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Nutrition for mental health
By Meira Eliot
Like many people I suppose, I can look around my circle of family and friends and see a variety of ongoing mental health problems, some mild, ranging from bouts of insomnia, anxiety and mild depression, some severe, including paranoia and schizophrenia.
I have been doing some online research on links between nutrition and mental health issues and would be really interested to follow this up in more detail. If anyone out there can shed more light on these links, especially if backed up with research and studies, I would be grateful for some more intel!
I am particularly interested in the following nutritional components:
Niacin, or Vitamin B3, has been shown to have beneficial effects in treating depression and schizophrenia. Niacin deficiency is associated with a disease called pellagra, where sufferers may have a range of symptoms including black tongue, sleep disorders, anxiety, depression and skin lesions. Long-term deficiency is also associated with less obvious personality changes, such as an increasing tendency to lead a solitary life as one gets older. In a controlled experiment in a psychiatric hospital patients with severe symptoms experienced relief from them when given niacin supplements. Their symptoms worsened when they ceased to receive the supplments and then improved again when niacin supplements were restored.
Omega 3 is sometimes mentioned as having a beneficial effect on schizophrenia and certain dementias, diseases associated with dopamine levels in the brain. Omega 3 is present in ocean fish and in linseed oil.
Antioxidants, such as found in Acai berries may also help to improve brain functioning and therefore alleviate mental disorders and symptoms.
Now I am NOT suggesting here that there is a simple cause and effect relationship between nutrition and mental health issues - if one person eating a healthy nutritious diet shows mental symptoms and another person on a similar diet does not then we must take the complex picture, including genetics and stress factors in the environment, into account. NOR am I suggesting that a nutritional connection in diagnosis and treatment of serious mental illness, or even mild ones, should immediately have us all reaching for our pharmaceutical medications and flushing them down the drain.
What I would be very interested in is an informed discussion and hopefully pooling of experience and intel. We could potentially do a lot of good here. |
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmmQ9fIwvQ0http://
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