Try To Make Good

[pshaw_raven]

I reminded myself this morning why I have an informal rule about "don't read the comments." I follow Nutrition Facts.org on another platform. Actually I follow Dr. Greger's podcast because it's interesting and I'm a nerd, but anyway. Today he posted a link to an article suggesting that diets higher in plant foods and lower in processed and animal foods may help with depression.   Notice some of the key words I'm using here - may, suggests, etc. Some people who went on vegetarian or vegan diets apparently had a reduction in depressive symptoms. Cool and good.

Cue the pile of people commenting about how much better they feel since they started eating meat again, "I've been vegan for 15 years and I'm still depressed," the remarks about how this doesn't actually help people with mental health issues but suggests that they should drop their medications and just eat flowers, and so on. 

I was tempted to comment myself, but why bother? No one's listening, it's a frantic clown fiesta of desperate people trying to get noticed online by being the most special and most outraged. 

Also, your health, whether mental or physical, isn't a zero sum game. If going with a more plant based diet helps ease some of your depression symptoms, then yay! I've experienced an easing of both anxiety and depression with a lot of the lifestyle changes I have made, but I still take my anxiety meds because I know my brain chemistry is such that I'm not likely to ever be NOT anxious. But it's nice to have much fewer episodes of depression, and shorter, less intense ones when I do. Obviously I'm not trying to say you should just get yourself some organic produce and don't listen to what Big Pharma is trying to sell you - yes, Big Pharma does pull some seriously shady shit and they need to slow their fucking roll with a lot of their schemes. But if the pills help, take 'em. Saying that you won't try a lifestyle intervention because it won't "fix" your depression is frankly stupid. Personally I would not refuse a 10% improvement simply because it isn't a 100% improvement. 

ANYWAY!

I tackled the pantry closet today. It's been lurking at the corners of my consciousness since I started decluttering and today I just said fuck it, I'm doing this thing. About an hour later, the floor is cleared, shelves are organized and old food either thrown out of put outside for the animals. I found some stale peanuts - no salt - so I scattered those around for the squirrels and crows. I'm probably going to make a dump run tomorrow, and take a load of things for donation, but with the kitchen and pantry done, I feel like my minimalism and decluttering project is over the halfway mark now. This is good.

Comments

[rebeccarobota]

Meanwhile I always seem to be the person in the corner expressing quiet alarm about the environmental impact of meat-centric diets. Don't get me wrong, I think people should do what's best for their bodies, but man oh man, if we all have to eat American quantities of meat to be happy and healthy, the planet is fucked.

[pshaw_raven]

I definitely feel like different diets are healthy for different people. I know when low-carb started to be a Thing I tried it for a while and felt terrible on it. Maybe I didn't stick with it long enough? But it doesn't exactly matter at this point. I do wish it were easier for people to get outside their food comfort zones because I think folks would include a lot more plants in their diets if they'd just try ones that have been properly cooked. As in not boiled to death.
Then I come across something like the zero-carb all protein adherents and just ... wtf.

Well ...

[ysabetwordsmith]

It depends on WHY you are anxious, depressed, or otherwise unwell. Causes include but are not limited to:

* Your body doesn't make enough of an important biochemical. If it can be replaced with pills, do that. Talking won't fix a biochemical problem.

* Your body could make what it needs, but has not got the raw materials to do so. This needs to be fixed with diet, as talking will not fix it and pills probably won't either.

* Your food contains things that throw your body off balance. You need different food. Talking won't fix it (but might help you make the changes) and pills probably won't either.

* Your relationship with the divine is messed up somehow. You need a clergyperson to sort out the mess. Nothing else is likely to help.

* You had a crappy childhood and now your head is full of bad tape. Changing your diet won't fix this, but eating healthy food is good self-care which you may not have learned earlier. Pills will just cover it up. You need to talk it out with someone who can help you put in good tape.

* A really awful thing happened to you and you are not coping at all well. You need more cope. This is best added by talking or reading to process the event and gain skills. Pills may blunt the misery but are unlikely to solve the problem. Healthier food won't fix it either, but is still good self-care.

* Your life is crappy right now. Maybe you have a terrible job, you're broke, someone is hurting you, or it's just meaningless and unfulfilling. Until you solve the material problems, you won't feel better. Pills, talking, diet, etc. may cover it up somewhat but that won't stop the practical issues from harming or possibly killing you.

* You live in a society that is generally scary and/or depressing. Well, nothing is going to fix that, but pills can make you care a lot less. Which is why there's a raging drug epidemic.

Often there is more than one reason, and the conventional health care system is not really equipped to cope with that, although there are alternative caregivers who will help you pick apart the causes and compile a care plan to address all of them. Multiple causes underlie a lot of "untreatable" conditions where each treatment is only helping one part so it doesn't get all the way fixed.

A problem is that people often latch onto the solution that solved their problem and think it will solve all similar problems, without stopping to consider the causes. This is a big issue when the system doesn't even distinguish between mental illness (e.g. you feel awful for no discernible reason, an innate problem) and mental injury (e.g. you feel awful because something happened to you, an external problem). Each solution may work for some cases, but none of them fix everything for everyone. :/

Re: Well ...

