The Science That Could Change Mental Healthcare, If Regulations Would Let It

Professor Julia Rucklidge has spent three decades proving that the right vitamins and minerals can transform mental health outcomes. The evidence is extraordinary. The system’s resistance is equally so. There is a moment in this conversation that stops you cold. Professor Julia Rucklidge is describing the birth outcomes from the Neutral Mums study, a randomised controlled trial in which depressed pregnant women were given either a placebo or a broad-spectrum micronutrient formula. The babies born to mothers in the micronutrient group needed resuscitation at birth at a rate of 15 percent. For the placebo group and those on standard antidepressant care, that rate was 45 percent. A threefold difference. Published in 2024 in the British Journal of Psychiatry Open. And almost nobody is talking about it. “I can’t imagine a mum, under informed consent, knowing the differential outcome, wouldn’t choose that over that,” Rucklidge says quietly. The frustration in her voice is the quiet kind, the kind that comes after decades of watching extraordinary evidence fail to change practice. Back to the Future: Pigs, Farmers, and a Radical Idea Rucklidge is a clinical psychologist by training, though she gave up the one-on-one clinic work when she realised she had better uses of her time. The direction of those better uses arrived in an unlikely form: a story about pig farmers in southern Alberta. The farmers had been adding high-dose vitamin and mineral supplements to the feed of pigs suffering from what was known as ear-and-tail syndrome, a condition in which animals become aggressive, biting each other’s ears and tails. The result: the behaviour stopped. Someone connected that discovery to a family member struggling with psychiatric symptoms, who tried the same formula. It worked. “If you go back in time, before psychopharmacology,” Rucklidge reflects, “our ancestors would talk about the primary cause of insanity as imperfect nutrition. This is back to the future.” The idea that a brain starved of essential micronutrients becomes dysregulated, and that supplying those nutrients can restore regulation, became the animating force of her research career. The brain accounts for roughly 2 percent of body weight but consumes about 20 percent of the body’s metabolic energy. It is, by any measure, hungry. The Recommended Daily Allowances for vitamins and minerals were never designed with that hunger in mind. Evidence Built Under Pressure The research grew from small open-label studies to randomised controlled trials. The first major area was ADHD, where Rucklidge found that while core symptoms improved, the more powerful effect was on what she calls emotional dysregulation: a trans-diagnostic quality that shows up across mood disorders, anxiety, and behavioural challenges. “We’d see this calmness, this improvement in their regulation of their mood and affect,” she says. It wasn’t being captured in the standard questionnaires. It was, in many ways, more important. Then the Christchurch earthquake happened. In September 2010, Rucklidge happened to have two groups of research participants, some already taking micronutrients, some not. In the days and weeks of ongoing aftershocks that followed, she checked in with both. Those who were well-nourished at the time of the quake recovered faster: anxiety dropped sooner, stress resolved earlier, mood stabilised more quickly. The effect was later replicated in Alberta after a flood, by researcher Bonnie Kaplan. Then came the March 2019 Christchurch mosque attacks. Unable to secure public health funding for a formal study, Rucklidge fundraised and gave micronutrients away free to members of the Muslim community. Volunteers moved house to house, handing out supplements and collecting questionnaire data. The pattern held: the well-nourished recovered better, even when the nourishment came after the trauma. “The fight-or-flight response is metabolically hungry. It depletes you of nutrients really quickly. So you’re giving the body more of exactly what it needs, precisely when it needs it.” The Neutral Mums Study The work that Rucklidge describes with the deepest sense of both pride and frustration is the Neutral Mums study, a project that began as a straightforward RCT into treating depression during pregnancy and grew, across three PhDs and multiple masters projects, into something far larger. The study recruited pregnant women with depression who were choosing not to take antidepressants, a group more common than many assume, given widespread anxiety about medication use during pregnancy. They were randomised to either a broad-spectrum micronutrient formula (Daily Essential Nutrients) or a placebo. The headline findings on maternal depression were positive. But the birth outcomes were the revelation:

