 I was inspired by Stephanie Welsh's little blitz this morning. I'm giving my talk barefoot right now. It feels different. I also want to thank Stefan Guinefer's awesome talk this morning. I was very inspired by that. And also because it helped set up some of the concepts I'm going to be jumping off into my talk today. That line of my talk, how does eating refined foods cause cognitive impairments and mood disorders? Why do we eat refined foods? And finally, I'm going to finish with, how can we banish refined foods from our diet? Very important. I'm going to jump off with work from my own lab I've been doing over the past few years in rats. And rats are actually a pretty good animal model to use to study the relationship between diet and cognition and other health aspects because their neurophysiology and digestive physiology is quite similar to that of humans and many other mammals, especially generalist omnivores, like humans. And so what we can learn about rats often translates very nicely to what we understand about humans and can corroborate with human research. So I'm going to begin by talking about the rat studies that involve looking at the effects of giving rats either a standard control diet that's derived mostly from whole food type ingredients sources to create these little rat pellets and compare rats that consume that to rats that are going to consume a refined diet that is made of highly purified and refined ingredients. I list some of the major components of each of the two diets here. If you wanted to get more information on these two diets, just send me an email. I could always send you the PDFs that have all the details from the manufacturers. And both of these diets are generally low in carbs, low in fat, I should say, I'm sorry, and high in carbs. They differ a little bit on protein, but they were selected to be roughly comparable on macronutrient ratios. They're not exactly comparable, but they're roughly comparable. Know what happens first when these rats, two groups of rats are placed on these diets. Within two months of being placed on the diets, we see there's a major difference in the fat mass that develops with the refined diet rats being significantly more fat tissue than the control diet rats. But there's no difference in lean mass tissue. I'm not showing here, but there's only a difference in fat mass, so we know it causes adiposity. But also, I've learned that it has significant effects on some cognitive markers of health or healthy cognition. So here I'm showing you a picture of a rat in one of my chambers. It's a standard skinner box. It has a lever, it has a light, it has a food receptacle. But we're not using the light in this study. All the rat has to do in this study is press the lever to get food, little food reinforcers. And what we use is a schedule of reinforcement where they have to make more and more lever presses for each next reinforcer. So at first they only have to press the lever five times to get a pellet. Then they have to press 10 times to get the next one. And then they have to press an additional 15 times for the next and so on, so it progressively increases more and more effort for each subsequent reward. And what you see is this is a very sensitive assay for measuring motivation. It's used a lot in rat research and in pharmacology work to measure a pharmacological effects on motivation. Well, here we're looking at dietary effects on motivation. And what we see, we measure by the end of the session how many rewards have they received, and that reflects how much work they put into getting those rewards. And the refined rats that have become obese on this diet have earned far fewer, significantly fewer reinforcers. So they have an impaired motivation compared to rats that are eating a normal control, healthy control diet. And those data, by the way, I've already published a couple of years ago in the Journal of Physiology and Behavior, a newer study that I've done since then is now looking at other aspects of cognition, specifically attention and behavioral control. And so we developed in our lab a two choice vigilance task. Basically it's a task where the rat sits in a chamber and now there are two levers, one on either side of the food cup, and there are two lights, one above each lever, and the food cup's in the center. And what we do is the levers are not normally in the box, they're normally retracted. And what happens is the rat makes a nose poke into the little food receptacle. That causes the levers to enter the cage so they're both available. And then either immediately when the two levers enter the cage or after some delaying after the two levers enter the cage, one of the two lights turns on for one second. So it's a brief presentation of a visual cue. The rat, so that's kind of shown in this diagram here, the levers come in and then either the light immediately comes on, zero delay, or after a three, six, or 12 second delay. So it's a variable delay for when this brief presentation of a light. And they have a limited amount of time from the onset of the light to get their food. They have to press the lever to get the food. They have to press the lever under where the light is or was. They have a six second period. So they basically have to kind of be vigilant and monitoring, okay, where is the light gonna