[pshaw_raven]

I actually was thinking about this very post yesterday and never got around to adding this.
From talking to a lot of other people, I started wondering about this. I don't think it's necessarily just an American thing, but it may well be generational - I don't know though. But I've met way too many people who have similar experiences as kids with being told their mental health doesn't matter. Some were told this outright, for other people it was more implicit in their parents' behavior. So sometimes it was simply ignored, sometimes it was addressed directly and made clear to the child that this wasn't acceptable.
My feeling is that if you've been brought up to believe that your stress, anxiety, depression, your general feeling of being overwhelmed and helpless is your own fault, then suggestions like this could be seen as reinforcing it. After all, we have a fair amount of control over our diets. So it comes off as being another old white guy telling me I'm not depressed, I just don't eat enough blueberries.
And dietary interventions for physical problems seem like they're only now being better understood, or would be better understood if we didn't have food companies sponsoring the research so that it comes out a certain way. So dietary intervention for mental and emotional well-being is even foggier. I'm sorry this is rambling, but I'm only on my first cup of coffee here and I'm trying to make sure I get everything out accurately.

Re: Well ...

[ysabetwordsmith]

>>But I've met way too many people who have similar experiences as kids with being told their mental health doesn't matter. Some were told this outright, for other people it was more implicit in their parents' behavior. So sometimes it was simply ignored, sometimes it was addressed directly and made clear to the child that this wasn't acceptable. <<

I think there's always been a certain amount of that, but the details are changing and that's causing a slightly different manifestation of problems. It used to be the norm to hide problems but people had a lot more life stability and social support from family and community. Now the problems are more open but there's a huge bait-and-switch going on, where people are told it's not shameful to have mental problems but are still heavily penalized if they do -- and there's much less connectivity and support in everyday life. So yes, a lot of people's problems get ignored, and thus get worse.

A big issue is that the system is only designed to care for emergencies. People are not taught how to treat small problems so they don't get bigger. We're taught to wash a cut so it doesn't get infected, but not how to bandage hurt feelings. People are left alone in waiting rooms for hours to find out whether a relative will live or die, and offered no emotional care. It's not designed to accommodate feelings, so the sense that you don't matter is accurate more often than not. And then society wonders why people wind up anxious and depressed. :/

Looking at food in particular: teaching people to ignore their feelings is one of the fastest ways to fuck up body awareness of what and how much to eat. Fixing that is then very difficult.

>>My feeling is that if you've been brought up to believe that your stress, anxiety, depression, your general feeling of being overwhelmed and helpless is your own fault, then suggestions like this could be seen as reinforcing it. After all, we have a fair amount of control over our diets. So it comes off as being another old white guy telling me I'm not depressed, I just don't eat enough blueberries.<<

Touche.

See also food deserts and the fact that poor people often have neither the food, tools, time, energy, or skills to cook healthy meals at home.

>>And dietary interventions for physical problems seem like they're only now being better understood, or would be better understood if we didn't have food companies sponsoring the research so that it comes out a certain way. So dietary intervention for mental and emotional well-being is even foggier.<<

Finding unbiased research in any field is hard now.

On the bright side, diet is something that many people have significant influence over, so it is often possible to make changes -- and the results are straightforward to observe. It either changes nothing, makes a slight change you're not sure if it really depends on diet, or makes a pretty big change that definitely correlates to diet. Among my monkeying around, I discovered that things like eating yogurt and bananas have a modest cumulative effect in improving digestion -- but hot muesli cereals for lunch make a huge improvement. The cool thing about diet is you can just explore different things, notice what helps or doesn't for you, and keep anything that produces results you like. You don't need a prescription or permission, which can be very empowering.

But being told to do it by someone else is often disempowering, especially if they nag or blame. 0_o

I have to admit, despite the often-shoddy science these days, I like reading about what makes foods healthy, how and why they work. There isn't much good research and recommendations on what to eat to recover from a given injury or illness ... but there are a few, and if you read widely enough then you can figure out more. Like if you break a bone, your body needs extra calcium to patch that, if you lose blood then more iron is prudent, and you can look up which foods have those raw materials.

We're a long way yet from understanding exactly how food influences mood, especially with intricate things like gut health. But some things are pretty widely known from empirical experiences -- lots of folks turn to chocolate (an entheogen) for its uplifting effects. We know that a diet high in fresh foods matches better mood than one high in processed foods, even if we don't know all the details of why that happens.

One thing I've noticed that isn't touched on at all in science is life energy. Eating things that are alive (like fresh-picked fruit) or recently were alive (like fresh-killed fish) yields more energy than things which were highly processed. It's something I mention when friends say they have no energy, and some people have found it very helpful.

So I like watching what people are discovering or observing about food. I'm just leery of a diet industry with a 95% failure rate in translating healthier eating to permanent weight loss. 0_o I think it's possible to improve health with better food, but we don't know exactly how yet -- and not everyone has the interest or energy to do the kitchen sink science themselves. Scolding people is pretty much always harmful, and it's hard to find food news that doesn't do that.

Talking about it, though, is a good way to make progress. I'm glad to see posts like yours, and people discussing this stuff.

Re: Well ...

[pshaw_raven]

Somewhat on topic here - thought you might be interested in this new book. I'm filing a request for it through the library.
Pressure Cooker - Why Home Cooking Won't Solve Our Problems, and What We Can Do About It link is to an interview in The Atlantic, links in the article to previous interviews as well.