Depression and mental disorders can be prevented and treated with simple healing foods

Copyright 2006 Truth Publishing

A study published last year in the journal Biological Psychiatry shows that certain foods are better at treating depression than antidepressant drugs. The study found that omega-3 fatty acids and foods high in a compound called uridine were able to reduce the symptoms of depression as well as or better than three different antidepressant drugs that were tested. This research was conducted at the McLean Hospital, which is affiliated with Harvard.

It's very exciting to see this kind of study, because it shows yet more scientific evidence for the healing effects of food as well as the relative uselessness of prescription drugs.

Based on the results of this study, it seems silly that anyone would continue to use antidepressant drugs to try to treat depression when there are simple healing foods available that do a better job. This is especially true when considering the potentially dangerous side effects of antidepressant drugs that are now coming to light, including increased risk of suicide, violent behavior, and other similar acts of aggression.

But what healing foods in particular are we talking about in this study? In addition to the omega-3 fatty acids, there are health enhancing substances found in walnuts, molasses, and fish, according to researchers. They're also found in many other foods.

It's especially interesting to note that molasses is included in this list, because molasses is produced as a waste product from the sugar refining industry. When you refine sugar beets or whole grains in order to make refined white sugar or white flour, you remove as much as 98% of the nutrition from those natural foods, leaving only a white, super sweet, highly concentrated refined sugar, and that's what ultimately gets fed to human beings.

The waste product from this process is a thick, brown, syrupy liquid — that's molasses. Molasses contains most of the nutrition of the original food, including the vitamins, minerals, and various compounds such as uridine. It is this molasses that's normally sent off to be used in livestock feed, and yet what we're finding here with this research is that this molasses can help prevent depression. Eating molasses is part of a food strategy that's just as good as antidepressant drugs.

This also goes to show why people who pursue healthy diets tend to have such a positive outlook and outstanding mental health — it's the foods. Because food greatly affects your mental state, if you eat healing foods, and foods rich in vitamins, minerals, and phytonutrients, then you're going to have healthier mental function and will rarely experience depression, especially if you combine these foods with natural sunlight. But if you eat processed foods and manufactured foods, as are generally consumed by most Americans, then of course you're going to be depressed, because you're not giving your brain the nutrients it needs to achieve a healthy mental state.

So it is in fact the food supply that is causing depression in this country. It's all the refined ingredients that have their nutrition stripped away. That's what's causing depression. But what do we do in this country to treat depression? We come up with new drugs like Prozac, Paxil and Zoloft, and we give those to people and charge them sometimes thousands of dollars a year to stay on these drugs. They don't need these drugs — what they really need are healing foods. They need to go to the grocery store, shop for some healthy foods like wheat germ, molasses, avocados, and so on, and eat those foods in order to have healthy brain balance and avoid depression. It's really not that difficult.

What else is exciting here is that we're seeing yet more benefits of omega-3 fatty acids. These omega-3 oils are almost miracle-class healing nutrients. They enhance heart health, they reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease, they boost brain function and nerve system function, and now we're seeing they even function as effective antidepressants. Clearly, omega-3 fatty acids are one of the most exciting nutrients in foods that are available to American consumers, and you can get these in everyday foods, or as nutritional supplements in things like salmon oil or flax seed oil. You can also eat chia seeds if you'd like to get some good, healthy omega-3s.

This is the first time we've seen a study that really explores the degree of the healing impact of these particular foods. Why is it that we live in a nation with health care priorities that cause us to spend billions of dollars testing antidepressant drugs and synthetic chemicals, but yet we will spend very little money on testing the healing qualities of natural foods and nutritional supplements? Clearly we have our priorities backwards, because it turns out that the answer to depression is readily available to every American consumer, right in their grocery store, right now. You can literally walk into your grocery store and find cures for depression, cures for early stage cancer, cures for diabetes, and cures for heart disease. There are cures right there in every grocery store, available right now.

So the answers for these diseases are really right in front of us, every single day. And if you're willing to take one step further and actually visit a health food store or a natural grocery store, then you can find even more healing foods. You can bring in even better nutrition and more potent phytochemicals for preventing these chronic diseases.