be? And then the light comes on and they have a limited amount of time to go and press that lever. And what I'm gonna ask is, how do rats on these two diets, how do they perform in terms of the delay? How does delay affect performance? And the two major findings I've found from this is that the refined diet rats are more impulsive. And that's shown over here with premature responses where the levers have come in but the light hasn't been presented yet but the rat makes a lever press. All right, so that's a premature response. We see that in both groups, the controlled diet and the refined diet rats, there's an increase in the likelihood of making a premature response with an increased delay of the light. But there's a major significant effect, especially at the long delay, where the refined diet rats are much more impulsive. They're more likely to make a premature response. So there's a disruption of behavioral regulation in that respect. And also we see there's a main effect of omissions and this is the refined diet rats are less vigilant. So they're missing opportunities for the light to come on as if they're not able to pay as much attention and maintain that sustained attention to wait for the light and then make the response. You see there's a much larger number of omissions emitted by the refined rat diet rats than by the controlled diet rats. So we see now that behavioral control is dysregulated, attentional processing is dysregulated. I'm gonna turn to some other research with rats, not from my lab but from colleagues labs that also characterize some of the other kinds of cognitive deficits that accrue with refined diets. And here I'm gonna turn to work that generally uses Western diets which are higher in fat than the diets I was using but they're also pretty high in sugar. And these have been known to cause obesity and impaired behavioral control of different cognitive markers in rats. So here's a study looking at the Western diet and the effects of Western diet on working memory. So I'll just talk, describe the task briefly. This is what's called a radial arm maze and it's called that because there's a central platform where the rat is first placed and then there's a series of eight arms that radiate out from the center. Each one is baited with a single food pellet. So the rat then starts each trial by going and collecting all the foods by entering each arm, getting the food coming out, going to the next arm, going to another arm. The most efficient way is to avoid arms that you've already been to and only go to the arms you haven't been to yet and that requires working memory, keeping track of the places you've been. And so if we count memory errors that is revisits to arms they've already been before they've depleted the maze, and this is work by Greenwood and Winnaker, we see that rats that are on a standard chow diet make fewer errors, memory errors on this than rats that are on a Western diet when they're in their home cages. So some impairment in working memory. Another aspect of memory that's impaired to other people, Kenoski and his group have shown, involves a more like a reference type memory. And specifically there's a kind of memory that a lot of our memories require the hippocampus, abbreviated HP here, but require this memory structure in our brains called the hippocampus, and that's one of the structures that can decline with age and is related to with Alzheimer's and dementia. And so we see that rats on a Western diet versus on a chow diet, if they're given a learning task where they're learning something that we know doesn't require the hippocampus, they learn at an equal rate, the Western diet rats, learn at an equal rate as rats on a chow diet. But when you look at a hippocampal dependent type task, I won't go into the details here, we know that it's a type of task that requires an intact hippocampus to perform well. We see that rats on a Western diet perform much more poorly than rats on the controlled diet, even though there's a main effect that it's a more difficult task than the non-hippocampal task. Another thing that these researchers did was look at a marker of blood brain barrier integrity. And those are the data reported over here. And what they saw is that if you look at the hippocampus and the blood vessels that kind of are close to the blood brain barrier where the hippocampus is located, compared to other cortical structures like the prefrontal cortex in the frontal part of the brain and striatum, which is a little bit lower down in humans, that the hippocampus in particular shows a much greater increase in this marker of blood brain barrier permeability. So it looks like the blood brain barrier is being compromised by this Western diet near the hippocampus. And that might be one of the important things about the link between diet-induced cognitive impairments and specifically the effects on learning and memory. One more rodent study. And this one is looking at spatial learning, which is another type of learning that requires the hippocampus to navigate space and keep track of places in space. So what this task involves is comparing, again, healthy control rats to rats on a Western diet. And what they have is this kind of task that's called an object-place-recognition task. And it's very simple. This is a top-down view of schematic. The