Ep 05. The link between nutrition and mental health with Julia Rucklidge

Transcript

Welcome to Nutrition Mission with ANZCO Foods. My name is Cam Harper and I'm your host for Season 1 Beef, Lamb and Ironman, where we will be bringing you nutrition and good health from New Zealand's finest beef and lamb. Today we will be talking to clinical psychologist Julia Rucklidge about the impact of nutrients and nutrition on mental health. Julia is a professor of psychology and a clinical psychologist in the School of Psychology, Speech, and Hearing at the University of Canterbury, the director of Te Puna Toiora, the Mental Health and Nutrition Research Lab, team leader in the Child Wellbeing Institute and co-author of The Better Brain. And stay tuned for our sprint to the finish segment at the end of the podcast, where we do a series of quick-fire questions. Hello, Julia, how are you?

JULIA RUCKLIDGE

I'm very well, Cam, how are you?

CAM HARPER

I'm outstanding, thank you. Now, Julia, tell us about your background in psychology.

JULIA RUCKLIDGE

Sure, so you can hear probably from my accent that I'm not from here. I'm originally from Canada. And I did my PhD at the University of Calgary in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, and trained as a clinical psychologist. I learned how to do psychotherapy, working with people with serious mental health problems. And then I did a postdoc at Toronto at the Hospital for Sick Children, and then I moved to New Zealand to teach about child clinical psychology in the clinical program at the University of Canterbury.

CAM HARPER

What brought you to New Zealand? What was the pull that brought you here?

JULIA RUCKLIDGE

A job. I got offered a post as a lecturer back then in 2000. And I moved here with my husband, we thought, a couple of years. And we're still here and we now have two grown up Kiwi children. So we've settled here.

CAM HARPER

Seems pretty permanent. Why psychology? Is that something you've always been interested in through your teen years perhaps and into adulthood?

JULIA RUCKLIDGE

Absolutely. Definitely, I think it probably started in my teenage years where I got very interested in mental health issues. I grew up with a mom who really struggled really significantly with anxiety and saw how debilitating it was for her and got very interested in the ways we learn how to treat people who are struggling. And so I firsthand saw the benefits of some of the treatments and medications, but I also saw some of the really challenging difficulties associated with the treatments, and which is why I guess I ended up in clinical psychology because I wanted to see if there are other things that could help people who are struggling with mental health issues outside of medication. Eventually that led me to the research that I'm doing now on nutrition, but originally it was about using other methods and tools to try to help people who are struggling with these really challenging and debilitating symptoms.

CAM HARPER

And on that Julia, looking after our mental health has been highlighted in recent years and it really has come to the fore and rightfully so. What factors would you say, a very wide-ranging question here, but what factors would you say have contributed to the decline in people's general mental health?

JULIA RUCKLIDGE

That's a big question. There's definitely a lot of contributors. I would say many of the contributors, to be honest, are environmental. You look at the rapid change in our environment over a very short period of time, whether that's the introduction of technology, which is often blamed, although the data on that are mixed. You can't say it's a clear-cut association between introduction of social media and rise of mental health issues. It's definitely a possible contributor, but probably not as large as we think. Another one, though, that is obviously very near and dear to my heart is our food environment. Our food environment has changed the most rapidly in our entire history. You think about the last hundred years we've had the introduction of so many foods that our ancestors simply were not exposed to. And I wouldn't even like to call them foods because foods are supposed to be nourishing for the brain. But if you think about going in your supermarket and you're surrounded by these packaged products and if you look at the ingredients, they are not ingredients that your great grandparents would have recognised. You've got a whole bunch of numbers on there. You've got emulsifiers. You've got preservatives. You've got your flavors, your colours. And you've got a whole host of other added ingredients that are added in in order to make that food taste, make it palatable, make it something that you want to eat. So I would definitely say based on the research that's been done over the last decade or so, that that is a contributor that we really, really need to pay attention to. It's technically an easy one for us to be able to change in order to be able to improve the mental health actually at a population level. So I'm very much a big proponent of looking at that food environment and saying we collectively, because we can't do it on an individual level, we collectively need to address how toxic it is for our mental health. It's a definite contributor. I would hate to say it's the only thing, but I see this as being one of the big ones that we really need to be paying attention to in the 21st century.

