By Kennedy Shelley
More and more science confirms it, vegans are setting themselves up for depression and mental illness with their diet alone.
And this isn’t just a condemnation or mocking of the smug vegan you know on Facebook; this is a serious health issue in the US.
Depression is one of the leading causes of long-term disability in the US. It costs our economy billions of dollars each year for treatment costs and lost productivity.
And the current treatment of just giving pills is not solving the problem. If giving pills was the solution then we would not have the number of people suffering from this going up each year.
What if the root cause of depression was not in our head but instead in our stomach?
When you think about it, you realize that the brain only makes up 2% of our body yet consumes 25% of the calories. It is not separate; it is part of our body.
Bodybuilders and athletes will eat to feed their muscles, but we give scant thought to what food does to our brains.
There are at least 11 peer-reviewed papers from 2007-18 that show an increasing link to vegan diets and mental health problems.
And their findings would no longer be baffling to these scientists if the mental health community would actually work with the nutritional community.
The problem is that vegans often do not start looking to find the optimal diet for human health, but instead give up meat to protect the environment or because they love animals, and then try to find proof that they can get nutrients from plants.
This is backward thinking.
They should be looking at what is required for optimal health and then try to create a diet in line with their values.
On paper, certain plants have vitamins, minerals and protein.
But when studied you find out the human digestive system can’t pull those nutrients out of the plants, setting the vegan up for serious nutritional deficiencies.
In 2018, French scientists studied 90,000 adults and found that for each food group that was given up on the road to veganism would lead to increased depression.
So, if you give up meat, you get more depressed. If you then give up eggs, more depression. If you quit fish, the group gets more depressed.
Young women in college are highly likely to flirt with veganism, so in 2018, William & Mary looked at over 6000 college students and found the vegans were significantly more at risk for neurosis and depression.
None of these studies prove that veganism caused a mental health problem. It is possible that veganism is attractive to the mentally ill.
But there is a strong enough link between the two that people should be very concerned about.
That does not mean that vegetables cause mental health problems either.
Researchers looked into the data from the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging to see if there was a link between diet and mental health issues.
This is not an isolated study with a few participants, this is tracking over 26,000 Canadians and will go on for over 20 years, but this study looked at the group from 2005-10.
The study participants were interviewed, examined and lab work was analyzed, and they found that those who ate more fruits and vegetables had less depression than those who didn’t.
But that is not automatic because higher fruit and vegetable consumption was linked to higher income, and when you have an adequate income, your chances of depression go down.
But the bottom line is that if you think some of your vegetarian friends are having some mental health issues, there is a very real chance they are, and their diet very well may be the reason.
More meat and non-industrial seed/vegetable oil fats can make a big difference in improving mental health, to learn more see this article in Freedom Health News.