It's really no big mystery — what we need to do as a nation is simply get back to our healing foods as they come out of the ground, as they are provided by Mother Nature. We need to recognize the disease-promoting problems with processed and manufactured foods, everything from carbonated soft drinks to packaged instant rice products. And we need to be honest and say, look, these are the foods that are causing disease in this country, and that if we are going to be a disease-free nation, we've got to stop trying to find new synthetic chemicals to mask symptoms of disease, and stop poisoning ourselves with the food supply. We've got to ban toxic ingredients like hydrogenated oils. They should have no place whatsoever in the food supply. We've got to outlaw things like homogenized milk fats, because of the way they promote atherosclerosis and cardiovascular heart disease. We have to eliminate ingredients like sodium nitrite, which causes cancers throughout the body, especially cancers of the digestive tract such as colorectal cancer.

Presently, the United States is home to the most chronically diseased population ever observed in the history of civilization, and it's no coincidence that we also eat the most processed foods, the most fast foods, the highest levels of sugar, salt and food additives than any other country in the world. In fact, we are the home to fast food chains that we franchise all around the world so that we can export disease to other countries in exchange for making a buck in the name of capitalism. We are the creators of the candy bars and the carbonated soft drinks that are now known around the world. We have taken a population that was relatively healthy fifty years ago and we have turned it into a highly diseased population, simply by altering the food supply.

People may say, oh no, that's not true, people are living longer now than 50 years ago. And actually, that's a distortion, because most of the deaths 50 years ago were infant deaths. Infants died of infectious disease due to a lack of good public sanitation. Back then, if you made it past the age of 5, you were going to live a lot longer than people live today. So the lifespan from age 5 is actually lower today than it was 50 years ago when people were eating out of their own gardens, and when they didn't have all these processed foods to consume, and when they didn't have carbonated soft drinks and hydrogenated oils, margarines, shortening, potato chips, snack food, and so on. They were much healthier. They had much greater mental health, too.

Today we live in a nation where people are mentally unstable. We've got kids picking up automatic weapons in schools and blowing away their classmates, and then it turns out they were taking antidepressant drugs. You know, that whole thing probably could have been prevented if those kids were fed some molasses, nuts, fish oils and omega-3 supplements, and taken off of the antidepressant drugs. And all you'd have to do is put those healing ingredients into the school lunches.

But no — today the school lunch program in our public schools is an atrocity. It has no resemblance whatsoever to good nutrition. We feed kids processed foods, refined sugars, cows' milk, and foods with artificial colors and additives that actually cause attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. We do this across the nation, and then we sit back and wonder why our children can't learn. So the answer to that, by the public school system, is to water down the curriculum. Let's make the classes easier, so that people can graduate now. You've got a whole nation of kids graduating from high school and many of them can't even read. They can't do basic math — they can't calculate a 15% tip when they go eat at a restaurant. They're mentally unstable, and it's all traced back to the food supply.

So finally, with this study, we're starting to see some of the healing effects of foods and how these foods stabilize mental health. Imagine what we could do in this country if we encouraged people to eat these healing foods. Imagine if everyone had stable mental health. Imagine if the people running our country had stable mental health — what kind of a positive impact would that have on foreign relations and domestic priorities? It would have a huge impact.

One final thought on all of this: These healing foods are affordable, are readily available for anyone to pick up and eat, and they are absolutely delicious. So it's time, I suggest, that doctors stop prescribing drugs when there are healing foods that do a better job. They should tell patients to start changing their diets, tell patients to eat some molasses and avoid processed foods. They should teach people to eat some raw nuts, including cashews, peanuts, and macadamia nuts. This will turn around the health of our country. But of course, that would require that we actually educate doctors about nutrition, and so far that hasn't happened.

A recent study published last year is the first of its kind in describing assorted beneficial nutrients and food items as containing healing properties for depression. The Health Ranger Mike Adams explores these foods and what they could mean to national health.

Mike Adams, "The Health Ranger," is chief contributor and editor of the NewsTarget Network, a leading independent news source for natural health, nutrition, medicine and other wellness topics. NewsTarget and Webseed.com are leading information resources for consumers seeking independent information on natural health and nutrition. More than 12,000 searchable articles are available at http://www.newstarget.com

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