Change Your Diet, Change Your Mind – by Dr. Georgia Ede

Dr. Ede begins by explaining that most current nutritional guidelines are wrong. As for how this wrong scientific consensus came about, she blames science’s reliance on randomized controlled trials, interventional studies, and observational/epidemiological studies, which leaves only case studies, which modern science doesn’t care for, and neither does she. She also does not trust systematic meta-analysis reviews, which look at large amounts of data collected in RCTs, interventional studies, and observational/epidemiological studies.

You may be wondering: if she dismisses systematic reviews, RCTs, interventional studies, observational/epidemiological studies, and case studies, what’s left to rely upon? Hasn’t she now thrown out the entirety of scientific method, up to peer review (which, by the way, she also dislikes)?

And the answer is: yes, yes she has. She bids us instead look at knowledge of things like the brain’s anatomy, physiology, etc, and thus work out what diet will be best, based directly on that. This “consider and decide” method, which predates scientific method, was extensively employed by Aristotle (to come to such conclusions as “the brain’s chief purpose is to cool the blood”), but has not been considered good epistemology for a very long time.

So, what does she recommend, in terms of diet? Her recommendations are threefold, inviting the reader to choose:

• Paleo (10almonds note: fine in the short term; long term health risks)
• Keto (10almonds note: usually good in the short term; long term health risks)
• Carnivore (10almonds note: bad in the short term; there is no long term because you will either revert to including some at least some non-animal foods, or you will die)

She also recommends to avoid superfoods (including fruit) and supplements, as well as whole grains and legumes.

The style of the book is very confident. Superficially, it’s well-referenced despite the author’s criticism of scientific method, but upon looking up the references in question for some of the more counter-consensus claims, the ones we checked didn’t actually show the thing she was citing them for.

Bottom line: if you’d like to adjust your diet to improve your mental health, many people do find such benefits on the keto diet in the short term (but still, watch out for the long-term heart health issues). If you’d like to improve your brain health in the long-term, this is not the book for that.

Click here to check out Change Your Diet, Change Your Mind, and see what we mean!