• Resuscitation at birth: 15% in the micronutrient group vs. 45% in the standard care and antidepressant group
• Low birthweight: No cases in the micronutrient group vs. approximately 10% in standard care
• Preterm birth: Lower in the micronutrient group
• Postpartum haemorrhage: Roughly halved in the micronutrient group

The infants themselves differed significantly. Babies born to mothers who had taken micronutrients were better regulated, showed improved motor control, habituated more effectively to their environment, and had fewer abnormal reflexes. Effect sizes between 1.0 and 1.2 standard deviations. Follow-up at six months found that the rate of postnatal depression in mothers who had taken micronutrients during pregnancy was between 8 and 11 percent. For women who experienced depression during pregnancy and are untreated, the risk of postnatal depression runs between 50 and 92 percent. The micronutrient group came in at roughly the same rate as the general population, as though the risk factor had been neutralised. Dysregulated Teenagers The second major recent trial looked at teenagers with emotional dysregulation, specifically irritability, aggression and mood instability, who didn’t necessarily carry a psychiatric diagnosis. The study was the first to receive New Zealand Health Research Council government funding in this area. The data monitoring committee required weekly screening for suicidal ideation, a precaution borrowed from the antidepressant literature, where this is a known risk. The irony is that the micronutrient data showed the opposite effect: suicidality tracked down, significantly more in the treatment arm than in the placebo arm. “It was such a good news story,” Rucklidge says, and then pauses. “We have gotten nowhere in terms of trying to get those data out there and influencing anything.” The Wall: New Zealand’s Regulatory Maze Supplements in New Zealand are governed by the Dietary Supplement Regulations of 1985, legislation from before seatbelts were required in the backs of cars. Under those regulations, a supplement cannot make claims to prevent or treat disease. The Medicines Act of 1981 reserves that territory for pharmaceuticals. The result: when a supplement is shown to treat or prevent disease, it becomes a de facto medicine and access suddenly requires a prescription from a doctor with no training in nutrition. Rucklidge tested this herself. She went to her own GP, the researcher behind 70+ publications on this product’s efficacy and safety, and requested a prescription. The GP’s practice declined. The reasons given: it was an unapproved medicine, and Rucklidge had no psychiatric diagnosis. “We cannot let supplements get regulated into the medicine space, because it just puts them into the hands of people who have no knowledge of nutrition. Why should I have to visit my doctor every time I want to keep myself well?” The core absurdity she names plainly: “We know vitamin C prevents scurvy. You cannot legally sell an orange with that written on the label.” The Bigger Picture: Reward, Dysregulation, and the Misdiagnosis of a Generation The conversation opens out into broader territory. The idea of a reward-system dysregulation epidemic, in which ultra-processed food, social media, gaming, vaping and other modern forces are collectively pushing young people’s dopamine baselines below normal, is something Rucklidge finds resonant. She has been moving away from diagnostic categories for years. What concerns her is the reflex: more diagnoses, more stimulants, without asking what upstream forces pushed so many people there. “We’re all on a continuum,” she says. “What our current mismatched environment is doing is pushing the middle ground up, so more people end up in the impaired category. Is it appropriate to just allow more and more professions to call people ADHD so we can medicate them? Or do we take a more grown-up approach and ask what the hell pushed so many people into that category in the first place?” Nutrition is not the whole answer. She’s clear about that. But it is an easy lever with a big reward, and one that the regulatory framework is currently making very hard to pull. Based on Prevention is Cure, Episode #50, featuring Prof. Grant Schofield Learn more about Professor Julia Rucklidge’s research: University of Canterbury profile Professor Grant Schofield: profgrantschofield.com If this kind of research resonates with you, and you feel a pull to help people through the science of prevention, the power of nutrition, and lifestyle medicine, maybe health coaching is the place for you. Get in touch with PREKURE.