Author: Christina Bruni

Christina Bruni is the author of the new book Working Assets: A Career Guide for Peers. She contributed a chapter "Recovery is Within Reach" to Benessere Psicologico: Contemporary Thought on Italian American Mental Health.

Georgia Ede MD Nutrition Advice

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Georgia Ede MD Nutrition Advice

It’s not as simple as choosing from the food items Dr. Ramsey lists and calling it a day. With Dr.
Ede’s recommendations you need to calculate your personal macronutrient amounts. Then adhere
to eating only certain foods in certain ways.

On the Keto Diet you are allowed to have a specific amount of carbohydrates like starting at 20
grams a day. Dr. Ede recommends ketone monitoring as part of this diet.

Dr. Ede has reported that patients who change their diet this way have better mental health. It’s best to buy her book or check it out of the library. There are specific rules as to what to eat
how much and how to eat (cooked versus raw).

You start out with a Quiet Paleo diet and transfer to the Keto diet.

Customize carbohydrates:
Carbohydrates on Quiet Keto come from fruits and vegetables.

Quiet Keto Food List:
Meat, seafood, poultry, and eggs.
Non-starchy Vegetables:
Lettuces like iceberg, romaine, Bibb, Boston, green leaf, red leaf, oak leaf, Batavia, and
butterhead.

Fruits:
Avocado, olives, squashes: zucchini, yellow squash, summer squash, pumpkin, and spaghetti
squash, strawberries, blackberries, raspberries, lemons, and limes
Crucifers cooked only and limited to one serving per day as in:
Arugula, bok choy, broccoli,, broccolini, broccoli rabe, Brussels sprouts, all kinds of cabbage,
cauliflower, collard greens, kale mustard greens, radish, Swiss chard, turnip, watercress.

This ends my review of the Dueling Doctors and Their Diets.


Drew Ramsey MD Nutrition Advice

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Like I wrote before when I quoted the NYC clothing store SYMS TV commercial: “An educated consumer is our best customer.”

In keeping with this I would like to educate followers about the nutrition advice of the Dueling Doctors and their Diets. Georgia Ede MD will follow. First up Drew Ramsey MD.

Dr. Ramsey nixes loading up on super sizes of the latest super food touted. Instead eat a balanced variety of food. To wit: “Eat what you enjoy.”

Per Dr. Ramsey:

“We are trained, from an early age, to eat to be skinny instead of healthy.”

He quotes Felice Jacka, a researcher at Australia’s Food & Mood Centre: “We need to get away from this idea that nutrition is about body size.”

In his book Dr. Ramsey refers to clinical trials that verify the Mediterranean Diet improves mental health.

I say forget trying to memorize how much RDA of vitamins and nutrients we need and what food provides these. Simply eat balanced food items from the list below every day and that should cover getting enough nutritional value. That is my $100 dollar holler.

Highlights of Dr. Ramsey’s review of required foods:

Brussels sprouts (I eat them often!), oranges, leafy greens, lentils.

Pumpkin seeds, cashews (I love ’em and eat them nearly every day!), oysters, spinach.

Seafood including wild salmon, anchovies, oysters.

beans and almonds.

Fresh fruits and vegetables like broccoli, sweet potatoes.

Oatmeal, Brazil nuts, mushrooms (I have ’em every week nearly every day!).

Grass-fed beef if you’re a carnivore.

Corn, bell peppers, tomatoes, cantaloupe, carrots, broccoli.

Eggs (my favorite breakfast!), pistachios.

Clams (love ’em!), mussels (my favorite feel-good food!).

Oranges, cherries, chilies, red peppers, mustard greens.

Turkey.

Avocadoes, berries

Kombucha, kefir, yogurt, miso.

Dark chocolate.

Ironing Out Our Health

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In the YouTube video Dr. Ede talked about iron the missing helpful food in a lot of diets.

Interested in this I Googled foods with iron. The following food contains a good amount of iron:

Peas: a cup cooked with salt: 2.5 mg.

Pumpkin seeds: one cup nearly 3.7 mg.

Cashews: 2 ounces: almost 3.8 mg.

Sweet potato (a cup of boiled sweet potato without skin): 2.4 mg.

