Can multivitamins actually help with depression, anxiety, or mental well-being? The honest answer for many people is skepticism.

That’s exactly how the recent episode of The Doctor’s Kitchen Podcast begins.

Host Dr. Rupy Aujla openly shares that he never believed multivitamins had much impact — especially when it came to mental health. Like many people, his experience with supplements had been limited to basic, low-dose products that didn’t seem to move the needle.

What follows in his conversation with Professor Julia Rucklidge is not a pitch for pills — but a reframing of how we think about nutrition, the brain, and mental wellbeing.

Professor Rucklidge is a clinical researcher and professor at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, where she has spent decades studying the relationship between nutrition and mental health. Her work spans numerous clinical trials and long-term research programs focused on how micronutrients affect mood, emotional regulation, stress resilience, and psychiatric symptoms.

That depth of experience shapes the entire conversation.

The Problem Isn’t Nutrients — It’s How We’ve Been Using Them

Early in the episode, Professor Rucklidge makes a key distinction that shapes the entire discussion:

The issue isn’t whether nutrients matter.

The issue is how we’ve been trying to use them.

She explains that mental health is complex, and the brain is complex — yet much of nutrition research and supplement culture has focused on single nutrients at a time:

• Vitamin D for depression
• Magnesium for anxiety
• Omega-3s for focus
• Iron for fatigue

Throughout the conversation, she returns to the same point: the brain does not operate on one nutrient at a time. Every neurotransmitter pathway, stress response, and energy system depends on many nutrients working together.

So when people conclude that “multivitamins don’t work,” what they are often reacting to is a very specific experience: low-dose, generic products designed to prevent deficiency — not to support brain function.

That distinction becomes one of the most important takeaways from the episode.

Why the Brain Is Different From the Rest of the Body

A central theme Dr. Rupy and Professor Rucklidge explore is that the brain is not just another organ to be treated like muscle or bone.

During the episode, she describes the brain as:

• Highly energy-dependent
• Exceptionally sensitive to stress and inflammation
• Dependent on precise chemical signaling
• Constantly adapting to environment and experience

Because of this, the brain’s nutritional needs are not only higher — they are broader and more interconnected.

When those needs are not met, the consequences don’t show up as obvious physical symptoms.

They show up as:

• Mood swings
• Low resilience
• Irritability
• Anxiety
• Emotional overwhelm
• Difficulty focusing
• Reduced stress tolerance

In the conversation, this becomes a turning point — reframing many “mental” struggles as experiences that may also have a biological and nutritional component.

The Shift From Deficiency Prevention to Brain Support

Another major idea discussed in the episode is that most multivitamins were never designed with mental well-being in mind.

They were designed to prevent deficiency diseases.

Professor Rucklidge explains that preventing scurvy, rickets, or anemia is not the same thing as supporting emotional regulation, stress chemistry, and brain energy metabolism.

Throughout the discussion, she emphasizes that mental health support requires a different nutritional lens — one that looks beyond minimum daily values and asks what the brain actually uses to function.

This moment in the episode reframes the entire multivitamin debate.

The question stops being:

“Do multivitamins work?”

And becomes:

“What happens when nutrients are used not just to avoid illness — but to support how the brain actually operates?”

Why This Matters in the Real World

What makes this episode resonate is how closely it reflects modern life.

Dr. Rupy and Professor Rucklidge touch on the realities many people are living with:

• Rising mental health struggles
• Chronic, not occasional, stress
• Diets dominated by ultra-processed foods
• Constant cognitive and emotional load

Yet most mental health conversations still focus almost entirely on symptoms, coping strategies, or crisis response.

What often goes unexamined, as highlighted throughout the podcast, is whether the brain is being consistently supplied with the raw materials it depends on.

Where Hardy Nutritionals Fits Into This Conversation

The philosophy explored in this podcast episode is the same philosophy on which Hardy Nutritionals was built.

Not that one vitamin fixes one problem — but that the brain functions as a system.

That’s why Hardy formulas were never designed to resemble conventional multivitamins.

They were built to be:

• Broad rather than narrow
• Meaningfully dosed rather than symbolic
• Balanced rather than isolated
• Designed to nourish the brain, not just meet minimums

This systems-based view is reflected in both Hardy micronutrient formulas, Daily Essential Nutrients, and Optimal Balance.

Daily Essential Nutrients was created to provide comprehensive micronutrient support for individuals navigating deeper, ongoing, or complex mental health challenges.

Optimal Balance was created as a more accessible, lower-potency option to support everyday emotional wellbeing, mood balance, stress resilience, and sleep — backed by its own research and designed for long-term daily use.

They exist not because “multivitamins are good,” but because the brain deserves better nutritional support than it has historically been given.

The Real Question the Podcast Raises

By the end of the episode, the most powerful question isn’t:

“Should I take a multivitamin?”

It’s: “What would change if mental health care took nutrition as seriously as neurotransmitters, therapy models, and behavior strategies?”

Because no matter what tools someone uses — therapy, medication, lifestyle change, or all of the above — the brain is still doing the work.

And brains need nourishment.

Final Thoughts

This podcast episode doesn’t promise cures. It doesn’t oversimplify mental health. And it doesn’t reduce suffering to nutrient levels.

What it does — through an honest conversation between a skeptical host and a researcher who has spent decades studying nutrition and mental health — is open the door to a quieter, more foundational truth:

Mental wellness doesn’t start with willpower.
It starts with biology.

And biology starts with what we give the body to work with.

If nothing else, this conversation invites a re-examination of something many people have written off — and asks whether multivitamins didn’t fail us…

…but whether we’ve been asking the wrong things of them.

About Hardy Nutritionals®

Hardy Nutritionals® multivitamin-mineral products are powered by our proprietary NutraTek™ mineral delivery technology, which combines each mineral with specialized organic molecules—just like nature—to optimize absorption and distribution to body cells. Our flagship supplement, Daily Essential Nutrients, is widely considered to be the most research-backed micronutrient treatment.