Diet and Nutrition
For optimum physical
performance the subject of diet and nutrition plays a
critical part in your fitness, health and mental
well-being.
Food
For Thought
How you think and feel is directly affected by what
you eat. This idea may
seem strange, yet the fact is that eating the right
food has been proven to
boost your IQ, improve your mood and emotional
stability, sharpen your memory and keep your mind
young.
One of the most limiting concepts in the human
sciences is the idea that the
mind and the body are separate. Try asking an
anatomist, a psychologist and a biochemist where the
mind begins and the body ends. It is a stupid
question, and yet that is exactly what modern science
has done by separating psychology from anatomy and
physiology.
But it’s not just the scientists who live by
this false distinction. It’s us.
When you’re having difficulty concentrating,
when your mood is low, when you struggle to find a
memory, do you consider that you may be poorly
nourished? Why not? Every one of these states - your
thinking, feeling, mental energy and focus –
happen across a network of interconnecting brain
cells, each one of which depends on an optimal supply
of nutrients to work efficiently. The evidence is
there if you look for it. You can change how you
think and feel by changing what you put into your
mouth.
Of course improving our mental health isn’t only
about nutrition. While,
sadly, most psychotherapists ignore the role of
nutrition and the brain’s
chemistry on how we think and feel, let’s not
make the same mistake of
omissions. I believe the solution for the mental
health problems that plague
or society lies in the combination of optimum
nutrition and good psychological support, which
includes a place you can call home, being treated
with respect and dignity and counseling.
Whether you’re in good shape or are currently
dealing with a mental health
problem, there are five essential foods you need to
tune up your brain.
*Balance your glucose – it’s fuel for the
brain
*Essential fats – these keep your brain
‘well oiled’
*Phospholipids – these memory molecules give
‘oomph’ to the brain
*Amino acids – These are the brain’s
messengers
* Intelligent nutrients – these include vitamins
and minerals that ‘fine tune’
your mind.
Knowing a few simple facts about your amazing brain
shows you why these foods are so important for your
mind. Every day we have around 6,000 thoughts. Most
of them are repeats! Every single thought you think
is represented by a ‘ripple’ of activity
across the network of nerves called your brain.
Here’s how it works:
What we call the brain is a network of neurons –
special nerve cells that
connect to other neurons. You’ve got 100 billion
neurons, each connecting to
thousands of others. To get an idea of just how
complex that is, let’s look at
the Amazon rain forest. The Amazon stretches for
2,700,000 square miles and it contains about 100
billion trees. So there are as many cells in our
brain as trees in the entire Amazon rainforest, and
as many connections as leaves!
The connections between neurons are called dendrites.
Where one dendrite meets another neuron, there’s
a gap like the ‘spark’ gap in a spark plug.
This gap is called a synapse and it’s across
this gap that messages are sent from one neuron to
another.
The message is sent from a sending station and
received in a receiving station, called a receptor.
These sending and receiving stations are built out of
essential fats, found in fish and seeds;
phospholipids, present in eggs and
organ meats, and amino acids, the raw material of
protein.
The message itself, the neurotransmitter, is in most
cases made out of amino acids. Different amino acids
make different neurotransmitters. For example, the
neurotransmitter serotonin, which keeps you happy is
made from the amino acid tryptophan. Adrenalin and
dopamine, which keep you motivated are made from
phenylalanine. Turning an amino acid into a
neurotransmitter is no simple job. Enzymes in the
brain that depend on intelligent nutrients do it.
These include vitamins, minerals, and special amino
acids. You are not only
what you eat. How you think and feel depends on what
you eat!
It used to be
thought that all our thinking is done by neurons in
the brain.
We now know that the digestive system contains 100
million neurons, and
produces as many neurotransmitters as the brain. The
gut, for example produces two-thirds of the
body’s serotonin, the ‘happy’
neurotransmitter. So in essence, you’re feeding
two brains. Every time you eat something it sends
signals to the brain because the gut and the brain
are in permanent
communication. This is why the right foods can make
you happy and the wrong foods can make you feel
anxious and depressed.
The most important nutrient of all for the brain and
nervous system is glucose, the fuel they run on. We
humans are solar-powered. We use plants to collect
the Sun’s energy for us in the form of glucose.
The plants absorb hydrogen and oxygen (H 2 O-water)
from the soil, and carbon and oxygen CO 2–
carbon dioxide) from the air, and combine these atoms
together using the Sun’s energy to make
carbohydrate (COH).
We then digest the carbohydrate down into glucose and
deliver this into both our brain and body cells. The
glucose is then “burnt” within our cells,
lubricating the Sun’s energy, which is what
keeps us alive.
Your brain consumes more glucose than any other
organ. In a sedentary day your brain can consume up
to 40 percent of all carbohydrates you eat.
That’s why you get hungry after exams! Any
imbalance in the supply of glucose to the brain and
you can experience fatigue, irritability, dizziness,
insomnia,
excessive sweating (especially at night) poor
concentration and forgetfulness, excessive thirst,
depression and crying spells, digestive disturbances
and blurred vision.
