Diet and Brain Health: Notes on Georgia Ede
Diet and brain health used to sound abstract to me, until brain fog made it feel very practical. I went keto in December 2025 – and Dr. Georgia Ede’s book is a big part of why.
Not because I wanted to lose weight. Not because it was trendy. But because after months of reading about nutrition, inflammation, and the connection between food and mental health, I kept arriving at the same conclusion: what if the way I was eating wasn’t serving my brain?
I’d been through three postnatal depressions. I live with the background hum of anxiety that most mothers of three seem to carry. I’d noticed patterns — afternoons where my brain simply wouldn’t cooperate, mornings where I woke up foggy despite a full night’s sleep, irritability that felt disproportionate to the situation.
I was blaming my circumstances. But what if part of it was the food?
Dr. Georgia Ede’s Change Your Diet, Change Your Mind is the most rigorous answer to that question I’ve found. This book was mentioned in passing by my nail technician (merci Mylène!) because she’d heard it in a podcast which mentioned the effect of food on ADHD. Well, well, well, I was far from thinking that reading this book was going to flick a switch in my brain about nutrition altogether! There is no turning back for me now — once you know how some foods inflame your body, you just don’t want them anymore, full stop. The switch was that easy for me. Two months in, no cravings, no weakness moments, but still waiting for the full effect of it all…
Diet and Brain Health: Who Is Georgia Ede?
Dr. Georgia Ede is a Harvard-trained psychiatrist who spent years treating patients with medication and therapy before noticing something: the patients whose diets she helped change were often doing better than she could explain from a conventional treatment perspective.
She began researching the connection between nutrition and mental health — and specifically the role of glucose, insulin, and inflammation in brain function. What she found upended most of what she’d been taught.
Change Your Diet, Change Your Mind is the result of years of clinical practice and research, presented in accessible but rigorous detail. This is not a wellness influencer book. It’s written by a psychiatrist who changed her own mind about psychiatry.
The Brain Is Greedy — And Picky
Here’s the core idea that reframed everything for me.
The brain uses 20% of the body’s total energy, despite being only 2% of its weight. It’s the most metabolically expensive organ you have. And it is extremely sensitive to the quality of its fuel supply.
When you eat a high-carbohydrate diet, especially one full of refined carbs and sugars, your blood sugar spikes and crashes. Those crashes don’t just make you tired — they stress the brain. Your brain interprets blood sugar instability as a kind of low-level emergency. And living in a low-level emergency for years has consequences.
Georgia Ede explains that many mental health symptoms — depression, anxiety, brain fog, poor concentration, mood instability — can be dramatically improved by stabilising blood sugar. Not always. Not for everyone. But far more often than mainstream psychiatry currently acknowledges.
Ketones: The Brain’s Premium Fuel
This is where it gets interesting.
When you significantly reduce your carbohydrate intake and increase fat, your liver starts producing ketones. Ketones are an alternative fuel source that the brain can use instead of glucose — and according to Georgia Ede’s research, many brains actually prefer them.
Ketones provide a more stable, consistent energy source than glucose. They don’t spike and crash. They cross the blood-brain barrier easily. And they have neuroprotective properties — meaning they actively support brain health rather than just fuelling it.
For people with treatment-resistant depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, ADHD, and other neurological conditions, research into ketogenic diets is showing genuinely promising results. Not miracle cures — but meaningful, measurable improvements in a significant number of patients.
I started keto as a nutritional experiment. What I noticed in the first few weeks surprised me: the afternoon fog lifted. Not completely. Not forever. But there were days in January 2026 when I looked up at 4pm and realised I’d been thinking clearly for the entire afternoon.
That hadn’t happened in years.
The Foods Georgia Ede Focuses On
Georgia Ede’s dietary recommendations align closely with what researchers like Sally Norton (oxalates) and Steven Gundry (lectins) also found their way to — which is that the most problematic foods are often the ones we’re told are healthiest.
