Brain food
- Food Matters
- Jan 22, 2020
- 4 min read
Updated: Jan 27, 2020
I’ve had a bit of a break from studying this week, which has given me the chance to catch up on some reading.
I was given ‘Brain Changer’ by Professor Felice Jacka for Christmas, and it’s really opened my eyes to some new research on how we’re affected by what we eat. Professor Jacka is the Director of the Food and Mood Centre at Deakin University in Australia. She was the first psychiatrist to prove a link between what we eat and our mental health, and her pioneering work has led to the creation of a new scientific field, nutritional psychiatry.
What’s new? Everyone knows junk food is bad for us!
True. It’s linked to obesity, heart disease and diabetes. But did you know that those high-fat, high-sugar hits can have long-lasting and really serious effects on our mental health? In fact, poor diet is now being linked to depression, anxiety, dementia and even some cases of ADHD.
Any good news in there?
Thankfully, yes! It seems changing what and how we eat can help reverse some of those effects and may even prevent them occurring in the first place. Professor Jacka is not saying a good diet is a cure for depression. There are lots of reasons why people develop mental health problems: often, there’s a genetic link; early life trauma or abuse, or simple life stresses, such as living in poverty, can make it more likely you’ll develop some kind of mental health problem. The trouble with all these is it’s very difficult, or impossible, to do anything about them. What Professor Jacka wants to do is to use diet, which we can do something about, to give people the best chance of not developing those problems in the first place, as well as helping those who are already suffering to improve their mental health.
So, what’s the answer?
It’s actually pretty simple, and it’s based on a diet we’ve known for years has all sorts of health benefits: the traditional Mediterranean diet. That means eating lots of fresh vegetables and fruits, wholegrain cereals (not white bread), oily fish, raw nuts and seeds (not salted) and extra virgin olive oil. Her modified Mediterranean diet (now known as the ModiMed Diet) also recommends some red meat, which contains iron, zinc and vitamin B12, all of which are thought to be helpful in preventing mental health disorders.
That sounds too good to be true!
That’s probably why she was met with such scepticism when she started her research - but the results of Professor Jacka’s SMILES trial (Supporting the Modification of lifestyle in Lowered Emotional States) were impressive. If you’re interested in the details, just follow the link below, but in short, she and her team found that after just three months on the diet, there was a real reduction in depressive symptoms; after six months, a third of those who took part were in remission. That’s impressive!
Is mental health that big a problem?
Yes. One in four of us will suffer some sort of mental health problem each year. That’s pretty devastating on a personal level, but on global scale it’s already costing more than two trillion dollars, and that figure is expected to rise to sixteen trillion over the next two decades.
Where to start?
How about with our kids? As a mum of three teenagers, I am all too aware of the increasing problem of anxiety and depression in young people. Schools in the UK are struggling to cope with the number of children (some of them very young) who need emotional support. Social media takes a lot of the blame, so does exam stress. But what if poor food choices were at the root of some these problems? Even if diet is only a contributory factor, isn’t it worth looking really hard at what we feed our children, and ourselves?
We’ve all seen kids drinking cans of fizzy drink on the way to school, or buying huge bags of sweets, chips and cakes after school: ultra-processed foods, high in all sorts of unhealthy fats, sugars and artificial additives. I’ve always been a fan of Jamie Oliver and his sugar-tax campaign, but perhaps we need to go even further to stop our young people eating their way to potentially serious mental health problems, as well as obesity.
It sounds like another health lecture…
Not at all. Professor Jacka is a world-leading academic, but she’s also a mum and she’s speaking from personal experience, in a way that’s simple to understand but not at all preachy. She had anxiety as a child, and depression as a teenager. She admits to eating a pretty terrible diet at times, including when she was pregnant (anyone planning to have a baby should read the section on diet pre- and post-conception). Her own daughter has also had depression. Instead of feeling bad about past behaviours, she wants us to feel positive about making changes we now know could make a real difference. She writes brilliantly about ‘mum guilt’, which I really identified with, and is inspirational in her desire to change lives for the better.
‘Brain Changer’ is not a comfortable read; there are some pretty scary facts in there about the long-term damage we can do to our brains, and potentially our genetic make-up, through poor diet. More research is definitely needed, but with the whole area of gut health coming into the mainstream, I think the future looks positive.
In the meantime, if eating better can help reduce the chances of us and our children developing mental health problems, it has to be worth cutting out the rubbish and swapping it for good, healthy food. The worst that can happen is we’ll lose weight, reduce our risk of chronic disease and feel more energetic. That sounds like a win-win to me.
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