Ep. 368: Your brain on fruits and veggies
Guest: Dr. Bonnie Kaplan, co-author of “The Better Brain”
Imagine, if you will, a wonder treatment that can help you overcome anxiety, combat depression, reduce ADHD and stress.
“What a blessing that would be!” says Dr. Bonnie J. Kaplan, a research psychologist and co-author of “The Better Brain.” Kaplan goes on to say, “There is a paradigm-shifting approach to treating mental disorders with food and nutrients.”
For Kaplan, that approach is a broad spectrum one – an approach that was contrary to the magic bullet approach to medicine. She says, “When we learned about nutrition, it was one nutrient, one disorder… That’s not the way the brain works. Your brain needs all 30 micronutrients: a mix of vitamins and minerals.”
At the turn of the century, her research was met with skepticism and outright rejection. In fact, she was shut down. “Health Canada shut down my research,” says Kaplan. “The Director General of Health Canada told me to stop my clinical trial and return all the patients to their psychiatrist and get them back on medication.”
Naturally, no one would fund her research because, as she was told, “vitamins and minerals are of trivial importance to your mental health.” Then in 2009, she led a team of 12 scientists to determine the relationships between maternal nutrients before, during, and after gestation on maternal mood, birth outcome, and infant neurodevelopment.
In 2013, Dr. Kaplan became a founding member of the International Society of Nutritional Psychiatry Research, an organization that emphasizes the importance of nutrition “above the neck.”
In 2019, Dr. Kaplan was awarded $250,000 by the Dr. Rogers Prize for Excellence in Complementary and Alternative Medicine – money that she has added to the more than $750,000 she has committed to fund ongoing research through two donor-advised charitable funds, one in Canada and one in the United States.
We invited Dr Bonnie Kaplan, the co-author of “The Better Brain,” to join us for a Conversation That Matters about the broad spectrum approach to a healthy and better brain.
