Diet is key to healthy living but, strangely enough, the topic rarely comes up in conversations about mental health. Instead, we tend to focus on medication and therapy, and largely ignore the food that we eat – which, according to psychologist Kimberley Wilson, is a huge mistake. After working at what was once Europe’s largest women’s prison, HM Prison Holloway in London, she became keenly aware of the powerful influence diet has on mental wellbeing.
She saw how, deprived of a balanced diet and nutrients, it was so much harder for prisoners to control their emotions. And she realised that proper nutrition is just as important for managing mental health as medication and therapy. She spoke with New Scientist about why nutrition is the foundation of brain health and how the foods we eat can treat mental illness.
A radical rethink of what makes your diet healthy or bad for you Olivia Goldhill: How does nutrition influence brain health? I think most people understand that food is important for our bodies but are less familiar with its influence on our minds. Kimberley Wilson: Mental health is an emergent property of a physical organ.
In the same way that your heartbeat is an emergent property of your heart, all of these things that we think about as mental wellbeing are an emergent property of your brain. If we want a coherent psychological experience, we should be thinking about the physical health and structural integrity of the brain as our starting point – and nutrition changes our brain’s ability to process thoughts and emotions, just like it influences the health of any other organ. Why do you think we so rarely consider this mind-body connection?
Four hundred years ago, René Descartes made the argument that there is an essence of the self that is separate from and superior to the physical body. It created such an impression on medicine and then psychiatry that we started approaching mental health as a neck-up intervention – the rest of the body is completely irrelevant. The brain is also out of sight.
Weightlifting changes your body very quickly, often within a few weeks. But because you can’t physically see changes to your diet, exercise and sleep in your brain, you have to wait for a subjective shift that can take six months. There is also a bit of egocentrism.
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