BONUS EPISODE: Food for Mood with Dr Michael Dixon & Dr Uma Naidoo
17th Sep 2023
Should we be reaching for the dinner plate before the pill bottle when treating mental illness? Dr Michael Dixon and Dr Uma Naidoo are back on the podcast talking about the Food for Mood campaign.
This idea of food as medicine is truly taking shape in the UK, but without strategies to ensure people can actually attain a level of nutrition to unlock these potential benefits, we’re simply reverberating ideas in an ineffective echo chamber. Michael and Uma are taking up the challenge, and launching the ‘Food for Mood’ campaign that engages multiple stake holders including government, supermarkets and of course, medical professionals and promotes the idea and practical strategies to introduce nutritional psychiatry at scale.
This is a great discussion about the challeneges of bringing fresh nutrient rich ingredients to the masses, changing our supermarket landscape and the way in which we practice preventative medicine.
Dr. Uma Naidoo is a Harvard trained psychiatrist, professional chef and a trained Nutrition Specialist and her nexus of interests have found their niche in Nutritional Psychiatry. She is also the national bestselling author of This Is Your Brain On Food.
Dr Michael Dixon is chairman of the college of medicine, he’s been a general practitioner at College Surgery in Devon for over 35 years. Since the early 1990s, he has been a leader of the GP/clinical commissioning movement with its aim of allowing frontline clinicians a far greater role in improving local services and health. Michael is a Visiting Professor at Westminster University and Head of the Royal Medical Household
Episode guests
Michael Dixon graduated in psychology and philosophy at Oxford University before studying medicine at Guy’s Hospital. Since 1984 he has been a general practitioner at College Surgery in Cullompton, Devon. In 2008, he and his partners created the “Culm Valley Integrated Centre for Health”, which is widely regarded as a prototype for general practice of the future.
Since the early 1990s, he has been a leader of the GP/clinical commissioning movement with its aim of allowing frontline clinicians a far greater role in improving local services and health. He co-founded one of the first Locality Commissioning Groups in Mid Devon in 1993 and served on the National Executive of the National Association of GPs before becoming the first chair of its successor organisation, the NHS Alliance, in 1998. He has continued in this role, by annual election, to the present day. In 2012, clinical commissioning was fully embedded in statute with the creation of Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs). A new organisation, NHS Clinical Commissioners” was created to represent CCGs bringing together the commissioning “arms” of NHS Alliance, NHS Confederation and the National Association of Primary Care. Michael is the acting president of this new organisation.
Recent national roles have included:- chair of the National LifeCheck Board, special advisor on Practice Based Commissioning to Lord Darzi and sitting on the steering group of the King’s Fund Enquiry into the future of general practice. Today, he is a member of the National Stakeholder Forum, sits on the National Steering Group and the National Strategy Group for Clinical Commissioning. He is also a member of the NHS Sustainable Development Unit National Advisory Group.
Michael is a Visiting Professor at Westminster University and Head of the Royal Medical Household. He is an honorary senior fellow in Public Policy at HSMC (University of Birmingham) and honorary senior lecturer in Integrated Health at the Peninsula Medical School. He is a regular writer and broadcaster, having written several books including “The Human Effect in Medicine” and is a former president of the Health Writers Guild.
Throughout he has been strongly supported by his wife Joanna, a professional artist, and they have three children. He is a keen gardener and fisherman, when time permits.
Michelin-starred chef David Bouley described Dr. Uma Naidoo as the world’s first “triple threat” in the food as medicine space: She is a Harvard trained psychiatrist, Professional Chef and Nutrition Specialist. Her niche work is in Nutritional Psychiatry and she is regarded both nationally and internationally as a medical pioneer in this more newly recognized field.
Featured in the Wall Street Journal, ABC News, Harvard Health Press, Goop, Healthline, and many others, Dr. Uma has a special interest on the impact of food on mood and other mental health conditions.
In her role as a Clinical Scientist, Dr. Naidoo founded and directs the first hospital-based clinical service in Nutritional Psychiatry in the USA. She is the Director of Nutritional and Lifestyle Psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) & Director of Nutritional Psychiatry at the Massachusetts General Hospital Academy while serving on the faculty at Harvard Medical School.
Dr. Naidoo graduated from the Harvard-Longwood Psychiatry Residency Training Program in Boston during which she received several awards, some of which included a “Junior Investigator Award” (American Psychiatric Association); “Leadership Development for Physicians and Scientists” award (Harvard), as well as being the very first psychiatrist to be awarded the coveted “Curtis Prout Scholar in Medical Education”. Dr. Naidoo, has been asked by The American Psychiatric Association to author the first academic text in Nutritional Psychiatry.
In addition to this, Dr. Naidoo is the author of the upcoming title, This Is Your Brain On Food to be released August 4th, 2020. In her book, she shows the cutting-edge science explaining the ways in which food contributes to our mental health and how a sound diet can help treat and prevent a wide range of psychological and cognitive health issues, from ADHD to anxiety, depression, OCD, and others.