CAM HARPER

So you were talking earlier, Julia, about the clinical trials that you've run in your career, but that link between nutrition and mental health, what were some of the, you know, what was the, I guess, the kicker to get you into doing clinical trials on that link between nutrition and mental health?

JULIA RUCKLIDGE

Sure, it's a really good question. So I talked about how I did my training in clinical psychology at the University of Calgary. The coincidental moment that happened when I was there was that my PhD supervisor, Bonnie Kaplan, who I co-wrote The Better Brain with, she was approached by some families from Southern Alberta, Canada, who claimed to be using nutrients at that point in a sort of pill form, vitamins and minerals, to treat really serious psychiatric problems like bipolar disorder, psychosis, depression, which are really viewed as conditions that only medications and or psychotherapy can treat. So to hear that nutrition was making an impact on them, well, at first she didn't believe them. But then she thought, I'm going to study them. I'm going to study this idea. She was publishing preliminary trials showing some really impressive changes in symptoms associated with bipolar disorder. Those were published in the early part of the century. That I thought, what do I have to lose? As an educator, as someone that I hired at a university, we are the critics and conscience of society. And sometimes you have to study ideas that contravene the current way of thinking. And I have to, you know, absolutely at the time, which was in the probably two, two there in 2005, 2006, to study the effects of nutrition on mental health was absolutely contravening the current way of thinking. I was trained that nutrition was irrelevant to the brain. It was not part of the curriculum. You can say that's true of anyone who treats people with mental health disorders is that it's just simply not covered because it's not being seen as relevant. That is changing now, but that's as a consequence of people like myself and others around the world who have decided to look at whether, you know, do the hard core clinical trials, do the randomised control trials that are necessary to change that evidence base. And then hopefully over time, we're going to be able to change that landscape and make sure that looking at people's nutrition is a core part of addressing this mental health crisis that we're facing. But not only that, start looking at it as a preventative strategy. You know, again, going back to what I was saying before, we need at a population level to be changing the food that we are eating. The data show that about half of our calories at a population level come from ultra-processed products. And so that's what I see as being really the low-hanging fruit is that, you know, we are not eating a healthy diet at a population level. And that's true of studies that have been done here in New Zealand, but also all over the world. So it's really something that we need to urgently address, is to start looking at reducing the consumption of ultra-processed products and increasing the consumption of real whole foods. That's your nuts, your legumes, your fruits and vegetables, a good quality grass-fed meat, your fish, those types of foods and then reducing your intake of those foods that I was talking about, the packaged foods with lots and lots of numbers and ingredients on them.

CAM HARPER

The thing is though, Julia, when you think about it, and you don't have to think very much just listening to you now, it's so painfully obvious, isn't it?

JULIA RUCKLIDGE

It is painfully obvious, yes. And so it's also painful for me to see that it's not getting the attention that it deserves from a government level I look at. The way they're trying to address the current mental health crisis is by actually training more clinical psychologists. I should be excited. It's something that I've been involved in for over 20 years, and yet I know that that is not the solution. You'll never be able to train enough clinical psychologists or other psychologists or mental health counselors to address the mental health crisis. It's not feasible, it's not economically feasible. And then I think there's so much opportunity if we addressed some of these core contributors to the mental health crisis. I think we would go so much further. Clinical psychologists are the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff. Addressing the food environment would be taking a really radical, well, I guess radical, I don't think it's that actually, to be honest, that radical, but really just a far more preventative and cost-effective way of addressing not just the mental health crisis, but also all the other chronic health issues that we see plagued in our society today. Your diabetes, your type two diabetes, your cardiovascular problems, obesity, et cetera. So all of those would also be potentially addressed, not necessarily fully, but we'd go a long way if we really took this to heart. But it does involve enormous government investment. It involves all of us getting on board on the research that's being done, the convincing controlled trials that have shown the importance of vitamins and minerals for brain health, the studies that have been done where they manipulate diet and they change people's diets from the ultra-processed products to real whole foods and see the benefit that it can have on depression, on anxiety, ADHD. So it does require all of us to sort of embrace this opportunity and move away from the pharmaceutical model that has dominated. I don't want to be negative about pharmaceutical models because it's done a lot of good for many people, but then telling you about that personal story, I also know that it can come with harm for some people. And ultimately, it can lead to, you know, some people just simply don't get better by that approach. So we need to have more tools in our toolbox.

CAM HARPER

Now, you were talking before and I said in the intro that you've recently published a book called The Better Brain. Can you tell us a bit about that, please?

