Transforming Health Through Nutrition, Empathy, and Research

Two psilocybin trials in eating disorders landed this year, and my feed has been full of the headline. The papers are more interesting than the headline.

The anorexia trial found large improvements in eating disorder symptoms at six months and sustained motivation to change at twelve — alongside wide variation between participants, with some holding gains and some not. It also found no statistical difference between the 1mg and 25mg doses, though the fixed-order design couldn’t test that cleanly. Either way, the psilocybin can’t be separated from the ~50 hours of therapy around it. The binge eating trial had five participants and no planned statistics.

Both trials have industry ties worth naming: the anorexia study used COMPASS Pathways’ COMP360 formulation with funding from Valor Equity Partners; the binge eating study was funded by Tryp Therapeutics.

What I keep coming back to is retention: 95%, in people sick for over a decade who hadn’t achieved remission with conventional care. Something made treatment reachable for people treatment had stopped reaching. Whether that something is the molecule, the container, or both is an open question — and an exciting one.

Not medical advice. These were tightly screened patients under psychiatric supervision, not a protocol to pursue independently.

[1] Douglass HM, et al. Br J Psychiatry. 2026. doi:10.1192/bjp.2026.10687 [2] Dallery J, et al. J Eat Disord. 2026;14:41. doi:10.1186/s40337-025-01508-3 [3] Peck SK, et al. Nat Med. 2023;29(8):1947-53. doi:10.1038/s41591-023-02455-9

Purple isn’t real.

Not in the physics sense. Violet sits on the visible spectrum. Purple doesn’t — there’s no wavelength for it anywhere.

Your brain makes it. Long-wave and short-wave cones fire at the same time, with nothing in between, and the mind invents a color to hold both. Red and blue at once. It refuses to choose.

I’ve been chasing that color my whole life without quite knowing why.

Early 2000s, I built a name for myself in the hip-hop scene selling purple kush. Master Kush, back then. I was a kid obsessed with plants — what they did, how they grew, why a few of them turned that impossible color.

Then came the part I don’t usually lead with. Recovery. Learning to eat differently — not perfectly, differently. The plate stopped being a test I could pass or fail.

Twenty years later I have a PhD and I study anthocyanins, the pigments that make blackberries black and radicchio bleed at the edges.

Here’s the part that gets me: they’re barely absorbed. Most of what you swallow never leaves the small intestine. It travels to the colon, where your microbiota take it apart into phenolic acids — and those metabolites appear to do much of the work.

The purple doesn’t act on you. It gets translated. By trillions of organisms that have been with you longer than any of your ideas about yourself.

Which is why Wise Mind is purple. Emotion and reason meeting. Not a compromise — a convergence.

I always grab something purple at the store. Not a rule. A game. The kid with the plants never really left.

Which of these are actually in your kitchen? And does purple mean anything to you — a person, a place, a season of your life?

Tell me below. I read all of them.

#nutritionalpsychology #gutbrainaxis #anthocyanins #polyphenols #wisemindnutrition

I’m hard on the systems that fail people. Soft on the people.

Two documents landed this year that almost nobody read together.

One is a book called Eating Behind Bars, by Leslie Soble, Alex Busansky and Dr. Aishatu Yusuf at Impact Justice. It just won a James Beard Award. It documents what the carceral system actually puts on a tray: ultra-processed food chosen for shelf life, eaten in silence, on a clock, sometimes made deliberately worse as discipline. One formerly incarcerated advocate calls it gastronomic cruelty.

The other is a scoping review from MAPS called “Relocating the Root,” which launched their project on psychedelics for system-impacted people. Its boldest claim is that our diagnostic frameworks, the DSM-5 included, were never built for people harmed by structural violence, and can end up pathologizing a normal response to an abnormal system.

I’ve spent my career arguing that eating behavior is not the root of the problem. It’s the smoke.

Here’s what happens when you put these two documents next to each other. Take a person. Disinvest in their childhood. Prosecute them under drug laws written to be enforced selectively. Feed them ultra-processed food for a decade in a room where eating is a humiliation ritual. Release them inflamed, dysregulated, and uninsured.
Then hand them a diagnostic manual and ask what’s wrong with them.

The trauma and the tray are not two stories. They’re one story, told through two organ systems. And no psychedelic experience, however profound, will outrun a nervous system that’s being inflamed three times a day.

I’m not writing this from despair. Impact Justice has fresh produce moving into 31 California prisons. South Carolina is letting incarcerated women grow their own food. MAPS is doing the rarer thing and asking formerly incarcerated people what they need before designing the treatment.

That’s what real reform looks like. Co-created, not delivered.

Comment if this reframed something for you.

📚 Sources on the last slide.

Two clinicians can look at the same person and give opposite advice about food. One says addiction. One says restriction. For years I watched people get caught in the middle of that fight, and I don’t think either camp had the full picture.

So I spent my career building one that does. It’s now a peer-reviewed theory, and on July 17th at 12 pm PT I’m breaking it down in a free webinar. No jargon wall. Just the framework that finally makes room for the people who never fit neatly into a box, and a look at what’s really driving these patterns, upstream, where almost nobody’s looking.

