The most potent medicine for your mental health minght be in your kichen cabinet !

Food influences your brain directly and indirectly. When food is broken down by the microbiota into fermented and digested materials, its components directly influence neurotransmitters, such as serotonin, dopamine, and GABA (gamma-aminobutyric acid), which travel to the brain and change the way you think and feel. When food is broken down, its constituent parts can also pass through the gut wall into the bloodstream, and certain metabolites can act on the brain that way as well.

Food’s most profound effect on the brain is through its impact on your gut bacteria. Some foods promote the growth of helpful bacteria, while others inhibit this growth. Because of that effect, food is some of the most potent mental health medicine available, with dietary interventions sometimes achieving similar results to specifically engineered pharmaceuticals, at a fraction of the price and with few, if any, side effects.

On the other hand, food can also make you sad—certain food groups and eating patterns can have a negative effect on your gut microbiome and your mental health. Eating healthy, whole foods ensures that your brain is working at peak efficiency.

The idea of using food as medicine for mental health is central to nutritional psychiatry, and in my opinion, it’s crucial to finding meaningful, lasting solutions to mental health problems through simple and sustainable lifestyle changes.

We’ve come a long way since the seriously mentally ill were confined to asylums or hospitals without much understanding of their suffering. But mental health is still in a crisis. (More than 40 million Americans are dealing with a mental health concern—more than the populations of New York and Florida combined.) Mental disorders are among the most common and costly causes of disability. Depression and anxiety are on the rise. Suicide is a staple on lists of top causes of death, no matter what age-group. We’re in a mental health mess, no matter how many people are in denial about it. It has been challenging to find treatments that help people manage their moods, cognition, and stress levels.

Historically, we turned to evidence-based medications and talk therapies that worked for specific conditions. For example, for someone who was depressed, we might have tried a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor like Prozac. For someone who was panicky, we might have used cognitive behavioral therapy. Those kinds of treatments are still in wide use and can be effective. But for some people, the positive effects last only a short period of time, and they do not completely eliminate symptoms. Sometimes patients develop side effects from the medications and stop taking them. Other times they are afraid of becoming “dependent” on a medication and ask to be taken off it. Some patients who come to see me do not meet the criteria for a disorder such as depression or anxiety. They struggle with symptoms but not enough to warrant a medication intervention.

My own view of where we went wrong is this: Psychiatric diagnoses have no statistical validity, and the conditions have no biomarkers of specific diseases. “Diagnoses” are simply lists of symptoms. We assume that when a person presents with psychological symptoms, the problem rests solely in the brain. It is clear that other organs, such as the gut, play a role in how we think and feel. We need to examine the whole person and their lifestyle in order to better treat them.

The problem is bigger than psychiatry, extending to medicine as a whole. Despite the huge number of health issues that relate to diet, it may sound far-fetched, but many patients don’t hear food advice from their doctors, let alone their psychiatrists. Medical schools and residency programs do not teach students how to talk to patients about dietary choices. Nutrition education for doctors is limited.

Thankfully, we are inching toward a moment in health care when medicine is no longer strictly about prescriptions and a single line of therapy. Thanks to the wealth of medical knowledge accessible to the general public, patients are more empowered and informed than ever. It feels as though all my colleagues are experiencing a similar movement in their specialties, with patients eager to explore a diverse range of ways to feel better. One of my success stories of nutritional treatment was a referral from an infectious disease colleague. Another time, an orthopedic colleague reached out to me to ask more about the data on turmeric as an anti-inflammatory, as his patient with severe knee pain wanted to delay surgery until he’d tried this nutritional intervention.

In psychiatry, we are finally beginning to talk about the power of food as medicine for mental health. The body of research on the microbiome and how food impacts mental health is growing. In 2015, Jerome Sarris and his colleagues established that “nutritional medicine” was becoming mainstream in psychiatry. The goal of nutritional psychiatry is to arm mental health professionals with the information they need so that they can offer patients powerful and practical advice about what to eat. That doesn’t overshadow the importance of working with your doctor, since medication and the appropriate therapy remain a part of the journey to improved mental health. A better diet can help, but it’s only one aspect of treatment. You cannot eat your way out of feeling depressed or anxious (and in fact, trying to do so can make things worse). Food is not going to relieve serious forms of depression or thoughts of suicide or homicide, and it is important to seek treatment in an emergency room or contact your doctor if you are experiencing thoughts about harming yourself or someone else.

It is extremely important to look after your mental health with strategies of mindfulness, meditation, exercise, and proper sleep. The literature on these topics is vast, with methods both ancient and modern (and sometimes a combination of the two!) and I encourage you to explore them on your own. That being said, in addition to taking guidance from your doctor and encouraging mental wellness in other ways, you should support your treatment by paying attention to how and what you eat. The relationship linking food, mood, and anxiety is garnering more and more attention.

