What you eat can affect your mental health
Most people accept that ‘You are what you eat’ is a valid statement –if you eat unhealthily, you’ll end up with an unhealthy body. But what about an unhealthy mind? New research is increasingly showing a link between eating processed foods and developing mental health symptoms.
The brain is negatively effected when we eat a lot of high fat, high sugar foods – even if you get all your nutrients too. This means you can’t eat junk and then take supplements and expect to have good mental health. You need unprocessed food. Processed foods actually destroy proteins in the brain that are important for mood, learning and memory and general cognitive functioning.
So far, the diet which has been linked to prevention of depression and anxiety symptoms is a ‘Mediterranean’ one.
What’s a Mediterranean diet? Essentially, this:
- A high intake of plant foods (fruits, vegies, herbs)
- Whole grains (whole meal bread, pasta etc.)
- Legumes (e.g. lentils, chickpeas)
- Raw Nuts (doesn’t count if they’re roasted and salted!)
- Small amounts of lean meats – three serves of around 80 grams of lean red meat a week
- No processed, refined foods (nothing out of a packet, no white flour or sugar)
Legumes, raw nuts and also vinegar in this mix are the key ingredients often missing from a generally healthy diet of the average Australian.
If you’d like to make some changes to your diet to improve your mental health, it’s important to remember that dietary (and any other!) habits take time to make and break. If your diet isn’t great, start to slowly replace the least nutritious options with healthier choices, rather than overhaul your whole diet next week.
Small, sustainable changes last.
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