Comment “WEBINAR” and I’ll send you the link. 🌱

#foodaddiction #nutritionalpsychiatry #functionalmedicine

I used to wonder what it would be like when I was all grown up. When our friends had kids and all the little ones could play together. I used to wonder if I could pull it off. When I fell in love with @miracleworkher I knew the vision was coming to fruition. I knew we were going to raise some angels 😇

We’ve got some lifelong friends and the kids are growing up together. We celebrated Davina’s 4th birthday camping in the paradise of SoCal 🌴

Nature is the medicine. There’s something about cooking outside that was just meant to be. There’s something about raising kids that was just meant to be. Love life ❤️

🌱 #camping

After 12 years of work, it’s here 🎉

Today I’m sharing something that represents more than a decade of work, and more than a decade of papers circling the same question.

“A Unified Theory of Restrictive and Addictive Eating” is now published, open access, in the Journal of Eating Disorders.

For years, two camps have talked past each other. One sees dietary restraint as the engine of loss-of-control eating. The other sees the modern food environment and chronic stress as the driver of addiction-like consumption. Patients living in the gray area between them have too often been handed conflicting advice and have fallen through the cracks.

This paper proposes a life course model that holds both truths at once. Two developmental pathways, a restrictive one and an addictive one, that often begin in the same place (generational trauma and adverse childhood experiences), diverge along different neurodevelopmental lines, and can converge or even trade places across a lifetime. It’s a framework for treating the whole person rather than forcing them into a single philosophy.

If you’ve ever been told your eating problem was one thing when it always felt like two, this is for you.

I won’t pretend this was easy. I’ve poured myself into this question for a long time, and for the first time, it feels like the pieces actually fit together into something that makes sense, and that I hope is genuinely useful in the clinic.

To everyone who has been rooting for me along the way, mentors, collaborators, colleagues, and the patients who taught me what the textbooks couldn’t: thank you. This is yours too.

Comment “Unified Theory” for a link to the full article.

IFM AIC 2026 in San Diego was truly incredible 🙌🏼

Picture hundreds of functional practitioners, ages 25 to 80, dancing together under a full moon, celebrating the next wave of changing patients’ lives. Had a blast on the dance floor with @drluigivilchis and @doctor.funmed — and don’t forget the dancing during the presentations!

One unexpected joy was meeting and chatting with Jeffrey Bland, PhD — the founder of functional medicine himself. Thanks for leading the way @drjeffreybland. Excited to see @instituteforfxmed integrate more mental health, and to share the content made with @zoniahealth.

I presented my Unified Theory of Restrictive and Addictive Eating and led a roundtable on disordered eating and addiction. I also joined a panel on research in private practice — sharing what it took to collect data from 300 patients in 2021–2022, publish three papers, and navigate peer review and plenty of rejection 👨🏻‍💻

Two talks captured exactly why @fxmedmentalhealth exists:

Dr. William Clearfield (“The Endocrinology of Psychiatric Dysfunction”) argued that treatment-resistant depression, anxiety, and brain fog are often downstream of an overlooked trio: neuroinflammation, a dysregulated stress axis, and depleted neurosteroids. A “normal” TSH and serotonin-only treatment can miss the real drivers. Sometimes you’re not treatment-resistant — you’re undertested.

Dr. Robert Hedaya (“The Awakened Clinician”) tackled AI in medicine. AI is a brilliant pattern-matcher, but it’s built to agree with you — and that pull toward easy confirmation is seductive. The safeguard isn’t the software; it’s a conscious clinician who leads the thinking and cross-checks every conclusion. That’s how we use powerful tools to interpret complex labs without outsourcing judgment about your care.
The thread through both: complex mental health deserves real investigation and a real clinician behind it.

The real highlight? Sitting on a bench in Seaport Village, watching a man drop to his knee and propose. I got choked up — reminded how lucky I am to have found the best love with @miracleworkher, and how excited I am to grow our family with a third girl on the way 🥰

With love, DW

53% of Americans say their neighbors have bad morals. In 25 countries surveyed, we are the only one where that’s the majority view.

Every other country surveyed — Indonesia, Nigeria, Turkey, India included — had a majority who said their fellow citizens were morally good. We came out the other way. By a comfortable margin.

The interesting layer is generational. 57% of adults under 40 say other Americans are morally bad, compared with 50% of older adults. The pattern holds even after controlling for political party. Something else is going on with the under-40 cohort that the data hasn’t yet explained.

Here’s the part that matters clinically: the body doesn’t process abstract social distrust differently from physical threat. Chronic perceived danger drives sustained cortisol elevation, suppresses vagal tone, and pushes inflammatory markers upward. The literature has a name for the accumulated cost — allostatic load. Holt-Lunstad’s meta-analyses on social connection pegged the mortality effect at roughly the equivalent of smoking fifteen cigarettes a day.

You can’t fix the national mood. But the biology is yours. It’s measurable. And it responds to intervention.

The work is personal.

#FunctionalMedicine #AllostaticLoad #NervousSystemRegulation