rat is placed into kind of a box about this big, so they're just placed on the platform, so about that big, and they can walk around on the platform. And there are two objects on the initial five-minute period that they're in the platform. And rats are curious little creatures. They'll go and they'll sniff them, investigate them, and presumably encoding something about the details of these two objects. Then you take them out for five minutes, and what you do in the meantime is you either move one of those objects to a new location, so this object here has now been moved to this location, or what you can do as the experimenter is you can replace one of the objects with a new object type as different features, but it's in the same place where one of the original objects was. And the question is, with the place task, do they recognize and go and spend more time investigating the familiar object but at a new location, which requires remembering where in space the object was originally? Or, and or can they spend more time investigating the new object as new features, even though it hasn't changed its place? And that's recognizing that the object has changed. Well, we see here that the Western diet rats are just as good at recognizing the change in object, but what they show is a deficit in recognizing the change in the location of a familiar object, so specifically spatial cognition as being affected by the Western diet as shown in this study. Okay, a couple more things about the way that diet affects mental health. It's not just about cognition, but we know it can affect mood as well. So refined ingredients such as sugar and seed oils increase systemic inflammation by stimulating cytokine production. Chronically elevated inflammatory signaling can dysregulate neurotransmitter and neuromodulator metabolism, such as the dopamine, glutamate, and serotonin are three well-known neurotransmitters and neuromodulators that are affected by diet and play a role in inflammatory processes. Inflammation mediated depression. Okay, so inflammation in the nervous system that causes a depression resembles sickness behavior. So when you get a cold, when you especially when you get something like a flu, you just wanna hide under your covers and not talk to people and kind of, it's a conservation withdrawal kind of state. That's a typical sickness behavior. Diet-induced obesity or inflammatory process mediated depression is really resembles sickness behavior and doesn't resemble the kind of depression that's clinically diagnosed based on like anhedonia. Okay, so they're actually clinically very different types of presentations. Also, refined foods are related to anxiety. There are several micronutrient deficiencies that are associated with anxiety and depression, including minerals like zinc, magnesium, lithium, and chromium. Refined foods are often deficient in such micronutrients and also it's been shown, a study by these people here, that consuming nutrient dense foods is associated with positive affect. That is positive mood, happiness, things like that. So given that we see these strong links in some of them causal between diet and cognition and mood, then why do we continue as a population? Why do we continue to consume refined foods as such a major part of our diet? And here's where I think a lot of understanding of psychology and psychological processes, how they're affected by diet are responsible for this. I'm gonna go through these eight in successive slides. So one I wanna start with is the concept of supernormal stimuli. This is starting to gain attention in the research community. And it's been known for a long time since Nico Tinbergen and other seminal ethologists that when you study animals in the natural environment, you see lots of interesting things when you start looking at what are the cues that they respond to to try and regulate their natural behavior like parental care. And so here's, according to ethologists, an artificial stimulus, someone that the experimenter can create and then give to the subject out in the wild, an artificial stimulus that elicits a greater response than a normal stimulus, they called that a supernormal stimulus. So here's an example, an oyster catcher mother. Here's her regular egg sitting over here. Here's an artificially largeened egg that's larger, maybe more speckled than her own egg. And she'll prefer to go and tend this artificial stimulus. It's supernormal, it drives, it attracts her more than the natural egg. Here's another famous one that Tinbergen had experimented on in the wild with the herringgull. Herringgull chicks peck at the beak on the mother. There's a little red spot at the tip and that causes the mother to regurgitate the fish that she recently caught and then the chick feeds by eating that. I know, we've all been there, right? All of us, the mommy's in the crowd, raise your hand if you've kind of pre-masticated some of your food for your infant. