This paper this comes from is not really more than something that will generate a hypothesis. It is a survey of a British Columbia mood disorders consumer group: the strengths in it are that they did do a proper diagnostic interview (the SCID, for those who worry about these things, like me).
But the issue is food insecurity. An inability to get nutrients. I’m interested in this because of an anecdote in a book I am reading about food by Art Green: He is a kiwi with a paleo diet business. And in that book he mentions that one of his mates had huge mood issues which sorted themselves out with a paleo diet.
Now to the paper. A significant number of the people in the surveyed group were food insecure, which the paper defined as following.
Food insecurity status was determined as having an affirmative response to at least one of the two screening questions:
1. In the past 12 months did you worry that there would not be enough to eat because of lack of money? (Question description: Worry about food access).
2. In the past 12 months did you not have enough food to eat because of lack of money? (Question description: Compromised diet).
These two screening questions, which have previously been used in Statistics Canada national surveys [16], were also used in the British Columbia Nutrition Survey and allowed for direct comparisons of food insecurity between the sample and the general population.
A marked increase in food insecurity and poverty was found in the mood disorder sample when compared with the Canadian national sample.
This hypothesis does not go away, particularly for mood issues. There was a series of open label trials using nutritional supplements a decade ago, which lead to John Werry stating (as only he can) that he thought their studies were quackery until he read them. It did, not however, meet the test: double-blind trials failed.
What we do know is that people with mood disorders often lose and or gain weight, and this normalizes as they recovery. We know that antipsychotics affect insulin resistance (they increase it) and generally people with psychosis don’t get better unless they gain weight — often a dangerous amount of weight.
And we know that the standard dietary advice does not work. The high carb diet experiment has had two results: a decrease in the number of MIs — but this may be more due to intervention with statins than diet — and an increase in obesity.
But this, at present, is all guesswork. We need trials. Getting them funded and through ethical review, however, is a task for some very rich and saintly people. I’m not that rich. I’m not that saintly.
I wonder about this occasionally – I think some of the reason for our obesity epidemic is the lack of proper nutrients in the diets of many. Keeps you always “hungry” – not for calories, but for nutrients. I know that helps me feel my best – eating good food. Not especially paleo, but good food, not fake, and as quality as I can source. You eat pastured butter, the regular stuff tastes almost as bad as margarine.
Have you ever checked out the Nourishing Traditions/Weston A Price people?
Probably not as big a deal in NZ. YOUR cows aren’t fed leftover candy bars. :p (I pay extra for milk/butter/cream from cows who eat grass – it tastes so much better).
Huh, you like to point to discussions that rub up against my niche in Medicine.
The more interesting question is really: Does the Mental Disorder cause the physical decline or the decline the Disorder? (Answer: Can be either, as it depends on the person’s history, either the life they’ve led or their genetics.)
In most cases, Mood Disorders will always make consistently working very difficult. I imagine if you ran the numbers, you’d also find those with Mood Disorders are fired at a much higher rate than the Control group. Further, Mood Disorders directly effect the person’s ability to carry out directed tasks on time, which is a fancy way of saying “they will regularly be bad with their money”. (There’s also a sub-issue with the DSM pretty much deciding that anything that doesn’t effect your ability to work is no longer a Mental Disorder. Though this was coming for a while, given the functional utility of Anti-Depressants for the majority of the takers is “getting through your work day”.)
On the Biochemistry side of things, most Mental Disorders produce massive amounts of inflammation in the body, though more specifically the nervous system. The higher you run the blood glucose level, the higher the substrate availability is given to the nervous system energy production. The important detail here being that Inhibition is generally more energy dependent than the Excitatory processes. (Not in all receptor paths, but as a general guideline.) It’s not very different than craving certain foods because your body has an understanding that the specific food contains something you need. (Doesn’t mean you can get enough of what you need out of it, but the craving exists for a reason.)
But the problem with addressing a Mental Disorder by spiking the Glucose levels that hard is pretty obvious: heavier stress on the rest of the Organs. Obesity does bad things to the body.