Welcome to the MyBuddyGreen podcast. I'm Jason Wackeb, founder and co-CEO of MyBuddyGreen and your host.

Dr. Nicole Berkins is a licensed clinical psychologist and board-certified nutritionist

specializing in evaluation and treatment of children with serious developmental and mental health

conditions. And today we're going to cover all things mental health and nutrition, but not just

for kids and parents, but for all adults as well. Nicole, welcome. Thanks for having me.

It's so great to have you and I'm going to start with a big question. It seems like there are

so many more children, so many more teens, so many more young adults struggling and diagnosed with

neurodevelopmental and mental health challenges these days. It seems that way. Is that really the case

and why do you think it is the case if I am correct? Yeah, it's such an important question

and it's true. We are seeing that over the last one to two decades we've seen a steady increase

in kids, teens, young adults being diagnosed with a whole realm of things. Everything from

neurodevelopmental issues like autism spectrum disorder, ADHD, those kinds of things to mental health

diagnoses, anxiety disorders, mood and depressive disorders, learning challenges, all of those kinds

of things have been on the rise and it particularly shows up I think autism and ADHD are the ones that

sort of get the most pressed because the numbers there have been the most alarming, but certainly

depression, anxiety, all of that and so it does beg the question of what's happening there? Why

are so many more kids? Sometimes from a very young age struggling with things that we really didn't see

at this level of frequency 30 years ago and certainly before that and what the research and my

own clinical experience and that of my colleagues in the fields of medicine and mental health, what

it points to is a combination of things. It's not just one thing that would be simple, right? If we

just identified the thing like people say, well, what's the cause of autism or anxiety or whatever?

Well, we know that there's lots of different things and what the research points to is a combination

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