Nutrition and Mental Health: What a Dietitian Wants You to Know
You already know the advice. Eat more vegetables. Cut back on the takeaway. Drink more water. You have heard it so many times it has stopped meaning anything.
What you may not have heard is that the food on your plate is doing something to your mood, your energy and your capacity to cope, and that the connection is far more direct than most of us were taught.
On this episode of Finding Sanctuary, hosts Eddie Reaiche and Natalie Moujalli sit down with Claudia Jahjah, an Accredited Practising Dietitian with twenty years in private practice and a clinic at Westmead. What follows is one of the least preachy conversations about food you will hear.
Key Takeaways
- Nutrition does not cause or cure mental illness, but it has a real and measurable impact on how you feel day to day.
- Iron deficiency often shows up as brain fog, irritability and low mood long before anyone thinks to check for it.
- Red meat alone will not fix low iron. You need vitamin C alongside it for proper absorption.
- Emotional eating is a psychological pattern, not a willpower problem. You cannot out train it or out diet it.
- The Mediterranean diet still tops the evidence for mental wellbeing, largely through its effect on the gut brain axis.
- Small swaps beat restriction every time. Nourish your body rather than punishing it.
Start With the Three Simple Things
Eddie is a psychologist. Before he goes anywhere near the deeper psychological work with a client, he checks three things.
Every time I see a client, the three things that the simplest to fix before we go into anything psychological, is how their sleep is, how much exercise they have and what is their nutrition level like.
It is a useful order of operations for anyone. If you are exhausted, wired and running on coffee until two in the afternoon, the answer to why you feel terrible may not be complicated. It may just be unaddressed.
Why Your Household Ended Up Here
Claudia is careful not to blame anybody for the way modern families eat. She sees the reason clearly enough in her clinic every week.
Both parents are working. The children have tutoring, sport and everything else that lands after school. There is almost no time left for food preparation. So the household takes a shortcut, and the shortcuts available now are frictionless in a way they never used to be.
Even having mobile phone technology, we with our apps, Uber doordash, it just makes it too easy to actually think, I don’t have time to cook dinner.
The trouble is not that one takeaway meal will hurt you. It is that ultra processed food crowds out the good quality protein, the vegetables and the salads that carry the nutrients you actually need. Over time that shows up as iron deficiency, as B12 deficiency, and as a general flatness that is easy to blame on everything except lunch.
What You Are Teaching Your Children
Eddie asks the question most parents are quietly afraid of. Are we building this pattern into the next generation?
Claudia’s answer is yes, and the mechanism is worth understanding. Children of the seventies grew up when takeaway was a luxury and a family outing. They came home to a prepared meal. Those children are the parents now, and they are time poor, so their own children are learning that dinner arrives in a bag.
There is a second inheritance too, and it runs in the opposite direction. Many of us were raised under a rule that you did not leave the table until your plate was empty, usually enforced by a mother or a Taita who had known what going without felt like.
There’s a big disconnection with do I stop when I’m feeling full or do I meant to finish my food off the plate before my mum or Taita gets angry with me.
Put a generous takeaway portion in front of someone raised on that rule and the outcome is fairly predictable.
What the Evidence Actually Says
The research on food and mental health is still evolving, but one finding keeps holding up, and it will not surprise anyone with a Lebanese grandmother.
The Mediterranean diet performs consistently well. Not the version most of us eat now, but the real one. Good fats and oils, plenty of pulses, fish two or three times a week, and a great deal more fruit and vegetables than most Australian households manage.
The days when our parents used to feed us mjadra and chickpeas, we shouldn’t be going, I don’t want to eat this again. They actually were very good for you.
The reason appears to sit in your gut. Your digestive system hosts an enormous population of microorganisms, and those microorganisms influence the gut brain axis. Feed them fibre, healthy fats and variety and the downstream effect on mood is real.
