The rate of depression in American society today is approximately 10 times what it was during World War II. There are many different explanations for this, but it is generally agreed that the rise in depression reflects changes in life style. One change in life style which has contributed to this increase in the rate of depression is what we eat. Changes in our eating patterns have caused soaring rates of obesity, heart disease, stroke and depression. During WWII people were much more likely to engage in daily consumption of whole foods (fruits, vegetables and whole grains) than they are today. We are now living in a time when 70% of the food supply is made of processed and refined foods stripped of all virtually nutrients.
As one expert put it we are starving not because of food scarcity but because we don’t choose wisely from the abundance of available food. When it comes to mental health food can be medicine or poison. Whole foods and Omega 3 fish oil supplements support our mental health, while regular consumption of foods which are high in refined sugar, deep fried or high in partially hydrogenated fats lead to depression and dementia.
There are reasons why we’ve stopped eating healthy foods and why we eat so much of the foods that cause depression. Part of it is our hyper-busy life style. We put so much time into work and commuting that we don’t want to take the time to buy raw ingredients, find a recipe and spend 20 minutes preparing a home meal. We just want fast, pre-made convenience foods. Part of it is marketing. TV and magazines show people like us eating high fat, high sugar and deep fried foods (like deep fried Snickers, Twinkies or ice cream) with unbridled joy. When we walk into a grocery store the displays for fattening cakes, pies, cookies, and ice creams, are like works of art that reach through our eyes into our bellies and then ring an alarm in our brain that says “Gotta have it!”
Approximately 90% of human intelligence is subcortical which means it operates spontaneously beneath the level of consciousness. Brain research shows that most of our motivation to act is unconscious and that we respond to cues without conscious awareness. Mathias Pessiglione and colleagues at the Brain & Spine Institute in Paris have done some classic experiments which make this point. In one of them the participants were asked to squeeze a handgrip harder to get one coin rather than another. They kept squeezing the handgrip harder for the one Euro coin than for the one cent coin even though the images were flashed on a screen much too quickly for the conscious mind to register and could only be detected subliminally.
The one Euro and the one cent coins are simply pieces of metal. Society makes one more desirable than another by placing a differential value on them. We live in a society that has been putting way more value on unhealthy fast food than healthy, slow food, and it is only through conscious choice that we can reverse it for ourselves. We have to start thinking about the long time consequences of each small choice, because our small choices have an enormous cumulative effect on our health.
The same runs true for our crazy busy lives. One way is to keep racing from appointment to appointment while texting or cell phoning each other en route. The other is to choose to slow down and block out some time for buying and preparing whole foods to make a delicious, healthy meal. One expert has called home chores (which include meal preparation) Prehistoric Prozac, because creating something of value to our survival with our hands was wired into the brains of our ancestors as a source of pride and pleasure.
All of this sounds good but what about the fact that you when see the tubs of glistening ice cream bursting with chocolate chunks and nuts or the perfect cakes with the most gorgeous, lip-smacking icing you have an irresistible impulse to buy some and devour it?
Brain research has gotten to the point where we know why and how this happens and what we can do about it. In late June 2010 Professor Ray Dolan and his colleague Dr. Pine at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at University College London published their research on dopamine and impulsivity in the Journal of Neuroscience. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that plays a key role in reward, motivation, learning through reinforcement and addiction. People with mania and ADHD are known to act very impulsively and they have high levels of dopamine. People with Parkinson’s have great difficulty initiating basic actions like walking and talking because they have low dopamine levels.
Dr. Dolan wanted to see how extra dopamine would affect the decision making of ordinary people – would it make them opt for instant gratification rather than wait for a more beneficial reward in the future. In the experiment he recruited 14 healthy volunteers under two conditions: once when given a small (150mg) dose of L-dopa which increases the level of brain dopamine, and once when given a placebo. Under each condition, the subjects were asked to make a number of choices consisting of either a ’smaller, sooner’ option, for example receiving £15 in two weeks, or a ‘larger, later’ option, such as receiving £57 in six months.
The researchers found that every subject was more likely to behave more impulsively — choosing the ’smaller, sooner’ option — when levels of dopamine in the brain were boosted. Dr Pine believes that this finding may also explain why we tend to behave more impulsively when influenced by external ‘cues’. “We know that sensory inputs — sights, sounds smells and anticipation of rewards, or even of neutral cues which have been associated with rewards — momentarily boost dopamine levels in our brains, and our research shows that higher dopamine levels make us act more impulsively,” he says.
Although we all want to be healthy and avoid obesity, diabetes, heart disease and depression, isn’t it hopeless since we need willpower and willpower is exactly what dissolves the moment we see warm apple pie a la mode or chocolate mousse cake topped with whipped cream and dark chocolate espresso bean? Willpower is a mental construct of the conscious mind like the self. No brain scanner has ever found an area of the brain that could be said to be the seat of human volition.
