Can You Eat Your Way to a Healthier Brain? (Even Before You Can Talk)

Wood draws on Sheryl Hughes' food parenting framework: set up a healthy environment, model good food behaviors, and set boundaries while staying responsive to the child's needs. She shares her own parenting missteps—using screen time as a reward, which she realized was counterproductive, and a story where her partner let their 3-year-old eat only candy for three dinners until she stepped in. She believes the early years are an enriched opportunity to share health values, and that even if we can't yet point to a definitive study, it's unethical not to try.

Wood underscores that she could show a study finding parenting doesn't matter, which contradicts common sense and the weight of evidence. She notes that even with her own red meat study, she explicitly called it a single piece that needed replication. The danger of acting on one study is amplified by how media promotes surprising, often unreplicated findings. She advocates for a ‘body of evidence’ approach and reminds listeners that even robust findings occasionally generate a negative result.

Wood defines the Mediterranean diet as high in pulses, whole grains, low-fat dairy, white meat, fish, fruits, and vegetables, with moderate alcohol (a component she thinks will be dropped from future definitions). She admits the diet is 'nothing crazy—it's whole foods' and that in her metabolomic study, all healthy dietary patterns—Mediterranean, DASH, USDA—produced similarly beneficial metabolite profiles, suggesting that a whole-food, nutrient-dense pattern matters more than a specific name. She believes this could account for 90% of nutrition's impact for the average adult who is not an athlete or facing a specific condition, though she stresses that the food environment must be part of the conversation.

Wood argues that the RDA for protein is likely the wrong number and we need more nutrient-dense foods overall. She notes that fruits and vegetables are universally recommended yet intake remains low. She ties this to the red meat controversy: pushing a plant-based narrative without sufficient evidence risks steering people away from affordable, nutrient-dense animal proteins that could improve their diets. Her bottom line is that health is the goal, and multiple dietary paths exist, but we should not eliminate options without rigorous science.

Wood explains that child nutrition has been overlooked; even scientists at the USDA were surprised by the lack of studies. She is creating a cohort that will use blood samples to capture biomarkers of diet, because young children won't complete food frequency questionnaires and parents often don't know what they eat outside the home. The metabolomic data will then be used to examine how the same foods change the body and potentially influence long-term health. She hopes this will eventually provide a foundation for evidence-based dietary advice for children's cognitive and behavioral outcomes.

Wood's metabolomic study examined unprocessed and processed red meat intake in relation to inflammatory markers and found no significant association. When she presented these null findings at ASN, several audience members angrily criticized the study—one declared he would dedicate his career to proving her wrong—despite the session being filled with cross-sectional studies. A dietitian afterwards confided that for many of her patients, increasing red meat was the most achievable healthy change, but she was not allowed to say so. Wood reflects that this reaction shows how misinformation and bias permeate even the scientific community, and that demonizing an affordable, nutrient-dense food ignores the privilege embedded in plant-forward dietary pushes.

Wood describes metabolomics as tracking the molecules that appear in the blood after food is broken down, analogous to how a drug like aspirin acts. She shares that in her research, the metabolite–health outcome associations are “unbelievably stronger” than food–health associations. She has early evidence that some groups, like those with diabetes, may not show the expected metabolite signals from certain foods. Her own fructose intolerance—where watermelon passed through undigested—illustrates how someone can eat a food and get none of its metabolites. This interindividual variation is why she is excited about precision nutrition; eventually, a person's metabolomic profile might tailor dietary recommendations.

Wood has studied ADHD heritability with twins and confirms it is one of the most heritable childhood conditions. She notes that a biological rationale exists for food additives or dairy affecting behavior, but studies cannot yet show a population-level effect. She differentiates between an individual parent reporting improvement after removing a food (which she would not dismiss) and the ability to shift diagnostic rates across a population through diet. She also points out that studies in children are fewer and methodologically challenging, so this remains an open but currently unsupported area.