Claudia is precise about the limits of this, and it is worth quoting her exactly, because a great deal of nonsense gets written in this space.
There’s no cure or causation from diet to mental health, but it definitely has an impact in improving it.
Iron, and Why Women Notice It First
If you take one practical thing from this episode, make it this one.
Your body cannot manufacture iron. It has to come from what you eat. Women lose iron through menstruation, growing bodies need more of it, and athletes need more again. When levels drop, the symptoms are not subtle, but they are easy to misread.
Iron deficiency can present as the usual symptoms of tiredness, exhaustion, but brain fog, depression has been noted and irritability.
Here is the part most people get wrong. Eating more red meat is not enough on its own. Without adequate vitamin C from fruit and vegetables, your body cannot absorb the iron properly. Variety is not a nice extra. It is the mechanism.
When Food Is Doing a Different Job
Somewhere in the conversation, Natalie stops asking questions and says something that reframes the whole episode. She is a practising psychologist, and she has struggled with her relationship with food her entire life.
I always thought, okay, a simple diet will fix it, or an exercise regime will fix it. And I really only came to the conclusion last few years that it’s actually a psychological approach. It’s not physical. You can’t out train it. You can’t out eat it. Like it’s a frame of mind.
Claudia sees both sides of this in her clinic. Some clients with depression lose their appetite entirely and need support simply to eat regularly. Others use food to cope, to unwind, to soothe, and then carry the guilt afterwards, which feeds the next round.
Her approach starts earlier in the day than you might expect. Did you eat breakfast? Did you skip lunch? Were you living on coffee all morning? By the time nine at night arrives and the chocolate is calling, the honest question is whether you are hungry at all, or whether this is the only twenty minutes today that has belonged to you.
Swap, Do Not Punish
What Claudia never does, at any point in this conversation, is shame anybody. Natalie confesses to feeding her children sushi and calling it healthy. Claudia offers a better sushi choice instead of a lecture. Eddie raises the fast food question and she gives an answer no one expects from a dietitian.
Not all choices at McDonald’s are terrible. There’s always better choices that you can make when you do go to those fast food convenience places.
The same principle runs through her advice on evening snacking. Chocolate dipped strawberries with dark chocolate. Homemade date and nut balls with a cup of tea. Frozen yoghurt or a low fat custard with fruit salad.
Nourish your body with a gentle swap.
Food Is a Love Language
Natalie raises the cultural dimension, and this is where the conversation stops being clinical altogether. In a migrant household, food is never only food. There are rules about which drink you offer a guest first. There is food when we celebrate and food when we mourn.
Food is always our love language. It will be there, it’s never to leave, I don’t think ever.
Natalie admits she over caters constantly, because her worst fear is somebody sitting at her table thinking there is not enough for them. Claudia does not suggest she stop. She suggests sending people home with a container.
Share the food, share the love.
That is the tone of the entire episode. Nothing about your culture needs fixing. Nothing about your household needs to be perfect. And if you are wondering whether hers is, she answers that too.
If anyone thinks it’s perfect in a dietitian household, think again. We’ve got great knowledge. Putting it into practice takes a lot of work.
Start With One Thing
Claudia’s closing advice is deliberately unglamorous. Three meals a day. Lean protein, plenty of fruit and vegetables, whole grains, good fats and oils. Take a step back and go back to basics.
If you are not sure where to begin, a dietitian is a reasonable first phone call. If the pattern you are noticing is emotional rather than practical, a psychologist is the better one. Often the answer involves both, and there is no failure in that.
Listen to the Full Conversation
This episode covers considerably more than we have been able to fit here, including the generational shift in portion sizes, the truth about sushi, and the moment a dietitian and a psychologist both admit they are works in progress.
Find the full episode of Finding Sanctuary wherever you get your podcasts, and explore more of what we do at hshl.org.au.
If this conversation raised something difficult for you, please reach out. Lifeline is available on 13 11 14.