Fuel Your Brain with the Right Foods

What does food have to do with brain health? Everything.

Psychiatrists ask a lot of specific questions to evaluate patients, but they never ask their patients what they eat.

As funny as it sounds, we don’t talk about food in medicine and mental health, even though we talk about the compounds in food — omega-3 fats, b-vitamins, magnesium — a lot. Things really shifted for Dr. Drew Ramsey when he realized food presented an incredible opportunity for patient empowerment and added a delicious method in his clinical toolbox, along with psychotherapy, medications, and other lifestyle interventions such as exercise, to help people.

In Eat Complete: The 21 Nutrients That Fuel Brainpower, Boost Weight Loss, and Transform Your Health, leading psychiatrist Drew Ramsey, MD, explores the important connection between food and brain health—and the profound impact this has on our overall wellness.

Your brain determines if you gain or lose weight, if you’re feeling energetic or fatigued, if you’re upbeat or depressed; it also burns more of the food you eat than any other organ. This essential guide and cookbook teaches you how to fuel your brain and body properly, with the nutrients that are crucial to a healthy and happy life.

Drawing upon cutting-edge scientific research, Dr. Ramsey identifies the twenty-one nutrients most important to brain health and overall well-being. And with one hundred simple, mouth-watering recipes, he demonstrates how to easily incorporate these frequently missed nutrients into everyday meal plans.

Each recipe in Eat Complete is engineered for optimal nourishment to keep your brain properly fueled. Start your day with Orange-Pecan Waffles, rich in the vitamin E that protects brain fat; serve up a dinner of Garlic Butter Shrimp over Spiralized Zucchini to power the growth of new brain cells with high levels of zinc and magnesium; and indulge in Chocolate-Spiced Truffles to help fight age-related memory decline with plant-based nutrients called flavanols.

It became part of Dr. Ramsey’s mission to understand how food affects mood, and to bring that information to physicians and patients alike. Because of this, he’s spent a lot of his medical career as a psychiatrist focused on food and learning how to prescribe it. Using food in his practice allows him to help patients decrease their risk of brain illnesses, such as depression and dementia, while also helping them feel better physically.

Ramsey aims to change clean eating from something that is confusing and complicated to delicious, simple and economical. Specifically, he strives to make people excited about the foods they’re choosing and eating by talking to his patients about their food, where they shop and who they are sharing their meals with. This is one of the most fun parts of his job, Ramsey says.

“That’s really the goal of Eat Complete – to back that up with the science of what our body needs and translate it to food,” he says.

Here are 3 top tips to Eat Complete:

1. Nutrient Density: Focus on eating foods that include the highest concentration of nutrients. This way every calorie is packed with nutrients and you are eating efficiently.

2. Culinary Flexibility: Find ways to be versatile with the foods you’re eating. Changing up the use can prevent boredom and can give a nutrient boost to a variety of meals. One ingredient could be used in a soup as well as in a breakfast meal, salad, smoothie, snack, or drink.

3. Local Access: Find places around your community that sell local, seasonal food. Farmers’ markets are an ideal place to buy fresh, in season, local, and nutrient dense ingredients.

Eat Complete shows you what your body needs and why. A practical and appetizing guide, this cookbook provides a tasty path to transforming your brain, your health—and, ultimately, your life.