Nutrition is the basis of resilience

One of the main messages of our book The Better Brain is that nutrition is the foundation of resilience. All too often we hear people say that we live in such trying times, which is why 20% of our population is now diagnosed with a mental disorder (as opposed to <3% in 1960). This interpretation misses the point, in our opinion. Our ancestors lived more recently with the Great Depression and two world wars, without antibiotics, without anesthesia, and yes - even through a pandemic. Is our life really more stressful ... or. ... is our resilience less?

Our current food intake. Recent studies show that we do not consume a healthy diet the way our ancestors did. For example, in the past 50 years, people in Western societies have reduced their intake of minerals and vitamins (which we will call “micronutrients”) by more than 50%! Why would anyone choose to do this?

We don’t think it’s a conscious choice – it’s just people getting used to mainly eating ultra-processed foods (UPF) – which are like food but are essentially a chemical mixture of things like fats, simple carbohydrates (sugar), and salt. The problem is, these packaged items contain very little in the way of minerals or vitamins. Is this important for our brain health? Yeah! For our brains to function at their best, they need more than 30 micronutrients every minute for every day of our lives. UPFs are not able to provide them.

How do we deal with stress. One of the primary assumptions of the book is that people don’t change their behavior just by telling them “It’ll be good for you.” So the top priority in the first few chapters is explaining why we should all avoid UPFs and increase our intake of whole foods, and how to do it inexpensively. We also provide a summary of the evidence proving that the recent move toward reliance on UPFs likely explains some of the decreased flexibility and increased mental health problems. We support this argument in a number of ways throughout the book, and here we’ll focus on just one: Nutritional Therapy for PTSD.

Post-traumatic stress. Natural disasters (such as earthquakes and floods) and man-made disasters (such as terrorism and mass shootings) affect societies around the world, often causing immense suffering and long-term psychological effects. Julia lives and works in Christchurch, New Zealand, which has had her fair share of shocks, but then also gives her the opportunity to study the effect of nutrients on our ability to adapt.

For example, on February 22, 2011, Christchurch was hit by a devastating earthquake with a magnitude of 6.3 that killed 185 people and devastated the city center. But as horrific as it is, this trauma has given her mental health and nutrition laboratory at the University of Canterbury the opportunity to see if micronutrients can help people recover, not from physical injuries, but from psychological injuries.

Here’s the rationale for exploring this question. When we’re under extreme stress, even those of us who avoid UPF often reach for “comfort” foods (such as cookies, muffins) that are usually high in calories but poor in nutrients. But what is our brain doing at the same time during this intense stress? At such times, the natural alarm response system responsible for fight or flight is activated. Chemicals such as adrenaline and cortisol are released, enabling us to reach safety, shut down non-essential functions, and make sure the muscles we need to fly or fly are activated. Unfortunately, over long periods of time, the alarm system can get into overdrive, and this is one of the factors that can trigger memories, flashbacks, excessive vigilance and on the edge of an abyss all the time, feeling anxious and panicked when being reminded of the traumatic event. Inevitably, sleep disturbances and nightmares become common.

But while this high pressure is occurring, and your alarm systems are activated, your brain and body use the triage system to turn nutrients into the acute and urgent needs of fight or flight. In other words, many relatively continuous functions – such as regulation of mood, growth, DNA repair, and clarity of cognition – may be neglected.

The manufacture of neurotransmitters (such as dopamine or serotonin) and hormones (such as cortisol) require micronutrients, and they are many types of vitamins and minerals, such as zinc, calcium, magnesium, iron, all of the B vitamins and vitamin C. scientific fact. If your body depletes these nutrients, either it will not have enough nutrients to make these essential chemicals, or it will redirect all resources to the fight-and-flight response (because it is so vital to survival) and there won’t be. Much remains to ensure optimal brain function for things like focus, mood regulation and sleep.

Earthquakes and floods. Perhaps it makes sense now that with micronutrients being depleted at a high rate during times of stress, we need to replenish them with greater amounts from our food (and possibly from other sources). Julie studied this after the Christchurch earthquakes and with Bonnie during the South Alberta flood, and we want people to be aware of it during the pandemic. Incidentally, in two of our studies, we also found that B vitamins in particular could be helpful in reducing stress.