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All humans do this in other cultures too, actually. So just don't think about your own experiences as a baby. So what Tinbergen did was created these artificial stimuli, then especially this one here, this long red rod with this high contrast white bands, and noted that the chick would prefer to peck at that rather than at a natural, more naturalistic stimulus. So these idea of a supernormal stimulus has been around in ethology since the 1930s or 40s at least. But I think it really explains something about the kinds of hyperpalatable foods that have been created by the industrial food industry to elicit a greater amount of consumption, so overconsumption, compared to a regular whole foods. And so I think that these kinds of foods here are supernormal and that one of the reasons that leads to overconsumption. Here's another one, this one involves learning. So payovlovian flavor calorie associations have been studied quite a bit in rats and in humans. And we know now that a lot of our preferences, food preferences, develop by learning, especially with omnivores. We eat different things, little amounts, and rats do this too. And things that don't make you sick and things that are followed by a reduction in hunger because they have calories entering the system are things that we associate now, those flavors with something good. So we're learning to associate those flavors with calories. And so this is the normal kinds of foods, whole foods of different types that we would learn flavor calorie associations with. But when you have refined foods, they're calorically dense. And you think of the calories, that's the unconditioned stimulus in like a Pavlovian sense. That's what's driving the learning process. The bigger and more stronger the unconditioned stimulus, the stronger will be the associate of learning process. And so these calorie dense foods is basically like a much bigger US. So it's causing much more rapid and stronger learning of flavor calorie associations. And as a result, we enjoy those flavors and develop cravings for them much more than we would in a normal range of whole foods. Habit learning, here's another thing that's affected by diet. As we learn a skill or a procedure, we tend, we turn that behavior into a habit. Habit learning is great, it's very useful because it allows us to offload and automate daily tasks that we don't wanna have to use our limited attentional resources to always be monitoring. So we wanna do a lot of things on autopilot while we focus on the things that we're goal directed about. And there's a number of studies that have shown that refined foods accelerate and strengthen habit learning. Rats that consume hyper palatable food in binges in particular show faster habit learning than rats eating a control diet. There are more neurons in the brain regions, and this is a human study, there are more neurons in the brain regions that code for value and saliency of food. And this is in an area called the basal ganglia that's involved in habit learning and control of action. And so there are more neurons in that region for in obese than in lean people. So obese people haven't had a shift in the amount of brain tissue and neural processing dedicated to the value, coding for value and saliency of food cues. Another study, obese women acquire habits more quickly than lean women in a laboratory task setting. Another study yet, men with high BMI are associated with stronger habit learning with respect to motivational value of food. So I'm just finding some things in literature and there's more in the literature just like these studies. So the idea from these studies and others is that acceleration in habit learning can interfere with breaking bad habits. You can be stuck in a rut maybe because your habit system is overloaded, is hard to disengage. And then things like mindless eating and susceptibility to food cues can result. Here's another one that's from psychology, delayed discounting. The idea here is that we are able to forego immediate rewards if we value a future outcome even more. So we might avoid the piece of cake now that's presented to us and no, because I'm trying to maintain lean figure or I don't wanna have to run to the toilet or get gut dysbiosis, which I know I'll get if I eat this now. So you're putting off some, you're valuing something in the future more than the immediate reward. But we do discount rewards that are too far in the future or when the immediate reward is too enticing. And so here's an actual study that came out a few years ago looking at delayed discounting functions for both monetary rewards and food rewards in normal weight individuals and obese individuals. And what this is showing is a subjective value of a particular reward, like a monetary item or food item as a function of the number of months in the future that they're expected to get it. So how much would you value $10 right now? How much does it mean to you a month from now or that's the kind of nature of the questions that are asked. And you see, of course, for both kinds of subjects, for everybody, the further in the future some item of reward is, the more you discount its value, its subjective value decreases. But that discounting function is much steeper for obese people than for lean people. So we know that whatever is contributing to obesity is also affecting their ability to apply a subjective value to something in the future, a goal in the future. So this can further dysregulate behavioral control and planning, long-term planning. Another one, learned helplessness. And this is from the work of Martin Seligman and his colleagues. And what this is is a task where an