John Grant |
It was at an early age that Olivia Bahou, a 16-year-old Vaughan native, started having anxious and depressive thoughts that sent her down a spiral of uncertainty and doubt.
Imagine feeling melancholic and unmotivated in your adolescence.
It was one of her first visits to the doctor about her anxiety that two unlikely worlds of mental illness and food collided to spark a curiosity that changed Bahou that very day. She started to incorporate meat into her diet because of a lack of iron and started to see a difference in how she felt mentally as well.
“I struggled with anxiety between the ages of four to 14. During those years, I actually noticed that I had like a bit more anxiety,” Bahou says, “When I started eating meat, I started to feel better. I mean, I still kind of struggle with it, but it’s definitely better.”
Bahou is just one of many that realized how a change of diet could influence how your brain changes its thought process.
So why is this happening? Why do 70 per cent of mental health cases start to develop during childhood, or early adolescence?
Is it because of how our society views diet?
Kelly Matheson, a dietitian with the Center for Addiction and Mental Health, believes that a change in how our culture eats can have a massive impact, changing your diet and how you feel mentally. “One of the diet patterns that has been looked at the most in recent years is the Mediterranean style of eating,” she says. “This is basically a pattern that’s been shown to actually lower depression scores through randomized control trials.”
This diet includes eating whole grains, fish, fruits, poultry and vegetables – basically eating foods that are natural and unprocessed. Matheson believes that there is no exact formula on how you can change your diet to feel better, but eliminating processed foods is vital, especially the consumption of sugars.
“One thing I often tell people is to focus on one small area. I find the easiest thing for some people is looking at what we’re drinking. I feel like a lot of people drink a lot of sugar and drink a lot of calories.”
She explains that having too much sugar can make you feel good for a very short time, but when sugar crash hits, it may add to the negative thoughts you are already having. “So a good place to start is looking at what you’re drinking and maybe trying to have less sugar in your coffee, trying to drink less pop, choosing to drink more water, so you’re not overhauling everything, but then you’re building on something,” Matheson says.
Many advocates such as Mikhalia Peterson have surfaced. She details her struggles with mental illness, and how changing her diet affected her life in an unexplainable matter.
Mikhalia is the daughter of Canadian clinical psychologist, Jordan Peterson. He is well known for the advice he has given online to people trying to turn their lives around and his famous quote “if you can’t even clean up your own room, who the hell are you to give advice to the world?”
Just like her father, she is trying to help people by creating her own diet called the Lion Diet, which consists of eating only meat. She uses this diet to treat her depression and many other complications that came with an unhealthy diet. Peterson was a young adolescent, just like Bahou, when her anxiety and depression became severely worse, and she did not fix this problem until her early 20s.
apples. [Credit: John Grant]
Maybe the expression “You are what you eat” has more relevance than what we thought. Many studies have made the link to our gut health (microbiome), saying there is a connection between our gut and brain behaviour. These studies have shown that gut health, depression, anxiety, and social functioning are connected.
Jay Pasricha, M.D. says in an article that was published through the John Hopkins website, “For decades, researchers and doctors thought that anxiety and depression contributed to these problems. But our studies and others show it may also be the other way around,” he says.
Researchers are finding proof that aggravation in the gastrointestinal system may send messages to the central nervous system (CNS) that prompts mood changes. With all of this new found knowledge, many professionals are studying the connection with mental health and depression and sharing this information with the world to educate so that we can start a discussion on this issue.
Christina Seeley, a Registered Dietitian who works for Parkwood Institute for Mental Health Care, is doing exactly that. Parkwood Institute in London, Ontario delivers full-service care for those struggling with mental health.
Her role consists of many things such as setting up and maintaining customized diets for people during their stay at the Parkwood Institute, as well as teaching a range of topics relating to mood and food with nutrition services. She describes the rejuvenation process of helping people in this area as a “Wilted flower, coming back to life.”
“I’ve seen some pretty profound changes in our patients. Their cognition improves. They have a lot more energy. They’re brighter. They’re thinking more clearly,” Seeley says.
Seeley started this journey more than 12 years ago and had to do research on food and mental health on her own. During her undergrad, Seeley learned about nutrition for physical health, but never for mental health. With all this information she has acquired, Seeley began sharing with anyone willing to learn about this topic, so they can know about diet and mental health.
“It’s been a big learning curve. And I’ve learned lots over the years. I try to read every book I can find on that topic,” Seeley says. “I’ve been giving a lot more presentations, and people are becoming a lot more interested in it and a lot more aware.”
chicken, brown rice, and apples in her Brampton kitchen. [Credit: John Grant]
One thing that can spread awareness about this issue is teaching or telling youth the importance of cooking, and nutrition early on in life, so they are not unaware when they are past their adolescence and have no answers.
“In grade 10, I took a food and nutrition class, and they touched upon food and mental health a little bit, but I think it’s over-generalized,” Bahou says. “I think it would be important to focus on nutrition needs and dietary plans.”
Seeley adds, “I think students need more in-depth information. They do learn very basic nutrition in elementary school. Once you get to high school, then there may be like a food science or nutritional elective, but it’s not mandatory. You can go through your whole high school years learning next to nothing about nutrition.”
Learning about food does not have to be a boring topic for young adults. There is an artistic element to cooking that people could enjoy and combining cooking and nutrition can resonate with young creative minds and hone development in many areas.
“Cooking can be a form of therapy, it’s an art form,” Matheson explains with enthusaism. “I remember I had a patient one time who was a sculptor and I remember telling him ‘I’m so jealous because I have no artistic bone’ And he looked at me, and he goes, ‘You are an artist, you know how to cook, and that’s an art form.’”
Changing your diet may not be the definitive answer in stopping depression because there are many elements for why people are depressed. However, learning about this can help people fix an area that they may not have considered. If you want to start this process you should:
• Do your research.
• Start small.
• Eliminate sugar.
• Stop eating processed foods.
Knowledge is power, and a lack of knowledge is a lack of power.