Spinach: 1/2 cup cooked: 3 mg.

Lentils: 1/2 cup cooked: 3.3 mg.

Swiss chard: one cup: 4 mg.

One large baked potato: just over 3 mg.

Tofu: 6 ounces: almost 3 mg.

On Not Liking Chocolate

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Dr. Ede the author of Change Your Diet Change Your Mind parts ways with other experts giving nutritional advice.

The Integrative Health Coach I employ told me that beans, grains, and fruits break down into sugar. Sugar can exacerbate depression and anxiety.

Dr. Lipman cut out the habit of consuming quantities of beans. Eating too much beans can cause a diabetes concern apparently.

The advice to have dark chocolate I haven’t taken to heart either. As I really don’t like eating chocolate. My Health Coach told me that in her practice they’ve turned away from recommending that people eat dark chocolate.

I have eaten dark chocolate too long ago to remember when the last time was that I ate it. In fact I stopped buying dark chocolate years ago.

The strange thing is that I don’t often do what experts who hang out a shingle tell you to do. I trust my Health Coach because of my intuition that she knows what she’s talking about.

Also: I trust what friends tell me that makes sense. Years ago a friend told me he became a vegan. It was likely for ethical reasons. His mood worsened. When he returned to eating red meat his depression lifted.

Armchair advice to be certain. Yet intriguing insight that could very well be true.

In this blog I would like then to touch on how exactly to get happy and get more energy. What specific action can we take to lift ourselves up?

I’ve begun doing these things and will report back on the effects.

Who and What to Believe

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I’ve come to take what John C. Norcross wrote in his book Changeology with a grain of salt. He said that his wife wrote down every day how many calories she consumed.

Why she did this is what I would like to find out. Separating fact from fiction isn’t easy. As in believing that the calories in versus calories burned approach is how to lose weight.

It’s the kinds of food we eat not the amount that counts. It was a Big Food Marketing Myth that it’s OK to buy those “100-Calorie Packs” as a snack.

I think a better option is to fuel yourself for afternoon energy with a 170-calorie serving of cashews. Then go outside your office building to take a 15-minute walk on your break. Anyone who works at a job should take a morning and afternoon break by the way.

One M.D. who published a book titled Hype claimed that standard nutrition advice was wrong. She said it’s not healthy to eat too much broccoli (this could be true yet who would eat too much broccoli to begin with).

In fact what I a simple blogger thinks is that if you’re having broccoli for dinner every day 5 days a week you should question that. I think you should “eat a rainbow” like the British M.D. wrote in his book How to Make Disease Disappear years ago.

The author of Hype claimed everyone (everyone not just most people) gets enough daily water in the food they eat. What if you’re on a low income and buy Lean Cuisine frozen dinners? Chomp on Frosted Flakes for breakfast. Have a Big Mac for lunch with French fries.

Ignoring the socioeconomic reality of how and what people eat reinforces the industry norm of using well-off persons as the standard when talking about eating habits.

This M.D.’s advice was shot for me when she wrote that she drinks Naked Juice nonstop every day. She was not a health coach. She was a children’s ENT doctor in a hospital. Right.

There’s a path we can follow along the lines of nutrition:

  1. Credible scientific advice.
  2. Well-meaning advice that is repeated in the health field.
  3. Industry-sponsored research that gets the result the food marketer uses to sell a product.
  4. Questionable claims about how taking a certain supplement leads to better health.
  5. Giving a food “product” a name that suggests it’s healthful like Skinny Pop or Kind bars.
  6. Quackery.

In all my adult life I haven’t consumed the total RDAs of vitamins and nutrients that were recommended. I think the reason I don’t have osteoporosis–even though I don’t drink milk and likely don’t get 1,500 milligrams of calcium per day–is because I’ve been lifting weights that is strength training for 14 years.

It comes down to common sense. Like I said in a months-ago blog entry we need to Act as Our Own Healers along with working with our treatment providers.

How to heal using adjunct approaches not just food and pills is coming up in here.

Healing the Modern Brain

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The book above was published in March of this year 2025.

The Nine Tenets are Self-Awareness, Nutrition, Movement, Sleep, Connection, Engagement, Grounding, Unburdening, and Purpose.

