Welcome to Feel Better, Live More Bite Size, Your Weekly Dose of Optimism and

Positivity to get you ready for the weekend. Today's clip is from episode 74 of

the podcast with Professor Felice Jacker, a world leading expert in the field

of nutritional psychiatry. Now in this clip we discuss her ground breaking

research into the link between food and moods, the importance of our gut

microbiome and how a diet rich in diversity is key.

Until recently, as a conventional medical doctor, the widespread view was that

our diets don't really play that much impact in terms of the way that we

feel what is going on there. Yeah, I think you know there's been this long

standing, I guess dichotomy between mind and body, this idea that somehow the

brain was up here and the body was down here and they really didn't have a lot

to do with each other. But what really got me interested in the link between

nutrition and mental and brain health was the understanding probably, you know,

late 1990s, early 2000s that the immune system seemed to be really central

particularly with depression. It seemed to be both cause and consequence of

depressive illnesses and of course nutrition is a really strong driver of immune

function. And also in the early 2000s a lot of neuroscience work coming out of

America that looked at the impact of nutrition as well as exercise on brain

plasticity in particular this region of the brain called the hippocampus which

is really important for learning and memory as well as for mental health and

showing that you could manipulate that in animal studies rapidly by altering

diet and also exercise. So there was this emerging evidence that of course

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