Junk Foods Cause 'Mental Illness'
Mental illness, which really boils down to unusual and socially 'unacceptable' behavior and ideas, may be caused by wrong nutrition, according to some recent studies reported in the UK press.
"Food can have an immediate and lasting effect on mental health and behaviour because of the way it affects the structure and function of the brain".
Image credit: Amanda Paganini
Most psychiatrists vehemently deny that foods, (lack of) nutrients, allergies and poisonous substances may be at the bottom of the 'deviant' behaviors they have laboriously codified in the psychiatric diagnostic manual. No wonder, accepting the obvious would make their profession all but superfluous. At the very least, psychiatrists would have to take some hints from clinical ecologists and nutritional counsellors.
Instead of merely classifying the manifestations of damage from wrong nutrition and toxic input, they would have to search for the real causes of biologic disequilibrium and propose remedies, not only to their patients but also to health authorities and even their colleagues in general medicine. The 'epidemics' of autism and attention deficit disorder, for instance, are time coincident with a multiplication of "preventive" vaccinations - from four in the seventies to twenty and in some places even more than thirty recommended "immunizations" today.
Certainly, drugging people is not the solution. Let's do something constructive about the disastrous 'mental health' situation.
The Guardian has a good article on the studies just released:
- - -
Rise in mental illness linked to unhealthy diets, say studies
· Patients benefit by cutting intake of junk food
· NHS warned of rise in £100bn bill
Felicity Lawrence
Monday January 16, 2006
The Guardian
Changes in diet over the past 50 years appear to be an important factor behind a significant rise in mental ill health in the UK, say two reports published today.
The Mental Health Foundation says scientific studies have clearly linked attention deficit disorder, depression, Alzheimer's disease and schizophrenia to junk food and the absence of essential fats, vitamins and minerals in industrialised diets.
A further report, Changing Diets, Changing Minds, is also published today by Sustain, the organisation that campaigns for better food. It warns that the NHS bill for mental illness, at almost £100bn a year, will continue to rise unless the government focuses on diet and the brain in its food, farming, education and environment policies.
"Food can have an immediate and lasting effect on mental health and behaviour because of the way it affects the structure and function of the brain," Sustain's report says. Its chairman, Tim Lang, said: "Mental health has been completely neglected by those working on food policy. If we don't address it and change the way we farm and fish, we may lose the means to prevent much diet-related ill health."
Both reports, which have been produced collaboratively, outline the growing scientific evidence linking poor diet to problems of behaviour and mood. Rates of depression have been shown to be higher in countries with low intakes of fish, for example. Lack of folic acid, omega-3 fatty acids, selenium and the amino acid tryptophan are thought to play an important role in the illness. Deficiencies of essential fats and antioxidant vitamins are also thought to be a contributory factor in schizophrenia.
A pioneering nutrition and mental health programme, thought to be the only one of its kind in Britain, was carried out at Rotherham, South Yorkshire. According to Caroline Stokes, its research nutritionist, the mental health patients she saw generally had the poorest diets she had ever come across. "They are eating lots of convenience foods, snacks, takeaways, chocolate bars, crisps. It's very common for clients to be drinking a litre or two of cola a day. They get lots of sugar but a lot of them are eating only one portion of fruit or vegetable a day, if that."
The therapy includes omega-3 fatty acids and multivitamins, with advice on cutting out junk food and replacing it with oily fish, leafy vegetables for folic acid, Brazil nuts for selenium, and food providing tryptophan.
Some patients who resist treatment with drugs accept nutritional therapy and most have reported an improvement in mood and energy. Ms Stokes said: "Within the first month there's been a significant reduction in depression. We've had letters from [the patients'] psychiatrists saying they can see a huge difference."
One sufferer who benefited from a dietary change was James McLean, who was at university when first diagnosed with bipolar disorder (manic depression). After he had been sectioned repeatedly, his father read about the role of nutrition in mental health. The pair went privately to the Brain Bio Centre, in London, where Mr McLean's nutrient levels were checked; he was allergic to gluten and yeast and was given supplements, including vitamin B and essential fatty acids.
"I'd been eating lots of intense carbohydrate foods ... because they were cheap, and very little fruit or vegetables," Mr McLean said. Now, he excludes wheat from his diet too. He added: "I have more energy and confidence, I sleep better, and I came off the anti-psychotic drugs, although I still take mood stabilising ones."
