Hey everyone, welcome to the root cause medicine podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Carrie Jones,

and on this podcast, we go in depth with leading experts to understand and improve your health

and well-being. Today, I'm talking with Dr. Kate Henry about her food-as-medicine approach to mental

health and all around thriving in life.

She walks us through the physiology of the vitamins, nutrients, and amino acids that make up the

neurotransmitters in our brain and then relates it back to the foods we eat and how we absorb them.

Dr. Henry is a naturopathic doctor at Cinearay today, where she has advanced

training in mind-body medicine and functional approaches in mental health. It was an absolute

pleasure talking with her, as her passion and energy really shines through. Here's a clip from

today's conversation. If I asked you, how do you make

dopamine from food? Do you know? I'll give you a hint. There's two ingredients. And let me just say,

if you're sitting there being like, okay, what are you talking about? It's tyrosine and B6.

So there are chemical reactions that your body uses to build neurotransmitters, dopamine,

serotonin, GABA, right?

And it's not a secret and it's not a mystery.

It's right there on our biochemistry pages, but somehow that's not making it into the clinic.

And so what we do in the clinic is we sit people down and we go, okay, you've got depression, right?

And you're not eating enough triptophan, B6, B12, folic acid to make serotonin. So here's how we're going to get you there. And we start there with the foundations of how do you

make neurotransmitters from food in the first place? And then also let's build you a plan that does it for

you where you don't have to think about it. So we always, always, always start with the 80 data point nutrition analysis with people,

vitamins A through K, minerals, calcium through zinc, amino acids, omega-3s, fiber, and then we go from there.

This is just a small taste of the amazing show we have for you today.

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