Our food and mental well being

When we take a look at tradition, we can see that people used to use herbs and food as medicine for illnesses. This is an approach that we still turn to, but our main focus has shifted to drugs as our main source of medicine, and this is also applicable for our mental health problems. The improvement of the science of medicine brought a great increase in human life quality and we can survive many illnesses that we couldn’t before, but we also should take a step back sometimes and reconsider if we are doing everything right. Maybe drugs are not the solution for every problem we have both regarding our physical, both our mental health.

Prevention

“Good mental health starts with prevention”, this is considered an overall truth that we hear a lot. Although, what can we actively do something to prevent mental conditions? A lot. The prevention of ill mental health has many components including good parenting, human relationships, balanced work-life, good social media use, expressing your feelings and even physical activity and a balanced diet among many others.

If we think logically: what we eat, breath and put on our skin becomes slowly the thing that builds up our body, like water, oxygen and the nutrients (including vitamins and minerals). Our body gets the energy for it to live and thrive and as every cell in our body, our nerves are affected too. Our brain needs a set of nutrients regularly to function well since the brain itself is built up from fatty acids, water and other nutrients.

The effect of food on our mood

On the other hand, what do I mean when I say it can even affect our mental health? Changes in our diet can cause changes in mood, cognitive functioning, energy and even behaviour. A very simple example of how food is connected with our brain and mood is coffee. I guess everyone has felt the energy boost a cup of coffee gives as it has a very immediate and direct effect on our mood. On the other hand, it has many other effects on our body and even eating patterns can have a less immediate but long-term effect on our mental wellbeing. Just like how our car’s performance is affected by the quality of the fuel, our brain’s performance is affected by the food we eat.

The connection between food and
mental health problems

There is a growing body of evidence, that different foods affect overall mental wellbeing, but even mental conditions like depression, anxiety, hyperactivity (ADHD), schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s. Eating more fruits and vegetables and fish (like salmon mackerel and sardines) can have a big impact on our mood on longterm^1,2. An alarming finding, that modern diet including processed food, high sugar intake, fatty meals and simple carbohydrates have a bad impact on kids mental health³. Even more, some studies say that a shift in diet can lower the symptoms of depression⁴. To explore these topics I need more time and a separate article, this is just a short introduction to the power of food over our mental health.

Food that benefit your mental health

I would close this article by a little guide on what to eat to benefit our mental health. For prevention an overall rule: what is good for your physical health that is good for your mental wellbeing too. This means that a balanced diet should include⁵:

As you can see this really overlaps with the nutritional guidelines for your physical health I wrote about in this article.

In conclusion, balanced nutrition is very important for our body, including our brain. If we want to spend our every day on the highest potential possible it worth to switch to a healthy diet. Which is even more impressing for me, that food can even provide some sort of solution for mental health problems. I believe we have a very big power in our hands by being able to impact our body on these levels by only eating. This is a thing that we need to do daily anyway so why not to use it?

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References