Eat to Relieve Depression...changing your diet can work wonders!

Can you eat to relieve depression?

If you think you can add a few specific supplements to your diet to handle your depression, think again. Instead, begin to eat to relieve depression!

You are what you eat, and that’s true for your mental health as well as the health of the rest of your body. The drugs used to treat depression have had limited success out in the world; the field of psychiatry is finally turning its attention to diet and how what we eat affects depression!

Dr. Drew Ramsey, an integrative psychiatrist at Columbia University says, “We’re now facing this huge epidemic of mental health disorders. Depression is the leading cause of disability in the world, and soon it will be the leading cause of disability in America. So, as somebody who treats depression, it’s of great interest when we see a data signal that suggest that we can treat depression by focusing on nutrition and what we eat.”

Dr. Ramsey went on to say, “For a long time in psychiatry, we’ve know that individual vitamins can have a big impact on mental health – vitamin B12, iron, magnesium – but really in the past 10 years, studies have begun to look more at dietary patterns, and that’s been quite revealing.”

While I think this is remarkable progress in the thinking about depression, I think caution is necessary. Too many people will assume they can down a handful of supplements in the morning and eat whatever they choose for the rest of the day. It’s important to take a holistic view of our diet and to acknowledge that a food that is good for us has more to offer than the particular vitamin or nutrient that is being called out as its sole benefit. For instance, dark green leafy vegetables may give us vitamin K, but there is a host of additional benefits that make them a good idea to include in our meals on a regular basis.

“Food should be the first line of defense because it’s a foundation treatment. We really need to move away from thinking of things like diet and exercise as ‘complementary’ or ‘alternative’. That’s really bad thinking that’s gotten psychiatry into trouble”, continued Dr. Ramsey.

It remains to be seen whether main stream medicine will embrace a non-pharmaceutical approach to treating depression and other mental health challenges… where is the profit for big-pharma? Dr. Ramsey is an integrative psychiatrist, which means he uses a combination of traditional and non-traditional methods to help his patients; these include nutritional therapies and dietary interventions.

If you struggle with depression, change what you eat. Eat more fresh fruits and vegetables and cut out processed food and sugar. Eat a small amount of protein with each meal and eat healthy fats like avocado and olive oil. That’s how I cured my depression…I decided to eat to relieve depression.

Here’s a question for you: what have you got to lose except maybe some unwanted weight and years of depression?