Andrew McCulloch, chief executive of the Mental Health Foundation, acknowledged that mental illness results from a complex interplay of biological, social, psychological and environmental factors, but thought diet should be an everyday component of mental health care. "It costs £1,000 a week to keep someone in a psychiatric hospital. How much does good food cost? We need mentally healthy school meals, and mentally healthy hospital foods," he said.
Best choices and worst:
Good for the brain:
Vegetables, especially leafy
Seeds and nuts
Fruit
Whole grains
Wheatgerm
Organic eggs
Organic farmed or wild fish, especially fatty fish
Bad for the brain:
Deep fried junk foods
Refined processed foods
Pesticides
Alcohol
Sugar
Tea and coffee
Some additives
You can get "Changing Diets, Changing Minds" from Sustainweb here.
The Mental Health Foundation's "Food and Mental Health" Campaign
See also:
LA Times: Psychiatry's sick compulsion: turning weaknesses into diseases
Unlike the rest of medicine, psychiatry diagnoses behavior that society doesn't like
Are we all going meshuggah, or are the experts crazy?
Psychiatric researchers recently estimated that half of the American population has had or will have a mental disorder at some time in their life. A generation ago, by contrast, only a small percentage of the American population was considered mentally ill. Are we all going mad?
Mental Illness or Allergy?
Food and/or chemical allergies can create emotional, behavioral and mental symptoms such as panic attacks, compulsive behavior, depression, psychotic episodes, or hallucinations.
The hidden dangers of caffeine: How coffee causes exhaustion, fatigue and addiction
posted by Sepp Hasslberger on Wednesday January 18 2006
updated on Monday December 6 2010
URL of this article:
http://www.newmediaexplorer.org/sepp/2006/01/18/junk_foods_cause_mental_illness.htm
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Readers' Comments
Until now this is what I found out about feeding myself and creating a life worth living.
1. The best thing you can do for your body is to give it more Omega-3-fatty acids to feed your brain with the right kind of fat. I suspect the reason of loosing weight during a manic episode is because another kind of fat is being burned in your brain, giving far too much energy! The balance between Omega-3 fatty acids and Omega-6 fatty acids is: too much omega-6 fatty acid against to little Omega-3 fatty acids. Taking about 3 grams of Omega-3 fatty acids a day will keep the doctor away!
2. Do not use too much Glutamate, especially in the evening, because it activates your brain and if no lithium is available to control it you may stay awake for too long. As lithium might be the way to control the amount of glutamate in your brain. Just like St Janskruid does for three other neurotransmitters.
3. Vitamin B3 may be the missing link in the way you use too little of it too control a possible damage of your digestive system that your brain is not provided with the right amount and contents of the Cholesterine molecules entering your brain as fuel. B3 is also said to be the missing link for Schizofrenia patients. I think it is good for ALL brainproblems because it is changing the way your body is creating fuel for the brain. If there is too much fat in the cholesterine the brain may get too much power so it can start a manic episode. B3 is the way HDL (with more protein) is created in a larger way. It is also the way Cholesterine patients can naturally return their cholesterine to normal levels. Take salmonoil to provide enough "good fat" to act with B3.
4. Vitamin B5 is the molecule which is needed by the living creatures to live. Without it life should not exist. Because of the working of your vitamin B3 it is good to know that a large amound of B5 is regulating your sugar and protein-digestion.
5. Vitamin B6 is used in the body to create every neurotransmitter to be existing in your brains. It can even regulate the amount of serotonin! That is why I take vitamin B-100 complex every evening to sleep well.
6. Vitamin B12 is probably the missing link for people with MD. Source: An ancient Greek minerals book. It provides Cobalt. That mineral must be taken by people with MD to regulate the amount of energy and hormons in the brain. It is most obvious that in larger amounts it could be replacing lithium if you are stable. Don't experiment yourself, go to your doctor!
7. Vitamin C provides a stress meter as I tell you elsewere on the site: Stressmeter
8. Inositol, although not sold in such a large amounts can be taken ub ab amount of 2000 mg to be a sleeping pill. A natural one because Inositol is a vitamin of the B-complex. To get to sleep for me I take only the B-complex now; about 100 micrograms of vitamin B12 is in it.
9. Take vitamin C to get activated in the morning. Take a large amount of vitamin B-complex in the evening to give your brain the right particles to create your sleeping hormons and also get your brain throughout the REM-sleep reorganizing your memory. In my opinion a manic episode is nothing more or less than a large reorganization of the memories of your brain, starting to virtually power the brain's capacity with twenty times. In that "run" your brain is trying to work around the large amount of not-processed emotions in your memory. Afterwards it feels like having re-organised your harddisk. At least that's what I feel.
