Power Up Recovery with Nutrition Podcast · Academy for Addiction and Mental Health Nutrition

Modern Psychiatry and Addiction Recovery: Feeding the Brain with Umar Latif, MD S02E22

December 28, 2025·55 min·2 clips

We start with foundations. Let's look at root cause analysis. Is this micronutrient deficiency? Is this amino acid depletion?

Christina Veselak interviews Dr. Umar Lateef about the intersection of nutrition and mental health recovery. Dr. Lateef is a triple board-certified psychiatrist specializing in addiction medicine who works with military, veterans, and first responders. He explains his transition from conventional psychiatry to functional psychiatry, noting the gap between evidence-based and evidence-informed treatment. He criticizes the monoamine hypothesis still taught despite being debunked, and points out that 83% of federal medical funding goes to drugs/devices—leaving nutritional research unfunded. He introduces Psychiatry 3.0: a whole-person paradigm integrating neuroscience, psychotherapy, root cause analysis, lifestyle medicine, and nutritional interventions. His methodology starts with foundation-level assessment: food quality, hydration, electrolytes, circadian rhythm, and micronutrient/amino acid status before supplementation.

As heard by us

A practical case for treating nutrition as part of recovery, not an afterthought.

Power Up Recovery with Nutrition treats recovery as something that can be shaped by whether the body and brain are adequately fed. It works best when it links cravings and relapse to the simple problem of going too long without eating, then shows how blood sugar drops can set…

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You want a recovery episode that puts nutrition at the center of relapse prevention.

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