animal, such early work was with dogs, they're placed in what's called a shuttle box. They can jump back and forth over this partition to be in one side or the other. And periodically, they get a cue, the speakers turn on, that tell them that the side they happen to be on is about to get a shock, about to be electrified, that grid. So if they learn that, they can jump over to the other side and avoid getting the shock. Then they have a few minutes of safety and then the auditory cue comes on again. They have maybe 10 seconds to jump back to avoid the shock. If they don't jump back in time, they get the mild electric shock. No dogs were harmed, they're just annoyed in this study. They use low levels of shock, but enough that it makes them want to jump. But if you previously prevent the dog from jumping, so you put them in one side of the box and you have a barrier so it's completely closed and they can't escape the shock and you expose them to a number of shocks without being able to escape, then you open the barrier, so now they can make an escape or an avoidance response. You see that they're very impaired in learning to make that escape response. And this was a model for studying a phenomenon of learned helplessness that has been discovered clinically in humans where you feel helpless about your situation in life and so you feel like, well, I can't do anything about it anyway, I can't get out of this bad situation, so I'm just gonna give up, not do anything. And that was the reason they developed an animal model to study that process in humans. But really, when you think about the role of yo-yo dieting, then what you see is that when you start a diet, you can stick to it by sheer force of will of calorie restriction, but if you're eating the kinds of foods that are driving you to crave them, usually you end up going off the diet and you gain back that weight and some and then you try a diet again and you see this is that pattern of yo-yo dieting and eventually what I think is people learn that they're helpless to control their own weight with the standard conventional calorie restriction methods and so I think learned helplessness is really one of the factors that's affecting the phenomenon of people giving up. Overshadowing, I'm gonna try and speed up a little, make sure I have time for Q and A at the end. Overshadowing is a phenomenon discovered by Pavlov, he's studied how dogs associate a cue such as a bell with a reward like food. When multiple cues are present, however, then the dogs will tend to learn only an association between the most salient or the loudest or brightest cue with the food and that learning, so really loud sound will be associated with the food and it'll overshadow a quieter sound so they won't learn about the other one. Well, I think that when we're eating a diet of healthy flavors and refined foods, refined foods are so potent in their saliency of their flavors, I think the flavor calorie associations I was talking about, you can get overshadowing possibly, these are, some of these are hypothetical, overshadowing of learning associations between normal, healthy foods and their calories, so that flavor calorie learning, if you're also at the same time consuming hyperpalatable food, so maybe overshadowing is possibly playing a role in this phenomenon and I think this is very important to understand for children, not exposing them to these hyperpalatable foods too early because that might prevent them from ever learning that the more whole foods are nutritious or tasty, really. Counter conditioning, who enjoys the flavors of these monstrosities? Yes, I've been there, in a way I could still imagine I would like to put this in my mouth and think that that tastes good. Now, the very first time somebody encounters one of these foods, it probably doesn't taste that great, it's overly sweet, but also there's these, a lot of the additives and stuff don't actually naturally taste good, in fact, Starburst, I've never liked Starburst, I'm more of an M&M's guy. And they say so, it's plasticky tasting and I think that a lot of people might, when they're young kids and first exposed to these things, I think the very first exposure maybe, you wouldn't like that taste normally, but because there's so much sugar along there that it's causing some kind of counter conditioning, you're associating these bad tastes with the sugar, which provides a caloric increase and a very quick one, a rush of dopamine and so, which is involved in reward processing, I think that you associate these bad flavors with the good outcome and you then counter condition them. So now you start to like those flavors. Finally, sensory adaptation and habituation, you've all experienced jumping into a cold lake, the first moment is bracing and it's cold, but very quickly your skin cells adapt as a sensory organ, so you feel less cold. And also, if you hear a ticking of a clock, you get a new clock and it's really loud, but over time you kind of filter it out, that's kind of, you habituated, you learn to tune that out. Those are two related types of learning processes or learning and behavioral control processes. Well, sensory adaptation is to sweetness in our diet. If you're eating a high-sweet diet, you might actually be down-regulating the taste receptors that are able to taste sweetness and here's