Heavy gunfire. Then another event happened. In 2019, a gunman stormed two mosques in Christchurch, killing 51 people and wounding 40 others. Once again that city and its residents were dealing with a huge shock. As an application of transformational science, Julia Research Laboratory provided donated nutrients to anyone who survived the shooting and monitored their symptoms as an ethical and standard measure for quality clinical care.

Within weeks, they were clinically monitoring 26 people who had progressed, and saw the same treatment effect that we both experienced after earthquakes and floods. Not everyone, but many people have improved. These clinical notes have just been published in the journal APA, International Perspectives in Psychology: Research, Practice, Consultation.

Here are some details from the treatment of the mosque massacre. Before treatment began, 77 percent of these 26 participants had met or passed the cut-off score that defines potential PTSD. After five weeks on average, that rate dropped to 23 percent. In other words, of all people likely to have PTSD, nearly three-quarters showed significant, clinically significant improvement after about a month of micronutrient treatment. Stress decreased to the non-clinical normal range, similar to controlled research after earthquakes and floods:

Post-disaster data graph: Note that the three groups of people who received a broad spectrum combination of minerals and vitamins reduced their stress to a normal range in just 4-6 weeks. In contrast, in the two groups that did not receive the broad-spectrum micronutrients, the reported stress remained in the high range.

Summary of Posttraumatic Studies. The conclusion we draw from this line of post-disaster research is that providing micronutrients to survivors appears to reduce psychological stress to a clinically significant degree. These three different examples of traumatic events illustrate the powerful impact nutrients can have on healing and improving resilience. Can these findings apply to challenges linked to climate change and epidemics? We think so. Anything that can improve our ability to cope with ongoing stressful events should be a good thing to know.

Given the ease of use and large impact sizes, this guide supports a routine focus on eating nutrient-dense food and in some cases, additional micronutrients as supplements to disaster survivors as part of the government response.

Obstacles. The road to convincing governments to help people with micronutrients has been a huge challenge. For example, Julia wrote a description in the New Zealand Medical Journal last year describing how, after the mosque attacks, they faced great difficulties in publishing the findings of earthquake and flood research, and barriers that largely prevented them from being translated. under excution. I noticed an inflexible health system unable to carry out evidence-based research, and ethics committees were unable to respond quickly in order to facilitate research in the immediate aftermath of a disaster, when distress and tension were most intense.

In Alberta, Bonnie’s experience was similar. After the earthquake and flood results were published, a massive forest fire broke out in northern Alberta in 2016. More than 90,000 people were forced to leave their homes in and around Fort McMurray. Many lived in dormitories spread across the county and were not allowed to return home for several months. Bonnie called various officials in the government and the county health care system, asking to provide people with micronutrients to mitigate the psychological impact of trauma. Although she was able to base her suggestion on local and regional data, all of her suggestions were rejected – even the idea of ​​just mentioning people that they might want to take an inexpensive B-complex after breakfast every day.

Broader future implications. It is important to understand that the post-traumatic stress studies described here are supported by other studies from the UK, Belgium, South Africa, etc., all of which have shown that nutritional supplementation can enhance resilience. This shouldn’t surprise your readers here, because many of you already know the truth of what we said in our first sentence: Nutrition is the foundation of resilience.

In THE BETTER BRAIN we conclude with a chapter entitled “Seeing a happier and healthier tomorrow.” We emphasize food first as the way in which we must improve our resilience. We have developed a three-step approach to improving mental health resilience that recognizes that we are not all the same, that individual differences will affect the effectiveness of different treatments, and there is a place in a “mental health treatment toolbox” for all people. Evidence-based treatments: These include complete diets, micronutrients, counseling, family therapy, and medications. We argue that nutrition should come first, because it provides the basis for all others.

Suggested title for our book was Hidden Brain Hunger before it was changed to The Better Brain. We think this aptly describes the modern brain today.

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Mad in America blogs for a variety of writers. These publications are designed to provide a public forum for discussion – generally – about psychiatry and its treatments. The opinions expressed are those of the writers.

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