This has to be the best book I’ve read on the topic.

In his books Dr. Ramsey gives advice that runs counter to what Dr. Ede says. He’s a fan of kale and wrote the book Fifty Shades of Kale. She is not. He recommends and eats dark chocolate regularly. She does not.

Healing the Modern Brain is a lifestyle guide. Diet alone or pills alone likely cannot be the only factor helping a person have a better life. In terms of an organic approach where the parts of the whole come together to create a sustainable routine.

I checked out of the library years ago the Dr. Ramsey book Eat to Beat Depression and Anxiety. I recommend that book too.

The chapter on engagement in Healing the Modern Brain deserves a careful read.

“All work and no play” seems to be the tenet of American grind culture at our jobs where we spend most of our time each week. We should be having fun outside of our jobs routinely. And also find ways to have fun on our jobs if that is possible.

Engaging in something that gives you joy to wake up in the morning to do is paramount to healing.

Between Dr. Ramsey and Dr. Ede I err on the side of Dr. Ramsey. I talk about Dr. Ede’s approach because a person should have choices when all else fails. And too they might want to consider her guidelines first.

Either way it’s 2025. As of today giving up isn’t an option when it comes to recovery and having a happy healthy life. Giving up was not ever an option.

Real Talk About Mental Health

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Recovery is not a “one-and-done” deal. Healing is a lifelong process. Some of us will take pills. Others won’t have to.

When you’re not managing your condition as a full-time job it can free up your energy to focus on other things. I will refer followers to buy the summer issue of Magnolia Journal. To read the Chip Gaines Last Word essay. He wrote that choosing to wear the same outfit (the same brand of tee shirt, jeans, and boots) every day freed up his energy to devote time to the things that were more important to him than choosing what to wear.

Gaines knew our emotional energy is finite. The theme of the summer issue of Magnolia was boundless. The editors list the dictionary definition of this word: They contrast this to their definition of boundless:

Traditional Definition:

  • Having no boundaries; vast, unlimited, or immense.
  • Abundant; limitless. 

Magnolia’s Definition:

  • To see ourselves and the world around us through a lens of unlimited potential. 

Illness is not a dead-end. It offers us yes the chance for a boundless life. The fact is that if taking medication gives a person the potential to have a better life I say: Go For It.

Define unlimited: Not succumbing to internalizing that we’re hopeless. Not comparing ourselves to what other people can do and have. Expanding our limits and shifting our mindset to think: “What if?” and “Why not?” when it comes to dreaming.

What I’m against: In the evening TV news commercials sell drugs and state that a side effect can be fatal. You could die taking those pills. There’s a cost-benefit analysis to calculate: is this risk worth it to find relief from an illness?

The goal is to get rid of the shame that surrounds getting a diagnosis. A woman told me that when she was told she had breast cancer she didn’t want to tell other people. The woman thought they’d look at her with pity.

Shame lives in secrecy silence and judgment. Everyone should be proud of who we are and what we stand for. Our lives aren’t easy having an illness. Yet they can be better.

I know that if I didn’t have a disability I wouldn’t be the person I am today: championing that people living in recovery can have our version of a full and robust life.

We can have this life not despite our condition. Because of it.

The MMD (Modified Mediterranean Diet)

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This week I checked out of the library the book Change Your Diet Change Your Mind. In fact, Dr. Ede in her guide states that some of her patients choose to stay on medication while adopting the Keto Diet.

Dr. Ede is against using the Keto Diet for new or worsening psychosis.

I wanted to read her book to see exactly what she wrote and whether the hype in the YouTube interview was credible. As regards to the content it feels to me like she cobbled together evidence to make her case about the Keto Diet. She also refers to the Paleo Diet being an option.

I’ve created and coined the term MMD for Modified Mediterranean Diet as the kind of eating plan I’ve been adhering to.

My approach is what I’ve written here before: what I call my “little bites” philosophy. The strategy is to consume everything in moderation.

So that if you’re eating too much of a food Dr. Ede tells the reader is a no-no that could be a concern. Having adequate not excessive RDAs of food makes sense to me.

