Kaayla T. Daniel PhD, CCN, The Naughty Nutritionist®, author of Nourishing Broth, was interviewed on the Anxiety Summit by host of the Anxiety Summit, Trudy Scott, Food Mood Expert and Nutritionist, author of The Antianxiety Food Solution.
Real Food for Anxiety: Butter, Broth and Beyond
- Butter and the “fats of life”
- How vegetarian diets can contribute to anxiety and other mental health disorders
- Why soy is NOT a health food and why it can contribute to anxiety, ADHD and other mental health challenges
- Paleo diet and “nose to tail eating”
- Broths help to cure melancholy/depression and help us deal with stress
- A simple broth recipe
- The component in broth that helps calm the mind and quell anxiety
- How broths heal the gut and how this heals our brains
We started with a discussion about the harmful effects of soy:
What I would say for sure is that soy has a disastrous effect on gut health. We all know now that the gut and the brain are very, very connected.
The component in the soy bean that has such a terrible effect on the gut is the trypsin inhibitor or some people would call it protease inhibitors. Trypsin or protease are the enzymes we need to digest protein properly. If we’re inhibiting that process, the fact that soy beans are high in protein is a problem because we’re inhibiting the ability to digest that protein very well. You end up with a lot of digestive distress.
Then the inability to digest the protein and the stress on the pancreas can lead to what we often see with people is pancreatitis.
That’s where you start seeing some of the anxiety problems, for example, because chronic pancreatitis is a long-term progressive inflammatory disease, and it can cause distress including anxiety
We talked about one of my favorite replacements for soy-based energy bars: pemmican. I just call pemmican the energy bar of the twenty first century. It’s just a wonderful snack to have. It’s healthy. It has good fats, and it sustains you. You can purchase pemmican from US Wellness Meats.
Then we talked about broths and glycine:
there’s a lot of different definitions of broth and stock, but basically we’re taking animal bones, and they’re going to come complete with cartilage and some skin. We’re going to make a broth with that. The main ingredients would be those bones plus a good quality water and a little bit of apple cider vinegar or a different kind of vinegar. Actually, any kind of vinegar or perhaps a wine that will help pull the collagen or the gelatin out of the bones and cartilage as well as some of the minerals.
We’re going to have a very, very delicious and rich broth. From that, we can go and make soups and stews. There’s also ways we can do things like start from the beginning with, say, lamb skanks and vegetables and make that into a dish. The point is we’re pulling all the minerals and the cartilage and the marrow from the bones into our diet in terms of a delicious broth, soup, or stew.
we have some science behind it quelling the stress and anxiety too. One of the factors would be there’s some evidence that broth will help us sleep. Now, that’s pretty interesting because broth is actually completely devoid of tryptophan and we think we need tryptophan to sleep well. We do, but broth does contain glycine and glutamine and that can help us sleep
I mentioned that I had found a large amount of research looking at a specific antibiotic called Cycloserine
it’s actually an antibiotic that is used for tuberculosis and is sold under the brand name Seromycin. They discovered that this antibiotic can actually penetrate that central nervous system via the blood brain barrier and is effective for anxiety, social anxiety, phobia, and fear of public speaking. It affects the glycine bonding sites. Wow, if we’ve got this drug that will affect the glycine binding sites, why not just incorporate more glycine into our diets in the way of beautiful broths.
Here is one of the 2015 papers: D-cycloserine augmentation of cognitive behavioral therapy for anxiety disorders: an update.
And an older one: Dose-related anxiogenic effect of glycine in the elevated plus maze and in electrodermal activity.
Here are Kaayla’s books:
The Whole Soy Story: The Dark Side of America’s Favorite Health Food
Nourishing Broth: An Old-Fashioned Remedy for the Modern World
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