a study that showed this back in the late 70s. Subjects, human subjects were exposed to sodas with either high or low sweetness or a mixture of both. Then after they had some exposure with the high or lower mixed sweetness sodas, they were given a range of sodas that they ranged in sweetness from low sweetness to high sweetness concentration and they were asked then to rate how sweet is it and you see the people that had been pre-exposed to high sweetness, they're less able to judge how sweet, or they judge those high-sweet sodas as being less sweet. So if you're constantly eating sweet foods, you're not gonna be able to taste the natural sweetness in something like a carrot. That's kind of the point here. Also habituation, we all get used to the, oh that lower back pain I have or every time I take the steps I get a creak in my left knee, true, it started happening a year ago for me. You know, we habituate to these things and we kind of have to tune them out in order to kind of get by in life. I think we forget sometimes because we're habituating to the feelings of unwellness to what it felt like to thrive. Okay, I know I'm kind of getting close to my Q&A time, but I wanna quickly go over the message of hope. Despite these problems, there's a lot of hope that we have. So now I'm just starting the Q&A period. I'm gonna try and stick to five minutes. Pavlov showed that dogs that salivate when the bell predicts food, but he also showed that if you then present the bell by itself a number of times, they stop salivating. That is, you can extinguish the salivation response. So I know I've extinguished quite a bit of the sounds of a rustling sound of the opening a bag of chips or the seeing these cues or smelling cues that had previously I had associated with good things because I've abstained from them for a long time and seeing the cues without actually imbibing. I've extinguished some of those associations. So that's one of the hopes that you can actually take back into your hands. My late friend and collaborator Seth Roberts had done some really groundbreaking work applying Pavlovian conditioning principles. I won't go into the details of the theory. It's based on Pavlovian conditioning principles and to be able to break your body fat set point. So if you think of body fat as or adiposity as something that your body is regulating as a homeostatic system, then if you wanna lower your body fat set point, then that will reduce hunger and you will then lose weight naturally from that. And he's got lots of data from subjects that have participated online with doing this. For example, consuming some extra light olive oil or I've tried it with refined coconut oil which is very low in flavor is like giving yourself an unconditioned stimulus without a CS. And what that does is that also like extinction I could break the CS, US association, these kind of Pavlovian associations and it seems to be a very effective method of reducing hunger. Reward devaluation. This is what I've put in practice myself and it really works. A rat learns to press lever for a sugar pellet. If the sugar pellet is then, if they then eat the sugar pellet and get an upset stomach, they will no longer want to eat the sugar pellet. This is called a conditioned taste aversion. This is one way of devaluing the original value of a food. And I've done it not through inducing stomach upset but mentally thinking, oh, this is not good. This is really bad for me and I'm gonna make myself sick. And I've kind of be able to mentally create my own devaluation of hyperpalatable foods, refined foods. And related to that, very closely related to that, is this idea of equivalence class formation. When we look at the world, we don't just see a bunch of random objects. We kind of classify things as chairs. There are people, there are lights and we kind of group things in the categories for classes of objects. Well, we're typically, the typical person will think of these kind of refined foods as in the class of maybe not necessarily healthy but definitely edible things. Well, I switched and I said, nope, that's the wrong class. That's the class that this belongs to, inedible and toxic ingredients. So now, when I go to a coffee shop, I realize I'm just there for coffee. Don't look at all this crap in there because it's just refined foods. You go there, you look at the board, you know which kind of coffee you want, get your coffee. Remember that, coffee shops sell coffee. That's all you should be getting there. You can also cultivate no eating habits by consistently training yourself to avoid, when you see something, you say, I'm just not gonna do it today. And then the next day you say, oh, all right, I'm just gonna avoid taking it for another day. And it's kind of the way it works with alcoholics too. You just day by day, you train in a habit of saying no to something that you previously really wanted and choose something else instead. You can eventually establish a habit that will replace your old ones. So this does take more work but it has a long-term payoff of being sustainable. I'm not gonna go through all of these. These will be online anyway. But I wanna point you to the work that Brian Wansink at Cornell University and other people have been doing showing that how we can take control over our eating, mindful eating practices. I'm