JULIA RUCKLIDGE

Sure. I mean, it goes into much greater depth about all of the things that I've just talked to you about in the last 10 minutes. So it goes into the why. Why do we need to care about, say, for example, the vitamin and mineral density of your food? And so we explain what these vitamins and minerals do in your brain. So they support the manufacture of everything that is made. So your neurotransmitters, your enzymes, your hormones, we cannot make these really important signalers without the presence of vitamins and minerals. And it supports the healthy DNA, supports its turning DNA on and off. It supports your mitochondria, which are the important powerhouses of every cell in our body, helps with energy production. So they're so vital, and so we spend a lot of time going into that. And then we go into, well, where do you find these minerals and vitamins? And you can't find them really in any great level from your ultra-processed products. There's a little bit of fortification of a few B vitamins, but you won't get the full array of those vitamins and minerals from those types of foods, you need to get them from your real whole foods, nutrient-dense foods. And it's not just minerals and vitamins, we also need to make sure we get a good supply of omega-3 fatty acids. And of course, your macronutrients are important too, but our focus on the carbs and proteins and fats is really being, has unfortunately overshadowed the importance of these micronutrients. And then we go into the research. So compelling research. Study after study after study, showing that if you, you know, all the associations between the poor diet and greater risk of mental health problems, good diet associated with lower risk, the longitudinal studies tracking people over time, and then the randomized controlled trials that I described.

CAM HARPER

So Julia, we've been running this podcast series and it's been about optimising nutrition for training for an Ironman. What do you think is the ideal diet for optimizing your brain? I mean, another wide-ranging question, but is there an ideal or is it dependent on the person and where they're at?

JULIA RUCKLIDGE

I'm not an expert on that area of the athletes. And because they can be quite different from the population that I'm most used to, which is people struggling with a mental health issue. But I don't think that the recommendations really are that different. I know that there's a lot that goes into that personalised approach for people who are training at that level. But when it comes to making sure that you're mentally well, it isn't hard. The research shows that a real whole food diet, what I described before, is what you should be going for. The more you restrict that worries me. So the more you go down the route of, I'm going to restrict my intake of, say, fish or meat, or I worry that we are going down a route of restricting certain foods that are actually really nourishing. And meat is an example where there's been a lot of flak against meat. And I actually just need to say I'm not paid by ANZCO to say that. I'm not funded by industry at all. I'm not funded by the supplement industry. I'm not funded by the meat industry. I just say that because I know the research and I understand what nutrients are available in certain foods that aren't available in other foods. Some examples would be things like B12 or your access to bioavailable iron.

CAM HARPER

Over this podcast, I've been lucky enough to talk to some very, very interesting people, a couple of top New Zealand Ironman athletes, Hannah Berry and Braden Currie, and talk to another lady, Mikki Williden. Mikki's a fantastic leading professor in nutrition. Nic Gill, performance and strength and conditioning coach for the All Blacks. Another guy, John Newsom who's a coach in Christchurch and they've all said the same thing. And that is that whole foods, a good balanced diet is gonna take you a heck of a long way. And it's really interesting because it wasn't that many years ago, many people were saying you need to have supplements, you need to do this, you need to do that. But it's interesting to see that swing is really coming back to having good, healthy, whole, simple foods. Which is quite surprising when you say, when you hear that, right?

JULIA RUCKLIDGE

You kinda go, well, of course. Yeah. If you're under a lot of stress. So, you know, thinking aloud about the stress associated with doing a marathon, I haven't done one. I haven't done an Ironman. It's not in my vision, to be honest, of ever wanting to do one. But I assume that that is quite a stress load on your body, and it may be under those circumstances. I certainly know from the research that we've done on disasters, you know, following the Christchurch earthquakes, for example, giving people additional nutrients when the fight-flight response is so great and it's been triggered so repeatedly, giving people additional nutrients in pill form, particularly B vitamins, was a really effective way of helping them cope and become more resilient. As we were saying, it sounds very obvious and it is obvious.

CAM HARPER

I completely agree with everything you're saying, Julia. But I also understand, you know, when you get people who are under enormous personal strain or they're working every hour that's given to them, it's easy for them and especially when you look at cost of living and you look at their schedules and everything else they do choose convenience over whole foods. I mean how do we get that step change and thinking to get going?

