Nutrition & Health News This Week

Gisele's anti-depression diet, the link between exercise and sleep, and more.

What supermodel Gisele ate to cure her depression

It’s hard to believe that supermodels or any of the super-rich über-class, with their access to elite everything—coaches, doctors, eye creams—can be misled on something so basic as healthy eating, but maybe the greater the gild, the more the groupthink. And for some years now, the groupthink on diet has trended vegan. All the celebrity vegans…sigh, too many to name. 

Now, however, some are quietly acknowledging the deficits of this way of eating, including deficiencies in such nutrients as vitamin B12, calcium, iodine and iron, as Robert Downey, Jr. reluctantly disclosed earlier this year. And Gisele Bündchen is now acknowledging that she developed iron deficiency anemia on the “whole foods, plant-based” approach she followed for years with her former husband, Tom Brady.

Gisele, who is currently on the publicity circuit promoting a new cookbook, says that her lifestyle and some shoulder surgeries left her depressed. “She was told that she needed to change her diet, get eight hours of sleep, and exercise daily,” The Cut reports. “Once she did that, she said she became a different person…And poof! There goes the depression.” Since we can assume that a supermodel and wife of one of the greatest athletes of all time was already well-informed on the importance of exercise and sleep, we’re going to assume that diet was the transformative agent for her mental health.

The news we’re all clamoring for--obviously--is, what does this impossibly beautiful and now more emotionally resilient woman eat? Gisele gives very few details. We learn that she never consumes white sugar, calling the ingredient “poison,” although she seems to eat plenty of fruit and whole grains. She eats eggs for breakfast—a frittata or omelet— to consume enough protein. And after breakfast? She goes vague…maybe a smoothie, she says, or…who knows, maybe, like many supermodels, she lives on air. But here’s what we see in the pictures: some eggs…and what’s that? Steak?!

The steak pic in the New York Times print edition is why I thought to write this story (No, it was not my regular rounds of reading The Cut, People, and Harper’s Bazaar…) The picture doesn’t appear in the online version of the article, however. Could the omission be a Freudian slip or an error by a Times photo editor? Friends of Gisele, please (LOL) report back.

Nutrient deficiencies in children

Nutritional deficiencies on the vegan diet are a feature, not a flaw, and while celebrities can easily self-correct, young children are not so lucky, according to an article called “Potential Micronutrient Deficiencies in the First 1000 Days of Life; The Pediatrician on the Side of the Weakest,” published last week in Current Obesity Reports. Italian researchers found that children on a vegan diet during this vulnerable time of life are inherently at high risk of being deficient in calcium, iron, and vitamins A, D, and B12. Diets lacking animal foods do not contain these nutrients in a form that can be (easily) absorbed by humans. A deficiency in vitamin B12 is especially concerning: it has been associated with neuronal changes that lead to damage to the auditory and visual systems, interfering with learning and social interaction, according to the authors. Newborns with vitamin B12–deficient mothers are usually asymptomatic at birth but will develop clinical signs at 4–6 months. These may include “irreversible neurological damage.”