not gonna go through all of these. Social support is very important. You're not alone. Surround yourself with people that support the kind of choices you're making. Seek out a community. I know one in particular that's really good. And that help support your goals. And the final thing, wait one more slide after this, the final thing is to redefine yourself. And this is what I've done. If you don't like how you are, change who you are. You are not that chubby boy, fat girl, poster child for junk food or perpetually fatigued professor suffering IBS. I won't go beyond that because I don't want TMI. Transform yourself. I'm not that person anymore. I am now this other person. Don't be a slave to the old you but be a vibrant, healthy person not controlled by the food. So become the one at the party that never touches the cookies or never drinks the soda and define yourself in that and fall in love with that. Just to bring all the way back to the rat research I've done, even in my rat research I found that if we get the rats, well we force them, they don't choose this, to after they've been on a refined diet for like nine months, we now put them only on the control diet for five weeks. Okay, so that's all they have access to now is now they were obese on the refined food, now they're eating the control diet. Then we test them on that motivation task, right? Progressively increasing the amount of work to get each reinforcer here and we see that they recover their motivation. So you can change yourself and if a rat can do it, so can you. Thanks. That was the best take home ever. So again, we have maybe time for two questions. I'm going to exert my chair's privilege again. So one of the things that you know, bloggers, right? Our job here is to help motivate people to actually dedicate an amount of time to Rob's whole thing of try it for 30 days, right? See how you look, feel and perform. How does this research inform a challenge, right? So you're challenging somebody to ditch all of these foods that are really messing with their ability to have a healthy relationship with food. So you're gonna say, I want you to go without these foods for X period of time. How can we refine those challenges to increase success? So you don't have the people who are jumping on a 30 day challenge and then falling back face first into a gallon of ice cream, not talking from personal experience at all there. But how can you use this research to improve the success rate of people who are starting on that pathway and not falling back into those yo-yo patterns? Yeah, it's a good question. And I think that my answer would be to actually explicitly teach them about these, the last eight, what can you do to take hold and control of your diet? To start actually explicitly making bullet points of those and that people can read and understand and start to work on. Those are actionable steps, I think. Thank you for an excellent presentation. Could we go backwards a few slides to the depression section? Because I wanted to ask for some clarifications. You mentioned magnesium. Oh yeah, this was just from that one paper I have linked here. I don't know how to pronounce it. Zinc, magnesium. Oh, it's not up there. How do you? Okay, in that study they talked about how zinc, magnesium, lithium and chromium are trace minerals that are deficient in people who have anxiety, diagnosed with anxiety and depression disorders. And are they suggesting supplementing lithium? Because I'm not really at all familiar with that. I don't remember the exact details. I think they were just saying that there's a relationship there. I don't remember if they were then advocating supplementation of those in particular. Or do they mention that? I don't know what they, I don't remember what they mentioned. If you want to email me later, and my email should be available, I'll send you the actual PDF of that paper. Okay, and then maybe another quick clarification on the habit formation, or how the habits are, yeah. You're talking about the disruption of habits? Right. So are you primarily talking about negative habits? So for example, Just habits in general. So maybe somebody who's obese if they have sped up habit learning, maybe they'll actually acquire the good habits more quickly. Possibly. By eating refined foods. What I did was I pulled out, well no, I mean the refined foods led them to a state. They're now in a phenotypic state where they more rapidly, at least according to research, can more rapidly acquire habits. They shift from doing something by knowing about the goal to doing it kind of on autopilot. That shift happens more quickly. So there's two different parts of the basal ganglia system I won't go into, but they that are involved with this transition. And they're shifting from one to the other more quickly is the idea. That's what I'm saying. Okay, so as far as acquiring new healthy habits, what does that suggest in terms of diet? Good, well there's hypotheses, one could test that could they then, if they then gave up those foods, that was the habit they were trying to train in. Would they be at an advantage compared to somebody who eats junk food but wasn't obese and didn't show an impaired habit learning? Would they have an advantage in actually acquiring a quicker habit to reject junk foods? Okay, thank you. Good question.