Welcome to Dishing Up Nutrition, brought to you by nutritional weight and wellness.

This morning, my co-host and I will be talking about the role that gluten and sugar play

in the rising rate of anxiety in both adults and teenagers.

And here's this interesting statistic, kind of surprising and interesting.

As of last year, so in 2020, the National Institute

of Mental Health found that about 20% of adults have an anxiety disorder, and it doesn't

stop there, nearly 32% of teenagers. Or in other words, one in three teenagers in this country have an anxiety disorder.

Now, as a mom of two teenagers, that statistic was pretty concerning to me. And I want all of the

listeners to really take a minute and visualize what this means. So if you think about all

those teenagers that you know, and if they were all lined up and you count out every third one, that's how many have an anxiety disorder.

One in three kids between the ages of 13 and 18 and one in five adults suffer from anxiety.

But we're not here to just talk about the problems.

Today, we're here to offer solutions. And for me, as a registered dietitian, we're not here to just talk about the problems. Today, we're here to offer solutions.

And for me, as a registered dietitian, whenever I'm thinking about a health condition or a disease,

I always think, what is the food connection to all of this? So specifically, in light of today's

topic, what is the food connection to anxiety?

And we're going to talk about the food connection to depression.

Now, of course, we know there's a sugar connection, a blood sugar connection.

My co-host, Kara, will go into quite a bit of detail explaining that connection in just a little bit.

And Kara and I both are going to talk about some of the research out there connecting sugar

to anxiety.

We also found, as we were preparing for today's show, that there is research out there

...