10. Keep your emotions clearn on an every day basis and write them down or type them so that your family and friends have access to it and perhaps see in an early stage that it is going wrong with you.
11. Be careful with hypnotherapy because if you are stable and every MD patient can be stable after a Manic (eventually throughout Depression) episode. You can be thrown two years back in processing the emotions stored in your brain!
12. Lithium therapy worked with me the last time coming from a zero-level perfectly. As I had appointed with my wife she had to tell me I had to start. I did that and kept working, although a little "busy". My concern about lithium is that if you use it for a long time (I did for five years continuously) that it does not in any way start you to write away your information on daily basis. Without lithium I did actually keep my diary up-to-date. Now I am taking it again I did not come to it. As my opinion is that lithium is only tranquilizing your emotions I do not think your emotions are processed by lithium. Thinking in that way I have 5 years of unprocessed or partially processed emotions to come through to get ever live without lithium again (as I tried for a month.) I think the thing lithium does not (access with your memory) in a way vitamin B12 has to do in creating the right chemistry to put information into memory while asleep. read about it (sorry it is Dutch, but I will translate the most important parts of it.) If lithium were the right medicine, every MD-patient would not ever try without it because he or she would be happy with that.
13. If you had a good night's sleep and you want to feel what it was like taking no lithium (as I did for 25 years until diagnosed MD getting only a real Manic Episode at 16 resulting in a depressive one at 17) just drink 1,5 liter of water in the morning. In the afternoon most of the lithium is gone. In the evening you take your lithium again (as I do: 1 grams of lithium a day.)The risks of getting a manic episode from this are low because you got a good night's sleep. Perhaps if you do, tell your doctor.
14. My quest is not only to find out more about alternatives for myself. I suspect my daugther to be MD patient also because she is 2,5 and remembers information from her brain that I suspect is already exceptional. When she really has it I have 14 years to find out how to stop her Manic Episode in a more natural way that lithium does. Because she is a woman she needs a natural way because if she ever wants to get children she must not use a conventional tranquilizer. Hopefully she has only the memory of me and not the Manic-Depressive behaviour. In my family:my mother has it and an uncle has a light version of it only not sleeping well for a period of time. The uncle of my mother (her mother's side) commited suicide. He possibly didn't get out of a depressive episode. Family of my grand-father (mother's side) had also a different behaviour. I did not know whether it was MD and I cannot ask them because they are dead for a long time. It is said that the chance to give MD to your children is 5% As I look at the rates it is in my family I think with us the chance is much higher. Fortunately my grandfather (mother's side) added a hughe amount of humor into our family and that is theway most of us get through.
15. MD can still be a viral infection. I once read a piece that the Bora Virus is brought into connection with MD. You won't hear anything about it but in England a woman must be cured from MD by only using antibiotics. I would not use anti-biotics but will try it with Colloidal Silver in a few weeks. (My generator of that beautiful super-antibiotic is under-way) The reason you won't hear of a viral infection of it is the market of lithium and other anti-MD medicine.
16. MD is only a forced reorganization of your mind, invoked only when you have a lot of stress and emotional-input. You can't really stop it by taking lithium. But it will be less fierce and as for me it will last in a for you environment better-way for about two weeks. But can anyone tell me that if you are able to start lithium (from level 0) and blow away a manic-episode, why do you have to take lithium every day? If the emotional-input and stress are at normal levels you won't get manic, just like every "normal" person.
17. My version of MD is dependent of the seasons. I won't get a manic episode from March till September because I receive a lot of sunlight. Perhaps my brains run better on that. Order the book "The Field" of Lynne McTaggert to learn more about that. Next October I will use a bio-energy-light to try to keep my mind running in normal mode!
18. Fallling into sleep can sometimes be difficult: I use little natural things to get rid of my thoughts sometimes: Valeriane and Melisse. Vitamin B-complex before getting to sleep. Half an hour of nothing before get to sleep, just sitting quietly. Sometimes, in day seemingly depressed, St. Janskruid will help.
19. Writing down your emotions is the best thing to get rid of emotions. There is no other way for somebody suffering from bipolar disorder. If you have lithium or another psychodrug. The want to write down everything will be lowered. And that is not helping you out.
