The Connection Between Nutrition and Mental Health
Written by Julie Woon, MSJ
This Q&A is based on a conversation between podcast host Julie Woon and Alex McNulty, founder of McNulty Wellness Collective and a therapist specializing in anxiety disorders and holistic wellness approaches.
Can you tell us about your background and McNulty Wellness Collective?
Alex: I just celebrated three years in private practice after spending about five years at Johns Hopkins. I left to practice more holistically, moving away from the traditional medical model. I specialize in anxiety disorders and OCD, and I'm currently working toward my perinatal certification. We recently welcomed our first baby girl nine weeks ago, and we've also hired our first therapist to expand our services for women's perinatal and reproductive health. I have a special interest in nutrition because I've seen firsthand how it affects mental health, and I don't think mental health treatment is complete without looking at the whole body.
What inspired you to integrate wellness and mental health into your practice?
Alex: Initially, it came from helping my mom navigate a metastatic breast cancer diagnosis for about five years during grad school. None of her providers gave her nutrition information, but she took it upon herself to make nutritional changes—not focused on weight or appearance, but as an additional way of supporting her wellbeing. Despite the chaos her diagnosis caused, I had never seen her feel more empowered, just from having a sense of self-efficacy through how she chose to eat and nourish herself. At a time when so much was beyond her control, she could control this and nourish herself in a way that helped her mood.
Since then, I've seen incredible inspiration from my clients. I've seen clients start walking around the block and alleviate depressive symptoms, or discuss eating more frequently and completely discontinue daily panic attacks without any other intervention. It became harder to ignore these positive effects.
In simple terms, how does nutrition impact our mental health?
Alex: If we really think about it, it's hard to imagine how it wouldn't. Society has bought into the idea that our mind affects our body—like losing appetite when anxious—but we're learning more about how the body affects the mind. What was once thought to be unidirectional is actually much more bidirectional.
There are several ways nutrition affects mental health: blood sugar regulation, neurotransmitter production, hormone regulation, nutrient deficiencies, inflammation, and gut health. For example, with blood sugar regulation, our brain relies on glucose to function. Strong spikes and crashes—caused by prolonged periods without eating or eating simple carbs—cause our brain to release stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline to regulate quickly. This can come at the expense of our mental health. That's what's behind being "hangry"—it's a real thing.
Are there particular foods or dietary patterns that support mental wellness?
Alex: There's no one-size-fits-all approach, but some general recommendations can help. For addressing blood sugar, focus on eating frequently to avoid prolonged periods without food. I encourage focusing on foods to add rather than restrict—avoiding "naked carbs" by pairing carbohydrates with fats and proteins. If carbs are like kindling on a fire, fats and proteins are like slow-burning logs.
Other helpful practices include:
Eating fiber, which feeds good gut bacteria (whole grains, fruits, and vegetables)
Eating in a relaxed state—being in a parasympathetic "rest and digest" state rather than fight-or-flight
"Eating the rainbow"—incorporating diverse colors to get various phytonutrients
Many of these align with the Mediterranean diet, which is consistently recommended for good reason.
How do you explore eating habits as part of treatment with clients?
Alex: I ask about eating habits right on my intake form. I want to understand someone's relationship with food from the start—any history of disordered eating, but also just the impact food has on their life, positive or negative. It's helpful to know about restrictions like celiac disease or preferences like veganism, because this alerts me to potential nutrient gaps. For example, low vitamin B12 is associated with depression, and since it's often found in animal products, vegans might struggle to get adequate amounts.
How do you explore eating habits as part of treatment with clients?
Alex: I ask about eating habits right on my intake form. I want to understand someone's relationship with food from the start—any history of disordered eating, but also just the impact food has on their life, positive or negative. It's helpful to know about restrictions like celiac disease or preferences like veganism, because this alerts me to potential nutrient gaps. For example, low vitamin B12 is associated with depression, and since it's often found in animal products, vegans might struggle to get adequate amounts.
Have you encountered resistance to discussing food?
