Associate Psychiatrist, MGH
Director of Nutritional & Metabolic Psychiatry: MGH
Director of Nutritional & Lifestyle Psychiatry: MGH Academy
Professional Chef & Part-time Culinary Instructor: Cambridge School of Culinary Arts
Nutrition Specialist
MoodFoodMD

Dr. Uma Naidoo is a board-certified, Harvard-trained psychiatrist who also trained as a Professional Chef, and studied Nutrition. Upon graduating from the Cambridge School of Culinary Arts, she won the school’s most coveted award, the MFK Fisher Award for Innovation in Cooking. She is the author of the first book in Nutritional Psychiatry called: “This Is Your Brain on Food,” which is based on her clinic and her research.

Dr. Naidoo is the Founder and Director of Nutritional and Lifestyle Psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), the first and only such hospital-based program in the United States. At MGH, Dr. Naidoo also serves as the Director of Nutritional Psychiatry at the MGH Academy, the world-renowned educational organization, for which she designed and released the only CME-based Nutritional Psychiatry educational program for clinicians.

In addition to her work at MGH, Dr. Naidoo serves on the faculty at Harvard Medical School where she worked to integrate Nutritional Psychiatry into the MGH/McLean residency training curriculum since 2016. She is on the faculty of the Harvard Department of Nutrition; and The Cambridge School of Culinary Arts. Dr. Naidoo was commissioned by the American Psychiatric Association to write the first textbook in Nutritional Psychiatry.

She serves as a regular media contributor at CNBC and is on the Harvard Health Publishing Editorial Advisory Board. She has been invited by the World Economic Forum to consult on their New Frontiers of Nutrition initiative.
Internationally after being one of only four US physicians to be invited to meet personally with the former HRH The Prince of Wales, now King Charles III, she was asked to lead a public health Food for Mood Campaign with the UK College of Medicine, where she serves as the US Ambassador for Mental Health.

Stemming from her Hindu roots which emphasize the mind-body connection, Dr. Naidoo has spent her life exploring the connection between mood and food. In her work, she aims to offer individuals more tools to improve their mental well-being using nutrition, lifestyle and metabolic health as the basis of her clinical work and research.