Hi my name is Louis Howes and welcome to the Daily Motivation Show.

We're talking about the brain and food connection.

How important is food by itself

and relating to minimizing depression, social anxiety,

and mental health.

Food is extremely important because it's directly linked to obesity and obesity itself causes low grade inflammation.

And foods that are really high,

particularly when you combine a high saturated fat

with a high refined sugar,

so let's say you're eating your, you're drinking your glass of milk with your cookie.

Like that's the worst because you're getting the saturated fat and the sugar and that's been shown to cause a very high what's called post-prandial inflammatory response.

We've been talking about post-prandial glucose response, which is after you eat, so post-prandial.

There's an inflammatory response that also occurs after eating.

Inflamm molecules cross the blood-brain barrier

and they play a role in basically depressing dopamine signaling and serotonin and all sorts of

you know affecting neurotransmitters and brain function and there's been studies

directly showing that if you inject a person with an inflammatory cytokine it causes depressive

symptoms versus... Really?

with saline? Yes. So the more inflammation we have in the body it increases

depression? Exactly. We used to think, again, the brain was separate from the body

and that, you know, the immune system

and all that didn't affect the brain.

...