Alex: Absolutely. Food can be very emotionally charged—I think it's become as contentious as politics and religion because of misinformation and "shoulds." Many people have personal rule books about food created from culture, upbringing, and societal messages. I try to understand what someone's rule book says, then we can examine it together. I never focus on "good" or "bad" behaviors, but return to the question of why—is this working for you? If yes, great. If no, do we want to make changes?
How do you encourage nutritional changes without triggering shame or disordered eating?
Alex: I'm very careful with my words and never hand out sheets listing "good" and "bad" foods. I encourage nutritional choices as a tool for empowerment rather than shame. For example, choosing a side salad over fries because you notice fries make you feel depressed and irritable is very different from choosing it because you feel you've been "bad" and need to "make up for it."
I'm focused less on the behavior itself and more on the why behind it. Helping clients adopt a different paradigm that de-emphasizes calories and appearance while focusing on nourishment and mental wellness can actually combat diet culture. The most harmful nutritional advice I've seen promotes rigidity and reinforces toxic culture, especially for millennials who grew up with an intense focus on celebrity weight and appearance.
What are some accessible, realistic changes someone could make?
Alex: Focus on what to add, not what to take away. Instead of restriction, think about food as a source of nutrients. For example, when making pasta, I focus on what I can add to it. My husband and I get pizza almost every Friday because we have a newborn and a toddler, and I'm not cutting that out. But I started having a side arugula salad or broccoli—not to be "good," but because I notice it feels better on my gut.
Other simple changes:
Don't skip breakfast—we want smooth blood sugar and sustainable energy to start the day
Focus on food diversity—I enjoy eating bowls with brown rice, protein, and as many different colors as possible
Remember that we often overlook simple, traditional advice because we're so familiar with it
How do socioeconomic factors and food insecurity affect someone's ability to prioritize nutrition and mental health?
Alex: This is crucial but often overlooked. Food deserts exist due to economic inequality, redlining, and systemic factors, affecting available food choices. Programs like SNAP help reduce food insecurity and are how millions of Americans feed their families. The morality and judgment we attach to food choices are absurd when we don't recognize that people often have limited options.
It's not that healthy people make good choices—people need good choices available to make. To promote health and wellness, we need food accessibility and must address systemic issues. We've become accustomed to judging people's food choices without recognizing the constraints they face.
Can you explain the gut-brain connection and its role in mental health?
Alex: This could be a thousand episodes! Basically, we're familiar with our central nervous system (brain and spinal cord), but there's also the enteric nervous system located along the GI tract, containing hundreds of millions of neurons—it's called the "second brain."
When we feel danger, fight-or-flight kicks in, and the enteric nervous system slows or stops digestion because our body wants to use energy to fight or flee, not digest. Unfortunately, our bodies don't distinguish between running from a tiger and getting a work email.
What's interesting is that the vagus nerve allows two-way communication between the gut and the brain. Actually, 80% of vagus nerve messaging goes from gut to brain, only 20% the other way. Having a diverse, healthy microbiome affects what's communicated back up to the brain.
What's one myth about nutrition and mental health you wish people would stop believing?
Alex: That "food is medicine." Food is an important piece of mental wellness, but it's also culture, community, and comfort. If we conflate it with medicine, we detract from medicine's importance and inadvertently moralize its use, as if it's a last resort after poor nutritional choices. This idea is entrenched in ableism and privilege. Nutrition is a wonderful tool, but it's one of many tools.
If you could get everyone to make one small change, what would it be?
Alex: Take your lunch break. Stop eating while reading emails. I'm guilty of this too, but eating while stressed affects digestion and intuition. We're not focused on nourishing ourselves properly. So take your lunch break.
What advice would you give someone who feels overwhelmed and doesn't know where to start?
Alex: Just pay attention to how you feel when you eat. Information itself can be good inspiration. We tend to over-rely on external cues—rules and "shoulds"—and have lost our ability to identify internal cues and intuition. It's a lot of unlearning, but paying attention more and drowning out the noise is worthwhile, even if it's not easy.
Want to hear more from Alex? Check out the YMyHealth podcast on YouTube and your favorite streaming platform.