Understanding micronutrients and mental health, Dr. Mary Rondeau talks about how we target dietary eliminations and reintroductions.
Understanding reduced caloric intake in fasting and how that might relate to mental health and where food elimination testing might be useful.
Traditional diets which are mostly wholefood based seemed to reduce depression, bipolar and anxiety disorders. Looking at how diet affects are sleep and its connection in our mental health, diets high in fiber are more associated with more restorative and deeper sleep compared to high fat and high carbohydrate diets which negatively affects sleep quality. This is what causes increase of food intake in odd hours of the night, doing something inactive which ultimately leads to weight gain.
Processed foods make up to 61% of what an average American eats. Which basically means that when looking in the portion of the grocery cart the area where a child sits is the only healthy foods everything else is packaged.
FULL TRANSCRIPT:
We’re gonna talk about micronutrients and mental health and how you target dietary eliminations and reintroductions, understanding reduce caloric intake and fasting and how that might relate to mental health, and where food elimination testing might be useful. If we look at a wide variety of population studies, we see that traditional diets which mean Whole Foods based for whatever culture the study was done in seemed to reduce depression, bipolar, and anxiety.
Traditional diets are often high in vegetables, fruits, whole grains, and fish or meat depending on where the culture is, As said, with Sea Culture versus an inland based culture.
We look at just sleep and the effect that diet has on sleep, and we know the connection that sleep has on our mental health. The connection is quite clear. High fat diets and carbohydrate diets negatively affect sleep quality, diets that are high in fiber are associated with more sleep restoration. When looking at experimental sleep restrictions, these lead to physiological, hormonal, and food behavior changes. If we are not sleeping very well, oftentimes another meal is added. So, if somebody has insomnia and they’re staying up really late at night, usually that person is going to eat another meal if not a snack. And so, we see a increase in food intake, we see a decrease in physical activity. As people are up at odd hours of the night, they’re usually not doing something active and that really affects the whole system. More which leads to weight gain.
As a whole the vitamins and minerals are needed for neurotransmitter synthesis and neuronal function. Our membranes help regulate membrane function. Think about calcium channels, Lithium has one of the longest traditions in psychiatry and we’ll talk about it in its relationship to magnesium.
How bad are diets? Processed food makes up 61% of the foods that Americans eat. That’s basically means that the portion of your cart at the grocery store, only the place where your purse or where your kids sit, is the healthy foods everything else is going to be packaged. This equates to about 1000 calories per day that Americans eat that is grain like based products, sugary drinks, chips and desserts.
So how can we make sure that when we do recommend a dietary change that it is successful? By far, the biggest thing is that when people go to eliminate foods out of their diet is, they don’t take them out long enough. They say I eliminated gluten for one week, or I did dairy for two weeks, that is simply just not enough time to determine if there’s going to be benefit and one aspect of that is if you’ve ever read any food labels, you will see that dairy and gluten, soy and corn are in everything. So, it oftentimes will take a week or two for patients just to truly become compliant on the diet recommendations and find all the sources that are in their diet. And then one big thing to watch out for is making sure that adequate calories are in the diet if you’re doing any type of an elimination diet because, if someone becomes calorie deficient in that time, oftentimes we can already see increased anxiety or increased agitation if they’re just not eating enough of the rights stuff.
