Food Affects How You Feel

Food Affects How You Feel
Harvard Health affirms that food affects how you feel. Your diet matters SO MUCH MORE than you think. 

Beat anxiety and depression by eating eating more fruits and vegetables!

“Serotonin is a neurotransmitter that helps regulate sleep and appetite, mediate moods, and inhibit pain. Since about 95% of your serotonin is produced in your gastrointestinal tract, and your gastrointestinal tract is lined with a hundred million nerve cells, or neurons, it makes sense that the inner workings of your digestive system don’t just help you digest food, but also guide your emotions. What’s more, the function of these neurons — and the production of neurotransmitters like serotonin — is highly influenced by the billions of “good” bacteria that make up your intestinal microbiome.”

Start paying attention to how eating different foods makes you feel — not just in the moment, but the next day. Try eating a “clean” diet for two to three weeks — that means cutting out all processed foods and sugar. Add fermented foods like kimchi, miso, sauerkraut, pickles, or kombucha. You also might want to try going dairy-free — and some people even feel that they feel better when their diets are grain-free. See how you feel. Then slowly introduce foods back into your diet, one by one, and see how you feel.

When my patients “go clean,” they cannot believe how much better they feel both physically and emotionally, and how much worse they then feel when they reintroduce the foods that are known to enhance inflammation. Give it a try!

Make sure these fruits and vegetables are free from glyphosate and the Roundup product.

Scientific studies have also discovered that glyphosate is an endocrine distruptor and can cause mental instability and mood disorders. 

Tryptophan is an α-amino acid that is used in the biosynthesis of proteins.  Tryptophan is an essential amino acid in humans, meaning that the body cannot synthesize it: it must be obtained from the diet through plant and animal sources that include grains, nuts, oats, wheat, and eggs (list not exhaustive). Tryptophan is also a precursor to the neurotransmitter serotonin and the hormone melatonin.  Tryptophan deficiency can lead to lower serotonin levels. This can result in mood disorders, such as depression.

Serotonin also impacts every part of your body, from your emotions to your motor skills. Serotonin is considered a natural mood stabilizer. It’s the neurotransmitter that helps with sleeping, eating, and digesting.

Glyphosate works in plants by disrupting the plants shikimate pathway.  The shikimate pathway is involved with the synthesis of the essential amino acids, phenylalanine, tyrosine, and tryptophan.  When we consume Roundup treated plants, we do not get the needed amino acids like tryptophan necessary for the synthesis of serotonin.

Another interesting point about glyphosate is that because of its chelating (binding and removing) abilities, it also reduces calcium and magnesium levels.

From the Harvard Health Blog:

Think about it. Your brain is always “on.” It takes care of your thoughts and movements, your breathing and heartbeat, your senses — it works hard 24/7, even while you’re asleep. This means your brain requires a constant supply of fuel. That “fuel” comes from the foods you eat — and what’s in that fuel makes all the difference. Put simply, what you eat directly affects the structure and function of your brain and, ultimately, your mood.

Like an expensive car, your brain functions best when it gets only premium fuel. Eating high-quality foods that contain lots of vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants nourishes the brain and protects it from oxidative stress — the “waste” (free radicals) produced when the body uses oxygen, which can damage cells.

Unfortunately, just like an expensive car, your brain can be damaged if you ingest anything other than premium fuel. If substances from “low-premium” fuel (such as what you get from processed or refined foods) get to the brain, it has little ability to get rid of them. Diets high in refined sugars, for example, are harmful to the brain. In addition to worsening your body’s regulation of insulin, they also promote inflammation and oxidative stress. Multiple studies have found a correlation between a diet high in refined sugars and impaired brain function — and even a worsening of symptoms of mood disorders, such as depression.

It makes sense. If your brain is deprived of good-quality nutrition, or if free radicals or damaging inflammatory cells are circulating within the brain’s enclosed space, further contributing to brain tissue injury, consequences are to be expected. What’s interesting is that for many years, the medical field did not fully acknowledge the connection between mood and food.

Today, fortunately, the burgeoning field of nutritional psychiatry is finding there are many consequences and correlations between not only what you eat, how you feel, and how you ultimately behave, but also the kinds of bacteria that live in your gut.

How the foods you eat affect how you feel read more here http://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/nutritional-psychiatry-your-brain-on-food-201511168626.

For more information on this topic, please see: Nutritional medicine as mainstream in psychiatry, Sarris J, et al. Lancet Psychiatry. 2015

The field of Nutritional Psychiatry is relatively new, however there are observational data regarding the association between diet quality and mental health across countries, cultures and age groups – depression in particular. Here are links to some systematic reviews and meta-analyses:

http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/99/1/181.long
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23720230
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4167107/

There are also now two interventions suggesting that dietary improvement can prevent depression:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3848350/
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4050338/

Diet during early life is also linked to mental health outcomes in children (very important from public health perspective):

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24074470
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25524365 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23541912

Extensive animal data show that dietary manipulation affects brain plasticity and there are now data from humans to suggest the same:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4563885/

Finally, while there are yet to be published RCTs testing dietary improvement as a treatment strategy for depression, the first of these is underway and results will be published within six months:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3636120/

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