Diet Tips from a Psychiatrist: Reconsider Supplements and Eat Real Food | Drew Ramsey

A lot of people like to talk about multivitamins and how they're an insurance policy. And it's always confused me as a doctor. Do you really think there's an insurance policy for not eating well, or not exercising, or moving your body, or not living in a compassionate and peaceful way? There's no insurance policy for that. When you don't eat well, you get sick.

And that's one of the reasons that I really promote a food first philosophy that certainly if people have a deficiency, for example, if you have an illness like pernicious anemia where your body doesn't allow you to absorb B12, of course, you have to take a B12 supplement. Or if you're severely iron deficient, take an iron supplement. But over the long term, what we really want to see is that people are getting their nutrients from food.

So some of the reasons for this aren't about nutrition, they're about community. That when you're engaged with your food and your food supply, when, for example, you go to a farmers market, or if you have kids and you take them to a farm and teach them about where our food comes from, that really creates a different philosophy or a different mindset about nutrition and about how we nourish ourselves.

Certainly, you can live on a multivitamin and sipping on some coconut oil, but that to me doesn't create a great meal. And that's really where I think about my favorite healthy delivery system, it's the dinner table. Where, as people sit around, there's a lot more going on than just the food. My family, we're talking, and we're processing the day, and we're trying something new.

Even just engaging with your food, the creative process of cooking, you take some of these wonderful food I just sort of picked up at the deli, and I thought, well, we can just whip up a little quick salad. Add in lots of fats and proteins with these nuts and seeds, a little leafy green with the watercress. I've never made a salad that has those ingredients, but it's a creative and fun process in a way to engage.

I think that's a big difference—the idea of starting your day taking a set of pills that someone has prescribed for you, or that we have thought about as that's what makes you healthy, as opposed to really seeking out the top food sources. And food is really the foundation of your health.

There's also some differences in terms of absorption. There are some molecules, for example, that just aren't in multivitamins or aren't in as good of a form, I would say. Things like vitamin E. In the natural world, there are eight forms of vitamin E; in supplements, there's one form.

In all these foods that I love to talk about—the leafy greens, and lemons, and red peppers—there are a host of what's called phytonutrients or plant-based nutrients. And these are really the miracle molecules of why a plant-based diet is just so incredibly good for our health because they're signaling molecules. They literally travel from the end of our fork into our DNA and change how our genes get expressed, and they turn on genes that keep us healthy.

So that's another way that supplements and real food differ as you get these phytonutrients. I like the idea that food becomes a way of nourishing the self in a way that a supplement really can't. There are a lot of beliefs in supplements, but really you can get all of the nutrients that you find in supplements in whole good nourishing organic foods.

Another important perspective when we think about brain health is it allows us to look at certain food trends in certain ways that you can take something that people think of as healthy, like juicing or a smoothie. If you look at a smoothie, for a lot of people, it's often a lot of tropical fruits and maybe some low-fat milk or yogurt, and really it's a lot of simple sugars.

And we want people to have a more robust meal with her smoothie. So all the smoothies in Eat Complete have seeds or nuts in them because I'm trying to increase the fat content in a smoothie and increase the protein content. Now fat has been a bad word for way too long. I hope that everyone now is considering fat as something that's really healthy. On...