The issue is whether the standard RDAs recommended are valid. One M.D. in another book stated that these guidelines were set by food industry staff.

In fact, over the last 15 years, I can’t say I’ve consumed the RDAs of fiber and calcium at all. Not from drinking milk do I get enough calcium. I think lifting weights that is weight training has kept my bones intact.

What I have every day is around 60 grams of protein which is the RDA for my weight.

Only sometimes and not often always do I have the recommended “5 a Day” servings of fruits and vegetables. More likely I have 2 to 3 servings of a vegetable daily and a serving of fruit 3 or 4 times a week.

On page 281. Dr. Ede lists the fruits and vegetables acceptable in the Quiet Paleo Diet she goes into along with the Keto Diet.

These are food items I’ve been having all long with the eggs chicken and dairy in my weekly diet.

Think of choosing what to eat from these “diets” as assembling a tray in a cafeteria from the options on display. My Health Coach thinks it’s pretty hard to adhere to solely a strict high-fat diet like Keto.

My stance is that it comes down to what your intuition tells you to do as regards to what food and how much you should eat. Just like our intuition can guide us to make decisions in other areas of our lives.

Dr. Ede lists nuts and seeds as a no-no. I regularly have a serving of cashews when I need to maintain my energy in the afternoon. Dr. Ramsey the other psychiatrist who wrote a book about food and mood recommends cashews.

Dr. Ede gives mixed advice about what foods to eat and what foods to avoid. It appears she lists certain food items to avoid that are also listed in the category of foods to eat.

Choosing the eating plan that will benefit us I think comes down to researching and hooking up with a reputable Integrative Health Coach. Not deciding on our own like one woman I knew who limited her “diet” to 700 calories per day so she could lose weight.

The obsession with losing weight and being thin must stop. Dr. Ede in her guide states the often-parroted ideal weight scheme that I’ve been against for decades: If you’re 5’0″ you should weigh 100 pounds plus 5 pounds more for each inch over 5’0″.

No I don’t think so. I’m 5’0″ and today I weigh 107 pounds.

This ideal weight guideline I don’t think is realistic.

Coming up in July after this blog carnival about food and mental health I’m going to review a couple of recent cookbooks I’m using to create recipes with.

Health Coach $100 Dollar Holler

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On Sunday morning I reported on the YouTube video I watched because I think it’s worth exploring a food-based option when all other treatment fails. For those of us who have a better life because we take pills I say not so fast to discontinue this treatment.

However I know that the food we eat plays a big role in how healthy we are. Mangia Bene Vivere Bene Eat Well To Live Well is a truism.

I won’t tell others: “This is my 2 cents.” I think the information I give is worth way more than 2 cents. That’s how I created the term $100 Dollar Holler.

Today’s advice comes from a reputable Health Coach I’ve talked with after viewing the YouTube video. In fact I think in the interview Dr. Ede said not everyone is helped with the ketogenic diet. I will have to watch the video again to verify this.

What I agree with Dr. Ede about is that so-called experts are giving advice that is not credible. I think what she is saying about the erroneous information is right.

Like the idea of having smoothies. I don’t drink smoothies at all. In the era of anti-science government leaders I think we need to educate ourselves more than ever.

The profit-driven Big Food marketers will claim anything to get us to buy their processed food. Maybe it’s because I have come to question the authority of elected leaders that I’m wary of believing the claims about health and nutrition that the current regime is passing off. In the form of essays that no reputable M.D. has published and that are not peer-reviewed but written by lackeys parroting the president.

Who can we trust to give us the right information?

Per the Health Coach:

“Doing a keto diet is not great for everyone, but incorporating healthy fats is an important part of diet for mental health, hormone health, and so much more. A high fat diet is pretty hard to execute.”

This is why I’m no fan of outright discontinuing psych meds if those pills enable a person to have a full and robust life they wouldn’t be able to live otherwise.

The idea that anyone can hang out a shingle as a nutrition expert is what alarms me. In the early 2000s I contacted a woman. She charged $1,000 per month for her advice. Where did she get her training?

The keto foods I eat that are “animal” fat are eggs and chicken every week. The other fat I get is from a handful of cashews every day and a tablespoon or 2 of organic peanut butter. Plus the healthy omega-3 fatty acids in seafood.

