Protect Your Mental Health With A Healthy Diet

Eating fresh fruits and vegetables daily can benefit our mental health as recent evidence suggests. Studies have shown that increased depression and anxiety can be linked to high calorie foods that are usually processed, high in fat that offer low or no nutritional value.  According to The Mental Health Foundation (UK) a number of mental health conditions could be influenced by dietary intake and growing evidence suggests that food plays an important role for the development, management and prevention of specific mental health problems.

In an excerpt from the Huffington Post. Carolyn Gregoire writes about the significant links to mind & gut health quoting from Drew Ramsey, M.D.

Diet May Be As Important To Mental Health As It Is To Physical Health

“The research has been mounting in recent years, and has expanded from a focus on individual nutrients to dietary patterns more broadly. In 2011, a large study found the modern Western diet (which is high in processed, high-calorie and low-nutrient foods) to be linked with increased depression and anxiety, as compared to a traditional Norwegian diet. 2014 review of studies, too, linked unhealthy dietary patterns with poor mental health and children and adolescents.

“For a long time in psychiatry, we’ve known that individual vitamins can have a big impact on mental health — vitamin B12, iron, magnesium — but really in the past 10 years, studies have begun to look more at dietary patterns, and that’s been quite revealing,” said Ramsey.

Growing evidence of the brain-gut connection also lends support the hypothesis that when it comes to mental health, food matters. The idea that there might be a significant link between gut health and brain health — and that gut bacteria imbalances in a number of neurological conditions, including anxiety, depression, autism, ADHD and schizophrenia — has gained steam in the scientific community. A 2014 neuroscience symposium even called the investigation of gut microbes a “paradigm shift” in brain science.

“The idea that brain health depends on gut health… that’s certainly the next wave of this,” Ramsey noted.

However, up to this point, the traditional line of treatment for mental health problems has been pharmaceutical interventions or treatments like talk therapy, or some combination of the two. Diet and exercise are rarely taken into consideration, except by “alternative” practitioners. Bringing diet into the equation would represent a major shift in the field of mental health care, opening up new modes of treatment and low-cost, low side-effect interventions for individuals suffering from a range of mental health concerns.

“Food should be the first line of defense because it’s a foundational treatment,” said Ramsey. “We really need to move away from thinking of things like diet and exercise as ‘complementary’ or ‘alternative.’ That’s really bad thinking…….”

Protect your mental health by eating a variety of fresh fruit & vegetables, complex carbohydrates, amino acids, essential fats, vitamins and minerals and by staying hydrated by drinking plenty of water accompanied by regular exercise.

An excerpt from article By Caroline Gregoire  Permission attained

Huffington Post.View full article here.

The Mental health Foundation – Diet and Mental Health

Seeking Help

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