This is only for your information, kindly take the advice of your doctor for medicines, exercises and so on.   

https://gscrochetdesigns.blogspot.com. one can see my crochet creations  
https://gseasyrecipes.blogspot.com. feel free to view for easy, simple and healthy recipes    
https://kneereplacement-stickclub.blogspot.com. for info on knee replacement

 

FDA Warning Says the Chemicals in Sunscreen Can Be Absorbed In Your Bloodstream—Here's What That Means

We know you’ve been told all your life to slather on the sunscreen before a day spent outside. We’re not disputing that advice, but a new report in the Journal of the American Medical Association has given us some food for thought: There’s a chance that sunscreen could potentially be dangerous.

Here’s how: Sunscreen ingredients can travel through the skin and build up in the bloodstream, the new report suggests. This finding has raised concerns about how sunscreen might affect reproductive and developmental health and whether it can cause cancer, according to an editorial accompanying the new report.

For the new study, scientists from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) studied the effects of sunscreen on 24 healthy people. They tested four different sunscreens—two sprays, one lotion, and one cream—each applied four times a day, to 75% of the body surface, for four days.

Blood samples were then taken from the participants to determine how much of four specific sunscreen ingredients—avobenzone, oxybenzone, ecamsule, and octocrylene—ended up in their bloodstreams. And it turns out, it was a significant amount.

A bit of background: The FDA recommends that any active ingredients in sunscreen with “systemic absorption greater than 0.5 ng/mL” should undergo toxicology studies, including research on developmental, reproductive, and cancer-related health issues. And sure enough, all four of those ingredients were found at levels greater than that FDA benchmark—some at levels six or even eight times higher.

That certainly sounds concerning. But before we freak out about how much sunscreen we’ve been putting on for the last 10 years, let’s consider a few key aspects of this new research. First, the number of participants evaluated—24—is quite low, and the results only showed blood levels of these chemicals over the course of one week.

Second, the report isn’t claiming that these chemicals are actually unsafe, or that sunscreen should be pulled from supermarket shelves. In fact, it doesn’t even recommend throwing your sunscreen out. “These results do not indicate that individuals should refrain from the use of sunscreen,” it says.

What the report does say is that we need to know more. “The systemic absorption of sunscreen ingredients supports the need for further studies to determine the clinical significance of these findings,” the authors wrote. The accompanying editorial points out that further testing could be especially important for babies, “whose skin may absorb substances at differential rates.”

The editorial also calls for sunscreen manufacturers to commit to more safety tests, claiming that industry leaders have been hesitant to do so in the past. “Despite multiple efforts by the FDA to persuade sunscreen manufacturers to conduct key safety studies, the manufacturers have failed to produce such data, forcing the FDA to conduct its own studies,” the editorial states.

Those FDA studies haven’t been super promising, either: In 2014, an advisory panel concluded that there wasn’t enough evidence to state unequivocally that certain sunscreen ingredients are safe.

Dermatologists, however, still say that lathering up before spending time outdoors is a must—despite these new concerns. “Sunscreen is one of the major components of sun protection,” Noelani González, MD, an instructor of dermatology at the Mount Sinai Icahn School of Medicine in New York City, tells Health. According to the Skin Cancer Foundation, daily use of a sunscreen with SPF 15 or higher reduces the risk of developing melanoma—the deadliest form of skin cancer—by 50%.

Plus, says Dr. González, no clinical studies have actually linked sunscreen use to any of the potential dangers mentioned in this new study. “At this point we don’t necessarily know that [the ingredients analyzed in the new report] are worrisome,” she says. “It’s a very good starting point for us as physicians to investigate, but it’s early on.”

So what does this mean for you when you’re packing your beach bag? You should definitely still throw in the sunscreen. If you’re concerned about ingredients like oxybenzone, you might want to consider products with physical or mineral blockers (rather than chemical blockers) like zinc oxide and titanium dioxide, which aren’t absorbed by the skin and are considered safe by the FDA.

But until we know more, says Dr. González, any sunscreen is still better than none at all. The authors of the editorial agree, saying that avoidance of sunscreen as a result of this study “could have significant health implications.” They also point out that wearing sunscreen should be just one part of a larger sun-protection plan—one that also includes wearing protective clothing, hats, and sunglasses when spending time outside, and seeking shade when the sun is strongest.

This is only for your information, kindly take the advice of your doctor for medicines, exercises and so on.     

https://gscrochetdesigns.blogspot.com. one can see my crochet creations  
https://gseasyrecipes.blogspot.com. feel free to view for easy, simple and healthy recipes    
https://kneereplacement-stickclub.blogspot.com. for info on knee replacement