JULIA RUCKLIDGE

Yeah, no that's a tough one. I would always say don't take it like it needs to be a step-by-step approach so you don't overhaul your diet in a week. We need to relearn what, again, our ancestors knew, which was that you do need to spend time on food preparation. But ultimately, again, this is probably a bigger thing than just an individual is looking at our society as to, well, why do people feel that they need to work those long hours? What are the work environment expectations? Why do people work in some really toxic environments where it's deemed as a good thing to work such a long day. For me, I prioritise sleep, making sure that I always get an adequate amount of sleep, which is seven to eight hours a night. Never compromise on that unless I absolutely have to get up for an early flight, which I avoid. But again, it's something that we all need to do is look after our well-being. And working those really excessive long hours is not looking after your well-being. And that is going to result in people making shortcuts on their food, which is then going to contribute greater to their stress. So we need to revisit that. There's a lot of research that shows that you're going to be more productive if you eat well. You can do your job in less amount of time if you're feeding your brain. Your brain needs those nutrients to think, to pay attention, to be creative. So that may very well be contributing to people feeling they have to work longer hours because they're running on empty.

CAM HARPER

So where to from here, Julia? What would you like to see happen in New Zealand and around the world to support mental health through nutrition and micronutrients. I mean, what would you change if you could?

JULIA RUCKLIDGE

I mean, like you're saying earlier, I guess the list is gonna be large. And so it should be. I always say, I guess I have to change this now, but I used to say, goodness, wouldn't it be great if one of these days I got that phone call from Jacinda Ardern that said, you know what? We finally have caught around and heard about your work. In New Zealand the interesting thing is that there's all this research that's done within one of our esteemed institutions, University of Canterbury, showing over and over and over again the benefits of this, the importance of nutrition. And yet it does seem to often be ignored by politicians, by the Ministry of Health, where do I go? Nutrition is not part of the conversation in mental health services. So all of that is where I'd love to see things change, that they really take it seriously and it's part of it. There's three full-time equivalent nutritionists in mental health in Christchurch. Does that seem adequate to you? No. So it's a huge problem. We need to teach children about why they need to eat good food. It's not to do an Ironman, sorry to say that to you guys. No, it's just for life, right? To be able to succeed and live your best life, isn't it? Yeah, but it's also to feed the brain. The brain, I always call it the hungriest organ and it punches above its weight. It's 2% body weight, but it consumes between 20 to 40% of the nutrients that you eat. So when you eat, you're predominantly feeding your brain. Well, actually, the reason why you need to eat these vitamins and make sure that you're getting a good amount of vitamins and minerals from nourishing food is that it's for your brain. It's not to grow. Yes, that's important. But really, you're predominantly feeding your brain. So we need to go back to reminding ourselves of the importance of food for that, you know, your prefrontal cortex you know, just the thinking machine that sits at the top of us. It's always a very full on time.

CAM HARPER

Julia, I've thoroughly enjoyed this conversation. Really, really have. Now, at the end of this podcast, we always do what we call a sprint finish. So it's asking a couple of quick questions and you answer with the first thing that comes to your mind. There's only four of them. So first one, are you a morning person or are you a night person?

JULIA RUCKLIDGE

Goodness. I think I'm maybe both.

CAM HARPER
I like it, it's a good answer. You're an all-rounder, I like that. What's your favorite hobby outside of your work?

JULIA RUCKLIDGE

Okay, I'd say water activities.

CAM HARPER

Great, and nutrition. In your household, is that an art or do you think it's a science?

JULIA RUCKLIDGE

It's both.

CAM HARPER

And when you are, whether it's a barbecue or if you're standing there with your husband, you're saying it is a majority of the cooking, so you have a steak, is it gonna be well done, medium or rare?

JULIA RUCKLIDGE

Medium.

CAM HARPER

Medium, perfect, I like it. And we're done. Julia, thank you very much. We have made it to the finish line of our podcast Nutrition Mission with ANZCO Foods, Season One, Beef, Lamb and Ironman. Thank you, Julia, for joining us and thank you for tuning into Nutrition Mission with ANZCO Foods. If you enjoyed our podcast and want to find out more, head to anzcofoods.com/ironman for more insights and news. Make sure you tune in next time when we talk once again to Braden Curry and Hannah Berry about tips and advice for recovery after a gruelling Ironman event and chat to them about their experience in Taupo's Nutrigrain Ironman New Zealand.