Good mood FOOD
Professor Julia Rucklidge’s work may be key to alleviating Aotearoa’s mental health disaster. Her Ted Talk ‘The surprisingly dramatic role of nutrition in mental health’ has now been viewed over 1.8 million times. Almost 16,000 people – including medical doctors and psychiatrists – have so far lined up to take her online EdX course. And her new book, The Better Brain (co-written with colleague Professor Emerita Bonnie Kaplan), shows how good nutrition can reverse, heal or lessen many common mental health challenges.
It’s time for health professionals, the Ministry of Health, and indeed all of us, to take on board Rucklidge’s recommendations, for the health of our nation.
The evidence for good nutrition
For some 15 years, Professor Rucklidge has been undertaking clinical trials to understand the efficacy of treatments for mental health. She’s a clinical psychologist, and director of the Mental Health and Nutrition Research Lab at the University of Canterbury. Instead of medication-based solutions, her laboratory explores the positive effects of wholefood and food-based micronutrients on human brains.
It seems that our brains have been starving for nutrients.
Why are our brains starving?
“What our brains are missing are micronutrients, the vitamins and minerals you can get out of real whole foods. Our diet has been changing dramatically to eating more and more ultra-processed