The Health Coach thinks a whole foods, low carb, healthy fat diet (like the Mediterranean diet yes!) is a great balanced diet for most.

Her eating plan is exactly the one I’ve used for over 10 years. Minus the smoothies. Minus grains. Minus meat.

In fact the Director of the USDA is often a person chosen who used to be a Big Food industry person. As early as 1993 I bought and read the original Mediterranean Diet paperback guide.

Decades ago on the government food website the recommendation was to have 6 servings of grains per day. This was obviously because the government subsidized farmers who grew wheat.

There’s a book I think it’s called Grain Brain that talks about eating grains. For 20 years I haven’t eaten grains. Only every so often.

I’ll end here with this: it’s worth exploring other options for achieving optimal mental health when everything else has failed.

My take on this is that I think some people have what I call “beautiful brains” and this is why the medication works. What a person eats can be a factor in why treatment works too.

More than the food we eat our lifestyle choices can buoy our mood and mindset.

Coming up after this blog carnival I will talk about the simple effective changes I’ve made in the last 2 months that have transformed my health.

Food and Mood: The Final Foray

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I’m going to top myself in this blog entry. I make no pie-in-the-sky promises. I don’t sell a product. I don’t guarantee that you’ll lose 30 pounds in 30 days by following my rules.

However what I’ve been writing in here for years about the food we eat improving our mood has been verified by two M.D.s

Drew Ramsey, M.D. the author of Eat to Beat Depression and Anxiety I found out is a psychiatrist in private practice. Long before I read his book I was eating the food he recommends: eggs, cod, cashews, bell peppers, salmon, shrimp, fermented dairy (yogurt) and mussels. (Italians love our mussels!)

The connection between food and mental health has been taken up by Georgia Ede, M.D. in her 2024 book Change Your Diet, Change Your Mind.

After watching a YouTube interview with this nutritional and metabolic psychiatrist I was astonished to find out I’d been doing what she recommended as well long before hearing her talk.

She recommended a ketogenic diet. Though I don’t eat meat I was surprised that all along I’d been eating the other foods in a ketogenic diet for years.

I have three eggs for breakfast. Seafood like shrimp, mussels, salmon, red snapper, flounder, and scallops for dinner. Organic chicken.

No grains at all. (I stopped eating grains 20 years ago before an expert like Ede told people not to.)

Dr. Edie told viewers to cut out refined sugars and refined fats. Like Dr. Lipman she’s no fan of vegetable oils or canola oil or seed oils. She rails against the modern-day scourge of eating processed food.

On this note the Mediterranean Diet is toast. Even the Nutritarian Diet doesn’t hold a candle to eating animal fat.

Watching the video unsettled me. It shocked me to find out that I’d been eating all the food you’re supposed to be eating.

Even smoothies got creamed by Dr. Ede. She is against this standard advice experts give people when they tell us what to eat.

Dr. Ede has had success using the ketogenic diet to treat patients not helped by traditional psychiatric medication. Some had been ill for years or even decades. After Dr. Ede prescribed a ketogenic diet in coordination with slowly lowering the doses of the traditional pills they had a miraculous recovery.

I’m no fan of taking Big Pharma pills for medical conditions that are caused by lifestyle choices. I say Take the Pill! if you need to take a pill to be well mentally physically or emotionally. By all means take the pill if it’s helping you be well.

The friend I watched the YouTube video with clarified that the psychiatric medication hasn’t been effective for a lot of people. Things got better when they went on the ketogenic diet. This is one of the few instances where I think alternative treatment should be considered. I think this because in my own life I’ve benefitted by eating ketogenic food.

I turned 60. I look and feel decades younger. The proof is in the fact that I exercise consistently and eat well. I hope by reading this blog entry you followers are energized and empowered to consider what you swallow: the lies being told as well as the Coca-Cola.

Now: I will always take the pill I’m taking. It strikes me that maybe this pill works precisely because my diet aids and abets the pill to be effective. You can’t outrun chowing down on candy bars and expect to be healthy.

The best thing is we don’t have to be rich or go broke to eat food that can improve our mood.

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