All nutritional scientists agree on at least one thing — the brain is part of the body.
Our large brains are energy hogs.
It consumes over 1/5 of our metabolic energy every day yet only accounts for 2% of our body weight.
So, what we eat is going to go a long way to keeping our brains in good health.
When we think about depression, ADHD or schizophrenia we often think of them as chemical imbalances, but what is the root cause of these problems?
Many scientists are starting to think our food may play a big part in our brain health.
We intuitively know that diet affects our mood, ability to think clearly and even our behavior. (If you doubt it, watch kids after cake at a birthday party or how you feel after a Thanksgiving meal.)
Nutritional psychologists are now raising the idea that we may be able to reduce or eliminate the need for psych meds through diet alone.
The Standard American Diet (abbreviated SAD) has been spreading throughout the world, roughly keeping pace with the worldwide increase in mental disorders.
This has gotten many scientists wondering if they are seeing a correlation like they saw when smoking rates went up and twenty years later there was a corresponding increase in lung cancer.
While some vegetarians want to blame animal fat, they have a rough time making the case that this is a change that has happened in western civilization.
In other words, we have been eating meat for a long time, but the explosion in mental health problems is recent.
It would have been impossible for humans not to eat meat until the 1950s because vitamin B12 was not available in pill form until then, it was only available in meat and it is essential to life.
Many scientists are noticing a link between refined carbohydrates and sugar with diabetes, Metabolic disorders, and inflammation.
To find out more see this article on Freedom Health News.
The question is, does the SAD diet’s inflammation in the body cause similar problems in the brain?
As a matter of fact, some doctors are referring to Alzheimer’s disease as Type 3 diabetes because they seem to be so closely linked.
In other words, if diet causes type 2 diabetes, could it also be causing type 3?
There is concern that refined carbs and especially refined oils (corn and soybean amongst others) contribute to body and brain inflammation.
There was a study in 2017 to see if dietary changes could help people with major depression.
Getting off the SAD diet resulted in major improvements in symptoms.
32% of the participants saw such improvement that they were in complete remission – without drugs.
More and more evidence is piling up that the SAD diet with refined carbohydrates and oils is creating more and more problems for our overall health by creating inflammation and causing excessive insulin and sugar in our blood.
And we are now seeing it doesn’t just affect our waistline, but also affects our brains.
But the good news is that the evidence shows that this damage can be reversed and change can happen quickly when we replace sugar, refined carbs and the so-called vegetable oils with a low-carb diet using real food.
Here is a presentation from Dr. Georgia Ede with even more information on the dangers of a vegetarian diet and mental illness.