We are, as Aristotle said, creatures of the habits we create by our actions. Our actions can create momentum in favor of or against healthy food choices. Knowing a bit of neuroscience is hugely helpful, because it enables us to appreciate that when we get a sudden compulsion to eat something unhealthy we are experiencing a craving that has been ignited by a temporary spike in dopamine. We also know that such cravings are most likely to arise when we are stressed out, because stress depletes serotonin (the brain’s feel good chemical) and increases cortisol (a stress hormone which makes us feel bad). What is crucial here is that we aren’t puppets. We don’t have to treat the craving as a command from control center which we must obey.
The most effective way to defeat such cravings is to switch mental gears so you can release the tension in your body and reconnect with your rational concern for your long term health. There are at least three different to do this that I’m aware of. Dr. A. Thomas Horvath (author of Sex, Drugs, Gambling & Chocolate) says that cravings involve the feeling “I must have x or I will die,” but cravings never killed anyone. He says that if you wait long enough (which is rarely more than a minute or so) your mind will jump to another subject and the craving will be forgotten. How long, he asks, can you keep thinking of a pink cow?
Another approach comes from Les Fehmi, Ph.D., (author of The Open-Focus Brain). Dr. Fehmi says we become most tense and anxious when our attention narrows to one object in the foreground of our consciousness and we push all other objects to the distant background. The way to relax and release bodily tension is to open up your attentional field to take in yourself, your internal sensations and feelings, all the objects around you, and the space between objects. It’s like opening the aperture of a camera from the narrowest to the widest. This opening of mental focus instantly relaxes the mind and body.
The third approach comes from Buddhist meditation. Buddhist meditators achieve a state of peace, calm, and equanimity, by practicing the art of allowing mental content (ideas, images, feelings and yes, cravings) to arise, pass and disappear. They neither struggle to push them away or grasp them tightly. They simply allow them to come and go like clouds on the screen of their consciousness which they call awareness. If you practice meditation daily you become skilled at the art of non-attachment and this makes it much easier to tolerate transient cravings. Some meditators turn in a spirit of openness and curiosity towards the mental content which troubles them, which could be fear, pain or a craving of some kind. They explore this mental content from inside and they find that the very process of exploring it makes it disappear.
Undoubtedly there are other mental approaches to defeating cravings for unhealthy foods, but whatever they are, I assume they share one common denominator. What is common to the three approaches I have recommended is a mindful catching of yourself in the act of becoming immensely attracted to a bit of unhealthy food, of acknowledging the craving and making space for it in your consciousness so it diffuses.
This is far preferable to mindlessly just giving in or consciously resisting in an extremely effortful way involving fight-flight with release of stress hormones. The all-or-nothing approach to a fudge cake doesn’t work – either gluttonously gobbling up half a cake after a week of dieting and feeling shame/guilt or having a momentous and highly emotional internal debate as if Congress were debating whether to go to war. Those sorts of debates leave you lightheaded with shallow breathing, clenched muscles and an uncomfortable tingling in your limbs. Restaurants and grocery stores will always arouse cravings in us because the people who run them design them to do just that, but they aren’t battlefields. If you experience a craving you can diffuse it by waiting it out, opening up your attentional field, allowing it to pass like a cloud or by exploring it with curiosity.
In AA they have a saying which goes, “When you point a finger at someone else you’re pointing three back at yourself.” The saying is meant to expose hypocrisy (faulting another for what you’re guilty of); and also to help AA members have more tolerance for and acceptance of others. Dustin Wood, Ph.D., assistant professor psychology at Wake Forest University, has just published a valuable study on the mental health aspects of what we say about other people in the July 2010 issue the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
Human beings have a 24 hour biological rhythm cued by changes in daylight called a circadian rhythm. The mammalian clock that regulates our sleep-wake cycle lies in the suprachiasmatic nucleus of the hypothalamus. Temporary disruption of circadian rhythm by international flights causes a combination of insomnia and fatigue known as jet lag.
The following is the philosophy of Charles Schulz, the creator of the ‘Peanuts’ comic strip. You don’t have to actually answer the questions. Just ponder on them.
The statins (drugs like Zocor, Mevacor and Lipitor) are the most heavily prescribed cholesterol lowering drugs on earth. They bring in 25 billion dollars annually from worldwide sales. The theory for prescribing them is that statins reduce arterial clogging, hypertension and heart disease by reducing cholesterol (a waxy textured mixture of fats) in the blood. They do this by inhibiting the function of HMG-CoA reductase, a key enzyme responsible for the biosynthesis of cholesterol. The problem with statins is that they work too well. They tip the balance of cholesterol from too high to too low.