Transforming Health Through Nutrition, Empathy, and Research

Happy birthday @miracleworkher my truest love. Your love has been such a tender teacher. I enjoy “doing life” with you we’ve made such a good beginning ❤️

Parenting is everything we dreamed it would be. You are a strong feminine force and you lift me up everyday. Can’t wait to continue to grow our family 🥰

#couples #consciousparenting

GABA is the brain’s brake pedal, the signal that quiets an overexcited nervous system. A 2025 review pulled together nine studies asking how much of it the gut makes. The answer: more than most of us were taught. Several familiar bacteria (Lactobacillus, Bifidobacterium, Lactococcus) carry the enzyme that turns glutamate into GABA, and the review estimates gut microbes may supply up to 30 percent of what’s in circulation.

How does something made in your intestines reach your head? The proposed routes: the vagus nerve, transporters in the gut wall, and butyrate signaling. Which is part of why gut trouble so often shows up as mood trouble or sleep trouble, and why “it’s all in your head” was never quite the right sentence.

The nuance worth holding: swallowed GABA struggles to reach the brain. Feeding the microbes that make it uses a route the body already has. Same molecule, different doorway.

And if you arrived with a number: peripheral GABA tracks the body, not the synapse. Levels swing with sleep, stress, and diet. There’s no reference range for healthy adults yet, so nobody can honestly tell you whether yours is high or low. That’s a limit of the test, not a verdict on you.

Should you take GABA supplements? The jury is still out... and I’d rather say that than sell you a bottle.

What the number does say is that the gut is not a side character in mental health. If you’re curious about your own biomarkers, the testing isn’t perfect, but it’s worth exploring with someone who’ll tell you what it can and can’t show.

Source: Rajamohamed et al., Annals of Neurosciences 2025

#gaba

Lithium was a soft drink ingredient twenty years before it was a psychiatric drug.

7UP launched in 1929 with lithium citrate in the bottle. The FDA pulled it from sodas in 1948 after harms at high doses. Then in 1949 John Cade reported it calmed acute mania, and lithium became psychiatry’s gold-standard mood stabilizer. Somewhere in those two decades the element and the drug fused into one word, and the word got scary.

What the stigma skipped over: lithium is a trace mineral in granite, soil, and drinking water. In population studies, regions with more of it in the water tend to report lower rates of dementia and suicide. Association, not proof, but it keeps showing up.

The mechanism papers point the same direction. Lithium quiets GSK-3, an enzyme that runs hot under stress and inflammation, and it supports BDNF, the growth signal neurons use to adapt and repair. Much of that shows up at doses far below prescription levels.

What we don’t have is the trial. A 2026 qualitative study out of London asked 14 adults taking lithium supplements what they noticed: steadier mood, less anxiety, sharper focus and memory. Nearly all of them started out wary. Self-report, no control group, a starting point rather than a verdict (inquiring researchers want to know)

The fine print is real. Lithium leaves through the kidneys, so kidney disease changes the math. Thyroid conditions and pregnancy call for caution. Certain diuretics, blood pressure drugs, and anti-inflammatories can raise lithium levels. And supplement labels vary because the category is loosely regulated.

Nutritional lithium is not a treatment for bipolar disorder and not a substitute for a medication that’s working. It’s a conversation for a clinician who knows your history...

Hard on structures. Soft on people.

Sources: Bloomfield et al., Ther Adv Psychopharmacol 2026; Hamstra et al., Curr Neuropharmacol 2023; Greenblatt, Nutritional Lithium 2016

Have you ever kept reaching for something you don’t even enjoy anymore?

That gap has a name. In neuroscience it’s called incentive sensitization: with repeated engagement, wanting intensifies while liking stays flat or fades. You end up chasing harder for something that delivers less.

Not weakness. Neuroadaptation.

I know this one from both sides. I got sober before I ever studied neuroscience, and the wanting/liking split was the first piece of science that described my experience instead of judging it. A new systematic review in the International Journal of Eating Disorders found heightened reward-related wanting across binge eating and harmful drinking, alone and combined. Not two separate problems... overlapping architecture.

And here’s why the science matters in daily life: you can’t negotiate with a system you can’t name. Once wanting, liking, and learning become three separate processes instead of one blur, the mind stops feeling like weather and starts feeling like terrain.

Swipe through, then tell me in the comments: what did your brain keep wanting after you stopped liking it?

