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• Diets that are high in saturated fat are becoming notorious for reducing molecular substrates that support cognitive processing and increasing the risk of neurological dysfunction in both humans and animals.
• As predicted from an evolutionary perspective, the gut does influence the molecular mechanisms that determine the capacity for acquiring new memories and that control emotions, as well as overall mental function.
• The results of a recent randomized clinical trial indicated that a 3-year folic acid supplementation can help to reduce the age-related decline in cognitive function.
• There is the exciting possibility that dietary manipulations are a viable strategy for enhancing cognitive abilities and protecting the brain from damage, promoting repair and counteracting the effects of aging.
• The capacity of diet to modulate cognitive abilities might have even longer-term implications in light of recent studies that imply that nutritional effects might be transmitted over generations by influencing epigenetic events.

• The American paradox is we are a people who worry unreasonably about dietary health yet have the worst diet in the world.
• Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.
• Key Rules:
  • Don’t eat anything your great grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.
  • Don’t eat anything with more than five ingredients, or ingredients you can’t pronounce.
  • Stay out of the middle of the supermarket; shop on the perimeter of the store. Real food tends to be on the outer edge of the store near the loading docks, where it can be replaced with fresh foods when it goes bad.
  • Don’t eat anything that won’t eventually rot (honey is the exception).
  • Families traditionally ate together, around a table and not a TV, at regular meal times.
  • Don’t buy food where you buy your gasoline.
  • It’s not just what you eat, but how you eat it.

• Check out: 7 Ways to Meal Prep Your Way to a Healthier, More Productive Week

• Although not classified as a non-communicable disease, depression now imposes the largest burden of illness and middle- and high- income countries.
• Adults followed over 5 years had a reduced risk of developing depression if they scored higher on a “whole food” dietary pattern, and an increased risk if they scored higher on a “processed food” dietary pattern.
• A 2010 Australian study found that a dietary pattern of vegetable, fruit, beef, lamb, fish and wholegrain foods was associated with a reduced likelihood of major depressive disorder, dysthymia and anxiety disorders.
• Recommendations and encouragement to follow national guidelines for dietary and exercise practices should be a part of care for all people with depression.

• Improvements in diet quality were mirrored by improvements in mental health, while reductions in diet quality were associated with declining psychological functioning over the follow up period.
• Another study by Oddy et al. identified relationships between measures of diet quality and behavioral problems in adolescents that were independent of family structure and functioning.
• The intake of core nutrient-dense food groups, fruits and vegetables, yielded almost identical results when compiled as a composite variable in sensitivity analyses, lending weight to the veracity of our measure of healthy diets.
• Population surveys demonstrate a substantial increase in overweight and obesity among children and adolescents over recent decades. Obesity does not necessarily indicate nutritional repletion, as high-energy foods typically have poor nutrient value.
• Intervention studies are now urgently required to test the effectiveness of preventing the common mental disorders through dietary modification.