What if, instead of starting with your stress levels, work and relationships, a therapist asked you what you had for lunch? Good mental health starts with good brain health. Good brain health starts with healthy, optimal brain development. Healthy brain developments starts with pre-conception nutrition. In this MyNutriBookClub, we’ll read and review the book, ‘Unprocessed: How the Food We Eat is Fuelling our Mental Health Crisis’ written by Chartered psychologist and nutritionist, Kimberley Wilson. Is that a correct way that I’ve said that? And that, to me, is the biggest argument I’ve heard for working with ourselves and our children, with these technologies. Forget about the fact that they’re buying us, they are messing with our baseline sense of well-being on a minute-to-minute basis. Wilson: I guess we should start with saying that, of course, these aren’t the only — nutrition isn’t the only cause and cure of mental health concerns, and I think we need to be careful not to lay the responsibility fully with the individual.

I am not sure I could choose a single favourite. The books I love tend to have served different purposes over time. In the running would be Like Water for Chocolate, Don Quixote, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Man’s Search for Meaning and On the Shortness of Life. What do you think are the key ingredients of a good book? And the reason that that’s so important, I think, is about understanding that relationship between that and our emotionality, because our emotionality is anchored in our bodies. And part of that is going to be about what your body is telling your brain about how the situational, the contextual information is being perceived and understood. I think Don Quixote would be a good choice. There’s plenty of it, so I could while away the hours. And, of course, it is a depiction of the power of the ‘sustaining fantasy’, which I might have need of if I were all alone on this desert island. Which book do you find therapeutic to read?

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By enrolling on this masterclass, you’re helping to support the Guardian, and this allows us to keep our quality reporting open to all. You will discover, through evidence-based research, the foods and nutrients the brain needs and what happens when there are imbalances in your diet. You will learn the crucial importance of good sleep, and why regular physical activity is one of the best investments you can make for your long-term brain health. This course has now passed, but you can be the first to know about the next one - and other workshops like this - by signing up to our newsletter here. Memories are often fallible. We often forget difficult times. Part of therapy is re-evaluating and reframing memories in light of new information. It’s less about what happened and more about how we understand it. So much of our diet is ultra-processed, but we just consider them normal foods: I think very few people would recognise baby formula or baby rusks as UPF, but by definition, they are,” says Wilson.

Featuring comments from Sophie Medlin, Chair for the British Dietetic Association, she looks at how blood sugar levels, gut microbiome diversity and inflammation affect emotional wellbeing – and the role of diet in managing all three. Tippett: And again, some of the things that you prescribe for, for example, minimizing stress or working with stress are things that are free: [ laughs] fresh air, natural light, sleep, rituals, the quality of our relationships. You also talk about arguments for limiting exposure to the news, as a therapeutic intervention. And I have to say, I — or, probably, to social media; or, those two things are synonymous, these days. I have to say, one of the most fascinating podcasts I listened to that you did was on dopamine, another neurotransmitter that we — is a word that we toss around. I certainly associate dopamine with that dopamine hit one gets from getting a notification or going online, being on social media. It was absolutely terrifying and illuminating to hear you talk about the importance of dopamine, not as a high, but just as one of the things that helps us decide to get out of bed in the morning, that helps with our overall pleasure in life; and what you explained is that what disrupts dopamine, or what plays with dopamine, actually works to diminish the baseline of that basic energy we have for life. The convenience of these foods means that they increasingly displace more nutritious but more labour-intensive foods from our diets,” Wilson writes. Diet and dementia risk

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Wilson: I think it probably depends on the context. But it really doesn’t, I think, perhaps make too much sense to think about the gut without thinking about the microbes that live there, because really, other than the job of the microbiome, what happens in the gut is largely absorption of water from fecal matter. It’s really about what the microbes are doing there in conjunction with the immune cells. If you are hoping to conceive or are currently pregnant or have young children then the book has some merit. If you are, like me, middle aged then you may as well give up all hope as the author does not give you any. In the United States, 60% of nutritional intake comes from ultra-processed foods – products that have undergone extensive changes and bare little resemblance to natural whole foods.