I read every one.

A lot of people I went to school with have left the nutrition field.

I would say I’ve left too, but the truth is, I never really joined in the first place.

Here’s what I mean. The field has an official name for what dietitians are supposed to deliver: Medical Nutrition Therapy. A diet prescribed to a diagnosis. It’s what insurance reimburses, and it’s what I was trained to provide (once upon a time in dietitian school).

I’ve never done it. Not even once.

Not because it’s wrong. In a hospital, it’s real clinical work. But the hospital is not the real world, and the real world is where I’ve spent the last fourteen years: one person, one conversation at a time.

What I do is called consultation. It starts with a broader question. Not “what should you eat,” but “what’s actually going on?” Sometimes that leads to coaching. Sometimes labs and a personalized roadmap. Sometimes we just end up talking... and that turns out to be the work 🌱

When I decided to “play the middle” in the eating disorders vs. food addiction debate, I lost some friends because they couldn’t ascertain which “side” I was on. Holding the tension and complexity of both sides of an argument is not for the weak. I have decided to approach the psychedelics vs. abstinence-based recovery debate in a similar way. I will not “pick a side” but will continue to unpack and explore multiple perspectives.

Let’s start with the research…

A 2026 systematic review pulled together six studies and 966 clinicians on psychedelic-assisted therapy. The headline finding is that the field is warmer than the culture assumes — 60 to 63% saw promise for substance use disorder, and support for more research ran past 80%.

Then the temperature drops the moment you change the diagnosis. Psychiatry residents endorsed this work for psychiatric disorders at 83.5%. For addiction, 56%.

Same clinicians. Same molecule. Different beliefs about what addiction is. Depression gets a novel mechanism. Addiction gets a moral debate.

But here’s the part that stayed with me. Look at who was surveyed: psychiatrists, psychologists, psychoanalysts. Now look at who wasn’t — the counselors and residential staff delivering most of the actual care in this country. The review names its own blind spot: the workforce.

That absence matters, because the objection from that workforce is usually misheard. When a counselor pushes back on this, the field hears rigidity. What she may actually be saying is simpler: my client isn’t stable enough yet. And holding that tension takes a settled nervous system, and maybe the staff themselves are not there yet.

Early recovery is also a physiologically depleted state. That’s mechanism, not evidence — no trial has tested whether correcting it changes outcomes. But psychedelic trials optimize the room, the music, the therapist. Almost none ask what the brain is made of when it walks in. And what the room is made of when it walks through.

If you work in this field: what would you want measured in a research setting?

van Dalen et al., Journal of Psychoactive Drugs (2026).

When I earned a PhD from UCLA, I knew it came with great responsibility. This is me living up to my promise…

Last week I posted the trials. This week, the people who were in them.

Eight qualitative studies, pooled. Five of patients, three of providers. Across all of them, both groups described the same two things: something opened, and something needed guarding.

Only the first half tends to make the headline.

Here’s what I keep coming back to. These medicines usually arrive wrapped in a container — a ritual, a set of practices — and that container was designed with a different kind of nervous system in mind. For someone with an eating disorder, parts of it can look uncomfortably like the illness itself. A few people in these studies said they used that resemblance as cover.

For most of them, the reframe held. The same act, in a different room, meant something different. For some, it didn’t.

That’s not an argument against this work. It’s an argument about who is holding the room.
What the paper actually asks for isn’t more enthusiasm. It’s conditions. Facilitators trained in both psychedelic work and eating disorder treatment. Preparation that names in advance what might surface. An agreement, made ahead of time, about what happens if anxiety spikes. For a nervous system organized around control, the plan is part of the medicine — before the medicine is.

And worth saying plainly: access is still mostly limited to low-weight anorexia trials.

If you have lived this — what would you have wanted asked before anyone said yes?

Morris et al., BMC Medicine (2026).

Nature has always been the medicine and always will be the medicine. Plants have always been the medicine. In my family, we believe in the healing power of food. It’s difficult nowadays to raise conscious eaters. Getting kids to eat vegetables is a flex 💪

Wifey is pregnant and we have a third girl on the way. We’re doubling down on the healing path that starts in farms and gardens.

Once you eat cherry tomatoes that taste like candy there is no looking back. When your kids ask for cucumbers, priorities shift.

This is important work 🌱

#urbanfarming #biodynamicfarming