the use of those and diets that are higher in omega-3 fatty acids and their impact on aggression and mood and emotion.

Mary Beth Albright:
And a lot of people will ask me personally, do I take any supplements? And I spend a lot of time on the east end of Long Island where I eat seafood as much as possible because it's so delicious out there. And when I'm out there, I have no supplements but when I'm not eating seafood on a regular basis, that is the supplement that I take. Is it DHA EPA supplement? I'm not selling any. I don't make any money off of it. But because you can see through two photon microscopes that have just recently been developed, you can see the neurons connecting more quickly that have had sufficient DHA and EPA. And in addition to all of the different studies that have been done about the importance of DHA and EPA for cognitive development, and it's always interesting to me, I had my child 15 years ago, but even back then, they were enriching milk and orange juice and all that kind of stuff with DHA and EPA.
And I think it's interesting that people really focus on that for pregnant women, but they don't focus on that enough for themselves as individuals. The things that we do for our kids are good for us too. Eating together is good for us, not just as a family, but with other people. Being involved in growing food and cooking food will make us more likely to make better choices for our long-term emotional wellbeing, and DHA and EPA. And so I think all of us need to start treating ourselves at least as well as we treat our children.

Dr. Daniel Correa:
We should hope. At least that's a good trigger to consider and think of. So in the book, you talk a lot about community and eating in community. Now, first Thanksgiving back after the pandemic and you brought dinner to your father in an elderly home. Talk to us about how eating and community impacts how we experience the food and our pleasure.

Mary Beth Albright:
I'm glad you brought that up. My father wound up dying just a few weeks later after that Thanksgiving, and I almost didn't go because we had such a bad meeting with him the day before. And I was just weeping that night and my sister came to me and she was like, "I really think that we should just go ahead and bring the dinner to the home." And we did. And I am so glad that I did that. And in the book, the science that I get into, I call it the Feast Paradox, which often in America associate eating more food with poor health outcomes. And the Feast Paradox is that when people eat with other people, indeed we eat more food when we're in communion with other people, but we also have greater health outcomes. We also have better mental health outcomes. And that community, it's not magic. It's an association of the importance of community and the importance of food to community that is evidence-based.
And that I saw anecdotally Thanksgiving of this year. And it's funny because of all the science that I present in the book, the thing that gets people the most riled up is the idea that eating with other people may have some benefit because people love to eat alone. And I get it. I do too. I love having a bowl of soup in front of Netflix or whatever. There's a specific pleasure that comes with that. But as a regular eating pattern, eating alone is not associated with the best mental health outcomes. And so that's the science that I present. But we need to relearn how to live in community and how to take these individual brains of ours and turn them into some sort of collective benefit for every brain that exists on the planet.

Dr. Daniel Correa:
And is there a difference in the science from eating together in a group or in community, really having attention to the food and to the community and not necessarily around devices, whether it's Netflix or your phone at that time?

Mary Beth Albright:
Yes, there is some evidence that when we are paying more attention to the people around us and to what we are doing, that that is a mindfulness practice. Mindfulness does not have to just be sitting by yourself alone in a corner for an hour. But the same mindfulness techniques like meditation that activate the vagus nerve, the bundle of nerves that go from the gut to the brain, to the brainstem, the same activation can happen when you're doing things like cooking. The same activation can happen when you're doing things like being with other people around food. And so again, it's just about the tool in the toolbox. Food is a tool that we are not using that we have to use anyway, and that there are a lot of evidence-based ways that show that we can use it for our long-term emotional wellbeing. And so I'm hoping that the book resonates with some people, and I certainly eat and cook differently than I used to and I feel really good about it.

Dr. Daniel Correa:
You talked about how you've changed how you're cooking and eating, and in your book, you not only describe very clearly for people, some of the brain and bodies neuroanatomy and how that connects to our food, and then talk about the science about the foods and connection to emotions. You also took the step to actually provide some different four week plans of food for emotional wellbeing to explore impacts in microbiome, inflammation, nutrients, and pleasure. Talk to me about that decision to include recipes or not in the book and a little bit of that thinking. Were you trying to create a prescriptive diet?

Mary Beth Albright:
The science that we have is actionable, and it's actionable in ways that people can talk to their doctors about, try out and see what is right for them. In furtherance of that, here's a week when you can focus on your gut microbiome and you focus on eating a fermented food every day and try to get as close to 30 different plants a week as you can. So it's not like, "Okay, so now from now on, you're going to eat 30 plants a week for the rest of your life" or "From now on you're never going to eat oatmeal for breakfast and you're only going to eat yogurt", that kind of thing. We wanted it to be actionable, actionable information, and that people wouldn't just get to the end of the book and say to themselves, "Wow, that was really interesting, but I don't know what to do now."
There are ideas on focusing on increasing your food pleasure because pleasure is a form of human nourishment. We have to remember that. So there's one week that's all about increasing food pleasure, including changing up the cutlery you use because there's a lot of science that shows that your brain perceives when you eat with heavy cutlery, your brain perceives the same meal as more flavorful and more satisfying than when you eat with lighter cutlery. And so changes like that can be really important and can really influence how you experience food. And that's what the whole book is about, is about how you experience food, how you create your own flavor, and how the food you eat affects your emotional wellbeing. And so that bidirectional way means that here's some ideas to try out and see what works. And by no means is it exhaustive. I mean, I learn something every day talking to researchers so that's probably going to be the follow up book.

Dr. Daniel Correa:
Well, Mary Beth, thank you so much for opening your heart, your emotions, and your kitchen to help us all learn more about food, our connections to it, and emotions. It's a great book. Eat & Flourish. Make sure to check it out. Thank you so much for joining us here on the podcast and sharing your time with our listeners.

Mary Beth Albright:
I've loved every minute. Thank you so much.

Dr. Daniel Correa:
Thank you again for joining us today on The Brain & Life podcast. Follow and subscribe to this podcast so you don't miss our weekly episodes. You can also sign up to receive the Brain & Life magazine for free at brainandlife.org and even get the Espanol version. For each episode, you can find out how to connect with our team and our guests along with great resources in our show notes. We love it when we hear your ideas or questions. You can send these in by email to blpodcast@brainandlife.org and leave us a message at 6 1 2 9 2 8 6 2 0 6. You can also follow the Brain & Life magazine and me on any of your preferred social media channels. These episodes would not be possible without the Brain & Life podcast team, including Nicole Lussier, our public engagement program manager, Rachel Coleman, our public engagement coordinator and Twin Cities Sound, our audio editing partner.
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Food For Thought: How What You Eat Affects Your Mental and Emotional Health

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