Last weekend I went to a nutrition class focused on how to address nutritional causes of mental health issues.  It was excellent.  It took a lot of the knowledge I already had and extended it in ways I had not thought of before.  Simple little strategies that anyone can do at home can make massive differences in the experience of life for someone with a mental health challenge.  Clinically difficult situations like depression, anxiety, mood disorders, ADHD, and even schizophrenia will often have significant underlying nutritional problems driving these expressions.  I would like to explore this topic for the next couple of newsletters.

Is this a topic that is of concern to many people?  Well, 1 in 5 Americans has a mental health problem.  That is 66 million people, of which over 13 million of them have a severe mental illness – you know, the 'you don't leave your room' level of problem.  That is assuming they aren't living on the streets.  Each year almost 17% of kids ages 6 to 17 experience a mental health disorder.  It is estimated that 50% of lifetime mental issues start by age 14, and 75% by age 24.  Suicide is the second leading cause of death in the 10 to 34 age group, and that has increased by 35% over the last 20 years.  

How is this tsunami of mental health issues affecting society?  Mood disorders are the most common cause of hospitalizations for the under 45 age group.  Mental disorders generate unemployment, criminal behavior (37%), homelessness (21%), substance abuse, school dropouts, and the list goes on and on.  There are 8.4 million Americans that are caregivers that average 32 hours a week in unpaid care for the mentally ill.  And here is a really interesting one, people with depression have a 40% higher risk of heart disease and metabolic syndrome.  While 56% of American's are wanting mental health services, over 57% of those with diagnosed mental health disorders are not receiving any care.  As we can see there is a huge mental health crisis in this country.

So where do we turn?  For most people, the choice is their family physician.  That is like asking your mailman to fix your plumbing.  I love family physicians, but mental health is vastly complex and they simply are not trained to assess and treat patients in this arena.  Mental health requires a specialty degree, like psychiatry or psychology, to even begin to accurately figure out what would benefit a patient.  Seriously, do you expect your family physician to fix your teeth or do surgery on your eye?  And yet almost 80% of drug prescriptions for mental health concerns are handed out by family physicians.  I don't blame the doctors. Patients demand their doctors give them something to make them feel all right.  Mental health does not work that way.  A pill does not address the real issues, it only hides the feelings – maybe.  A huge meta-analysis of both the published and the unpublished drug trials for anti-depressant drugs showed that when everything was looked at in total, anti-depressants were no better than inert placebos.  The published studies claim the drugs worked, but any study that showed the opposite simply was not published.  See here

So basically billions of dollars are being made by companies selling drugs with very nasty side effects that simply do not work any better than a placebo.

So what are we to do?  Obviously, stress, trauma, and a host of other frequently overwhelming life experiences require us to seek aid in developing better coping skills and relationships to life.  Many different sorts of support exist for this purpose.  Seek out what works for you.  But are there physical concerns that could be underlying our vulnerability to these stressors?  The answer is yes.  There are very real chemical issues that could be happening in our body to cause us to react poorly to normal life challenges that we could otherwise handle just fine.  Let's start with the most basic of basic issues – digestion.

By now most of us are aware that our feeling processes have to do with various neurotransmitters in our brain and body.  You may have heard of serotonin for feelings of optimism, well-being, and happiness, dopamine for feelings of pleasure and reward, and GABA for that relaxed easy state.  Well, each of these neurotransmitters is made from simple amino acids derived from proteins we ingest.  We cannot make these neurotransmitters unless we can get these essential amino acids from our diet.  We need tryptophan to make serotonin, phenylalanine, or tyrosine for dopamine, and glutamine for GABA.  These are readily available from our diet if we eat meat or the proper combination of vegetable foods.  But being in our foods is not the same thing as being in our bloodstream.  Our food contains proteins that are made up of hundreds of amino acids bound together in long ribbons that then twist and curl and fold into the complex shapes that serve as little tools and structural blocks that make up the creature or plant the protein came from.  We cannot use these tools and blocks as they are very specific to each plant and creature.  But we can break down the tools and blocks into their basic ingredients, the amino acids, and use them to build our own tools and blocks that are specific to us.  At least we can if we can first break the proteins down into their amino acids.  This is what digestion is supposed to do.

What if our digestion is failing to do this effectively?  If that is happening then we don't have the basic amino acid building blocks with which to make the neurotransmitters we need to feel okay.  That could be a problem.  How can we feel okay if we don't have the brain juices to do that with?  That is the idea behind the billion-dollar drugs they are filling us with.  They make us use what we do have more.  These neurotransmitters are designed to shoot out the end of a nerve to carry a message to the next nerve then suck right back up into the first nerve again.  The drugs block the return pathways so the transmitter stays between the nerve cells sending the message over and over.  The problem is the body finds this annoying and sends out enzymes to destroy the transmitter.  While the drug initially amplifies the messages, over time it ends up causing the destruction of our messengers.  If our digestion is not sending the nerves fresh essential amino acids to make new messengers, we are in trouble.

So, what do we need to be able to digest and harvest these essential amino acids?  We need acid and pepsin.  Not just any acid, hydrochloric acid at a concentration 10,000 times stronger than a simple acid like vinegar.  This super-strong acid is able to break the hydrogen bonds that hold the three-dimensional structure of the protein in shape.  This is what our stomach is supposed to make for us.  Pepsin is a super powerful enzyme that then is able to snip the protein apart into smaller fragments.  But pepsin only works in highly acid environments (pH1 to 3).  Both the hydrochloric acid and the pepsin are formed in the stomach.  But what if you are doing things that weaken this acid, like diluting it with water during a meal, or shutting off the acid release with stress, or worst of all taking an acid-blocking heartburn drug?  Without enough acid, we can not break down our proteins from our meal to amino acids that we need to form our feel-good neurotransmitters.  No matter what you do or who you talk to, without those transmitters you are going to be depressed or worse.  This is one simple nutritional problem that can devastate our life – poor digestion of our proteins.

How do we know if we are not producing enough hydrochloric acid?  A simple test is to drink a small glass of water with ¼ teaspoon of baking soda mixed in first thing in the morning.  You should have a certain amount of acid in your stomach right after you wake up that will react with the baking soda and form CO2 gas.  This gas formation should make you burp.  If you burp immediately then you have too much acid.  If it takes 2 to 3 minutes to burp, that is perfect.  If you have not burped within 5 minutes then your stomach acid levels are too low.  Too low means you are not digesting your proteins well.  It also means that you can not absorb minerals from your food.  More about that next time.

What can you do?  Well, don't drink with your meals, don't eat when stressed, and don't use acid-blocking drugs.  Is getting rid of heartburn worth this price?  A few weeks ago I wrote about a clever technique I came up with for relieving a hiatal hernia using a pinched tiny straw.  This can also be used at the start every meal to stimulate the vagus and phrenic nerves for turning on the relax and digest pat of your nervous system.  You only need a couple swallows of liquid for this so that it won't dilute your stomach acid.

Take care,

David              

Ellen update:    

We made it to Costco last weekend which offers Ellen the opportunity for a wardrobe addition.  She likes coats and shawls that offer the promise of keeping temperature swings at bay.  The weekend before she found a black and white version of this wrap, so naturally she want it in another color.  What a find!