from DEALING
WITH DEPRESSION Naturally SECOND
EDITION CHAPTER
12
by
SYD
BAUMEL
In the last few chapters
on nutrition, we've covered a lot of ground. In this chapter. I'd like
to offer something simpler: a few very basic dietary guidelines. (For a
more detailed treatment, see psychiatrist Abram Hoffer's recent
books on orthomolecular nutrition or Rudolph Ballentine's classic,
Diet
and Nutrition.)
These guidelines are based on the best of
what nutritional science and complementary and alternative medicine have
to tell us about eating for good health in general, and for mental health
in particular. Don't feel pressured to follow them to the letter (I don't).
Just give them your serious consideration and take from them what you will.
Favor whole foods over "food fractions."
Although food fractions are the stuff of which nutritional supplements
are made, not all food fractions are created equal. Most of our diet-related
health problems come from the indiscriminate, industry-driven use of food
fractions - sugar, sodium, refined fats and oils, refined grains - and
the junk-food and convenience-food products that typically are reconstituted,
like Dr. Frankenstein's monster, from these dead food parts. Food fractions
and Frankenfoods promote nutritional deficiencies and imbalances and contain
many additional chemicals that can promote adverse psychological reactions
in sensitive individuals. Although doctors and dietitians now recommend
a diet high in whole foods to prevent major physical diseases, it's just
a matter of time before they add affective illness to the list.
Minimize your consumption of foods and food
products that have been traumatically processed or prepared. Once again,
I have to blow the whistle on some of your favorite foods and mine. Frying,
barbecuing, and other cooking methods that burn or brown food create billions
of mutant molecules that can be toxic or carcinogenic. Aggressive commercial
food processing - the refining of oils and grains, for example - typically
devitalizes, nutritionally depletes, contaminates, and chemically alters
the wholesome starting materials.
Look for food that's clean, pure, and uncontaminated.
Again, as much as you can, pass on commercial foods laden with artificial
additives. Wash your produce thoroughly to remove pesticides and other
chemical residues (see the procedure on page 49 in chap. 3). Consider buying
organic, unsprayed produce or avoiding the most pesticide-heavy foods,
as detailed in David Steinman's Diet
For a Poisoned Planet.
Eat a diverse balance of the different tissues
and organs of plants and/or animals: roots, seeds (that includes nuts,
grains, and legumes), leaves, flowers (like broccoli), stalks, shoots,
stems, fruits; and if you eat meat: muscles, viscera (organ meats), and
even bones and marrow (as in soup stocks). Because every tissue is
rich in some nutrients, deficient in others, an anatomically well-rounded
diet is a nutritionally well- balanced diet. The more your diet looks like
a rainbow, the more you've captured both the nutritional and the "nutraceutical"
diversity of food.
Maximize your consumption of fresh food -
and don't neglect raw. Not only does the nutritional value of food
fall rapidly after harvest or slaughter, but microbial decay sets in immediately,
creating unwholesome, even toxic, new compounds.
Raw foods may have certain
medicinal benefits that cooked foods. lack. Herbert
Newbold cites some old clinical research that suggests raw nuts, seeds,
and unrefined oils can raise low hormone levels. As we saw in chapter 2,
this could be just what many depressives need.
Beware of compulsive food preferences or of
foods you eat day in, day out, all year round. As we've seen in chapter
3, some doctors consider this to be a recipe for food allergies that can
adversely affect brain and mood.
Respect your appetite, nose, taste buds, and
eyes, and let them help guide what you eat, how much you eat, and when.
This is tricky. It only applies where wholesome, natural foods are concerned;
and even then it's subject to the exception of "addictions" that can arise
when natural seasonal variations in food availability are erased by industry
and commerce.
The more that foods have
been processed, cooked, seasoned, or otherwise transformed into something
that tastes, smells, and looks like what they are not, the more our genetically
naive senses can be led astray. Suddenly we find ourselves satisfying our
yen for starch with potato chips, for fruit with pie, for protein with
greasy cheeseburgers. When a wide variety of strictly natural foods are
on the menu, studies have reportedly shown that animals and human infants
instinctively select a balanced diet. There may be hope for us too.
Respecting your appetite
also means not eating when you don't have one. Pleasure in the smell and
taste of food facilitates digestion. Its absence invites indigestion, malabsorption,
and food allergy. Of course, if severe depression has eliminated your appetite,
following it could eventually eliminate you. But this could be a good time
for a medically supervised fast to see if food allergies are why you're
depressed in the first place.
Consider eating in accordance with who, what,
when, and where you are - that is, eating idiosyncratically, ancestrally,
seasonally, and geographically. Eating idiosyncratically (according
to who you are) means listening to your body and respecting your appetites
and food preferences - within the confines of a wholesome diet, of course.
It could also mean eating in accordance with your constitutional type,
as prescribed by ayurvedic medicine, for example. Eating ancestrally is
based on the idea that the diet that suited your ancestors' genes (assuming
you know what they ate) probably suits you too. As mentioned in chapter
8 on fats, Canadian physician C. E. Bates
and others have found that when Northwest Coastal Native Americans return
to their traditional, salmon-based diets, they experience remarkable relief
from the multiple disorders that plague them on the modern Western diet,
including suicidal depression.
Eating seasonally and
geographically is based on the idea that different seasons and geographic/climatic
conditions stress us in different ways. By eating plants and/or animals
adapted to these conditions we can adapt better ourselves. This could be
why research suggests the oils of cold-adapted fish and plants protect
people in northern and temperate industrialized countries from the diseases
of civilization, while heat-adapted saturated fats, which are consumed
with impunity in the tropics, do just the opposite.
Eating seasonally/geographically
also appears to influence seasonal and geographic mood disorders, such
as recurrent winter and summer depression. As we saw in chapter 8, there
is evidence that cold-adapted omega-3 fatty acids prevent and treat winter
depression. Would a diet high in fresh fruits and vegetables have a similar
effect on summer depression?
