In Healing the Modern Brain: Nine Tenets to Build Mental Fitness and Revitalize Your Mind, Drew Ramsey, MD, psychiatrist, author and a leading voice in Nutritional Psychiatry and integrative mental health,  shines a much-needed light on the importance of self-awareness, nutrition, movement, sleep, connection, grounding, engagement, unburdening, and purpose. These core nine tenets work together to promote neuroplasticity, facilitate neurogenesis, reduce inflammation, and foster a healthy microbiome, ultimately helping individuals protect their brains and safeguard their mental health from the challenges of today’s world.  

Dr. Ramsey argues that we’ve become over-reliant on pharmaceuticals for treating mental health issues and that we underestimate the power of nutrition and lifestyle choices to build our Mental Fitness.  Mental Fitness is a radical and personal form of self-care that involves adopting a series of small lifestyle changes to enhance mental health and well-being. This empowering approach to living takes into consideration the mismatch between our modern world and what our brains need to be healthy, and explains why we need to take action to protect our mental health.

Dr. Ramsey provides direct, actionable techniques to improve brain function and emotional health. Readers will learn how to make educated decisions that can lead to significant improvements in their mental fitness, regardless of whether one has a specific mental health diagnosis. Healing the Modern Brain combines the latest scientific research with compelling patient encounters from Dr. Ramsey’s clinical practice to show us how we can put ourselves on the road to optimal mental health and better care for our miraculous, modern brains.

BIOS

DREW RAMSEY, MD is a board-certified psychiatrist, author, and leading voice in Nutritional Psychiatry and integrative mental health. He is a Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association and the founder of the Brain Food Clinic and Spruce Mental Health. For twenty years, he served as an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Columbia University, where he taught and supervised psychotherapy and nutritional psychiatry.

Dr. Ramsey has authored five books, including Healing the Modern Brain and three e-courses. He is a dynamic speaker, podcast host and educator who has delivered three TEDx talks and his work has been featured by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Today Show, NPR and other notable outlets. He lives in Jackson, WY with his wife and family. 

Arpana Church, PhD, Associate Professor and Co-Director, Goodman Luskin Microbiome Center will join Dr. Ramsey in discussion . Dr. Church is also Director, Neuroimaging Core; Director, Obesity, Metabolic Disorders, and Eating Behaviors Research Program, Department of Medicine; Vatche and Tamar Manoukian Division of Digestive Diseases David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.

An accomplished investigator in medical research focusing on the brain, gut, and microbiome, Dr. Church has a PhD degree in psychology after completing an APA accredited clinical internship at Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical Center. Her current research focuses on the interactions between environmental and biological factors in shaping brain-gut microbiome signatures associated with stress-based diseases such as obesity. Broadly defined, this ground-breaking research aims to integrate two systems (the brain and the gut) in order to better understand the underlying mechanisms associated with obesity and altered consumption behaviors. This focus on obesity is key to a deeper understanding of the risk factors for many chronic diseases, and ones that disproportionately affect ethnic minorities and women. Backed by the National Instituted for Health (NIH), Dr. Gupta’s goal is to develop a comprehensive model that provides a powerful biomarker that will increase diagnostics around obesity in an effort to improve overall health outcomes.

Building on the success of her lab in the area of adversity and obesity, Dr. Gupta recently received two major grants from NIMHD and NIA (NIH) on investigating the brain-gut microbiome interactions associated with obesity. She has also received several industry funded grants as the Principal Investigator in addition to publishing over one hundred peer-reviewed articles, which have been featured in mainstream media outlets such as the Today Show, NBC, PBS, NPR, WSJ, Science, and WebMD. Additionally, she is featured in a Netflix documentary “Hack your Health: Secrets of the Gut”.