Eat Your Way To Happiness

Could comfort foods be causing our mental distress?

Two recent UK studies have linked somersaulting mental illness rates to changes in eating habits over the past 50 years, and particular, to the low intake of essential fas & antioxidants in our modern industrialized diets.

Fresh produce consumption has plummeted 34% in 60 years, the vegetables we do eat grown on exhausted soils, have reduced levels of nutrients, and industrial farming techniques have fundamentally altered the biochemistry of animals we consume. Chickens reach slaughter weight twice as fast as they did 30 years ago, but must haul around carcasses containing 22 % fat, instead of two, to do so.

Perhaps then, the only surprise in January's reports from the Mental Health Foundation and Sustain was that it took so long to spot the dietary link to modern mental woes of ADHD, Alzheimer's, schizophrenia and exponentially increasing rates of depression in every generation since WWII.

But there is a ray of hope, as the Mental Health Foundation chief executive Andrew McCulloch points out, "It costs $1 750 a week to keep someone in a psychiatric hospital. How much does good food cost?"

*taken from the Journal of the Mental Environment (AdBusters), May/June 2006