The key villains, in Georgia Ede’s framework:
- Ultra-processed carbohydrates and seed oils — These are inflammatory, blood-sugar-destabilising, and nutritionally empty
- Refined grains — Bread, pasta, crackers: blood sugar mayhem
- High-sugar foods — Obvious, but worth stating: the brain feels sugar swings even when the rest of you doesn’t notice
- Soy products — Hormone-disrupting, poorly absorbed
The foods she advocates for:
- Animal proteins — Meat, fish, eggs, dairy. Complete amino acids, no anti-nutrients, the most bioavailable nutrition available.
- Non-starchy vegetables — Particularly low-oxalate, low-lectin varieties
- High-quality fats — Butter, ghee, animal fats, coconut oil
- Fermented foods — For gut health, which directly impacts brain health via the gut-brain axis
This overlaps neatly with my existing keto + low oxalate + low lectin framework. Three different researchers, three different starting points, converging on a similar conclusion: eat more animals, eat fewer plants (particularly the high-anti-nutrient ones), and reduce the carbohydrates that destabilise blood sugar.
What This Doesn’t Mean
I want to be clear about something, because this topic gets polarised fast.
Georgia Ede is not saying food is a substitute for psychiatric care. She’s not saying medication is always wrong. She’s not saying that keto cures everything or that everyone with depression just needs to change their diet.
What she’s saying — carefully, with research citations — is that nutrition is an overlooked and underutilised tool in mental health treatment. That changing your diet could meaningfully improve how you feel, often faster and with fewer side effects than adding another medication. That it deserves to be part of the conversation.
As someone who has lived with the consequences of ignoring the food-mood connection for years, I find that persuasive. Plus, I am a huge skeptic in mainstream recommendations, what information the media is giving us and how our society works in general.
What to Take From This
- Stabilise your blood sugar first — Before anything else. Reduce refined carbs and sugar, add more protein and fat at every meal. Even this one change can make a measurable difference to mood and focus.
- Notice your afternoon — For many people, the clearest sign of blood sugar instability is the 3pm slump. If you consistently feel foggy, irritable, or desperate for sugar in the afternoons, start there.
- Try keto for 30 days, properly — Not keto with daily “treats” and quest bars. Real food, high fat, low carb, no seed oils. Give it a genuine month and see how your brain responds.
- Eat more protein at breakfast — This is the single most evidence-backed change for mood stability. Protein first, every morning.
- Read the book — If you’ve ever felt like your brain isn’t working the way it should, this book is worth your time. It’s rigorous, readable, and genuinely different from most nutrition books.
Related Notes from Soph
If this note on diet and brain health helped, you might also like these connected Notes from Soph:
- Brain Fog and Nutrition, for the everyday version of this question.
- Anna Lembke on self-control, for the dopamine side of cravings and attention.
- Motivation and Dopamine, for another look at energy, focus and reward.
- Heavy Lifting for Women Over 40, for body work as future freedom, not punishment.
Why This Belongs in “Body”
My blog is organised around my Tree of Life: Roots, Body, Mind, Heart, Soul, Purpose. Each section represents a part of my life that needs attention.
This post belongs in Body — specifically in nutrition — because it’s about understanding the food-brain connection and how the fuel I put into my body affects every other area of my life. But honestly, it could belong in Mind too, because the effects of this dietary experiment are showing up most clearly in my thinking. The boundary between Body and Mind turns out to be more porous than I thought. They are one and work together!
That, perhaps, is the biggest takeaway from Georgia Ede’s book: the brain is the body. How we feed the body feeds the brain. There’s no separation.
Start with what you eat. See what moves.
Notes from Soph | Learning, not perfection.
Has changing what you eat ever changed how you feel mentally? I’m genuinely curious — this feels like a conversation that’s barely starting. Leave a comment or reach out.
Book Details:
Change Your Diet, Change Your Mind: A Powerful Plan to Improve Mood, Overcome Anxiety, and Protect Memory for a Lifetime of Optimal Mental Health — Georgia Ede, MD
Published 2024 | Little, Brown Spark
📚 Amazon.frhttps://amzn.to/4aXz7Gq 📚 Amazon.co.ukhttps://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1399709127/?tag=websitenote0f-21
🎧 Audible.co.ukhttps://www.audible.co.uk/pd/Change-Your-Diet-Change-Your-Mind-Audiobook/B0CNKTN43Q?source_code=ASSGB149080119000H&share_location=pdp
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