20. Taurine will help while taking lithium to keep year heart-rhytm as normal as possible (Also known to help while having low-bloodpressure)
21. Lysine will help to wipe away arteriosclerosis. Refer to this site for more information
22. Proline, Lysine and Vitamin C cooperate together to keep your bloodvessels in good shape.
23. Vitamin B3 will help to make more HDL-cholesterol in your body, probably the "better" fuel than LDL-cholesterol for your brains.
24. Vitamin B12 helps accessing memory and make your thoughts quick as they ought to be.
25. Vitamine B5 is known to play a role in your fiber and protein digestion.
26. Colloidal Silver (Silver solved in water) to keep away any virus, bacteria or other germ.
27. A Homeopatic Doctor prescribed me something so I can set aside things more easily. I believe it will work. It's no sense writing down which means he prescribed because it is done towards the person. If you'd like the idea of solving bipolar disorder this way,
you should visit a homeopatic doctor.
28. ... I will be translating the health-database from Dutch to English.
29 I am seeing my osteopath once every six weeks now and it is gread how my internal balance is restored by his treatment
You may want to see the progress and the whole database:"health in html format
Any suggestions or other tips: Mail them to me
Posted by: Tjarko Holtjer on January 19, 2006 06:54 PM
You may also want to mention caffeine allergy as a cause of ADHD and mental illness.
Written by Ruth Whalen, a medical technologist, with the foreword by A. Hoffer, M.D., Ph.D., "Welcome to the Dance: Caffeine Allergy, A Masked Cerebral Allergy and Progressive Toxic Dementia" (available at Amazon.com) explains caffeine allergy and toxicity as hidden causes of mental illness but doctors cannot figure that out.
Caffeine abuse is popular in the mentally ill community, but it is not well known that caffeine can sensitize and mask its own allergic response. With so many chemicals in our environment nowadays, it's a wonder that people are not allergic to more things. Or are they, and they are misdiagnosed? Anyhow, your website is terrific, and should help thousands of people.
Posted by: Pat on March 24, 2006 05:18 AM
Miss Ruth Whalen had some brief articles about caffeine allergy published online. I read them with interest; they were well written and well researched. Unfortunately, Miss Whalen's book, WELCOME TO THE DANCE, has no sense of rhythm and is flat footed.
This one-pound book includes too much material - taken almost directly from scientific papers written by others and available online. The information is important, but its presentation in this book needs serious editing and clarification.
The nontechnical parts of this book are "semiautobiographical" - drawn heavily from the author's life. As she tells it, she has certainly achieved a lot. Whalen seems to have been an anchor of the community, dependable, stable and bourgeois. She completed an advanced education, started a career and family, purchased and renovated houses, had a drivers' licence and traveled internationally. This book fails to present a worst-case scenario or to make its case as the author focuses mainly on the details of her own life, not on the plight of the mentally ill.
For years, Dr. Abram Hoffer has told his schizophrenia patients and the public that caffeine is dangerous and should be avoided. He wrote a mere two sentences about Whalen's book in his introduction to WELCOME TO THE DANCE.
Hoffer's advice about caffeine and Whalen's online articles are good, and should be sought out on the internet. Save the $25 price of WELCOME TO THE DANCE, get some Postum, and stay away from caffeine..
Posted by: Mark Twain on May 21, 2006 03:49 PM
Dear Sepp,
Thank you for posting information about my research on the damages of caffeine. Please note that "Mark Twain," who posted negative information about my work, is a previous associate of mine, a woman north of the US, slandering my work all over the web. She uses many names to do this. Extremely psychotic, she needs psychiatric help. Please see "One Bad Apple" on welcometothedancecaffeineallergy.com., written to warn people about her obsession with Dr. Hoffer and me and to warn them to stay away from her.
Thank you for the information you provide. I am sure you have helped millions of people.
Ethically,
Ruth
Posted by: RWhalen, MLT (ASCP) on June 20, 2006 07:34 AM
Thank you Ruth, for your clarification of the intervention of "Mark Twain". Good to know.
I don't know about millions of people, but it is entirely possible that a goodly number, after reading this or that article on my site, may have opened their eyes to new and previously unthought-of possibilities.
Sepp
Posted by: Sepp on June 20, 2006 10:57 AM
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
These articles are brought to you strictly for educational and informational purposes. Be sure to consult your health practitioner of choice before utilizing any of the information to cure or mitigate disease. Any copyrighted material cited is used strictly in a non commercial way and in accordance with the "fair use" doctrine.
