Recently I read somewhere that eating well could be considered an act of resistance-resistance to the dominant ideas about meat, eggs, diary, fish, processed factory food and takeaway fast food,  as what food consists of.    Resistance to being normal and travelling down the normal path in life.  This normal path is be overweight to varying amounts, to have one or more chronic conditions, to respond to these chronic conditions by taking ever more medications and at least for now, to live longer but with an ever greater burden of sickness and decreasing  quality of life.

To not follow  this path, takes a deliberate act on our parts.  This is where Frantz Fanon and John Butler come in.  In 1961, Fanon wrote a book titled The Wretched of the Earth about colonisation, at the time when anti-colonial movements were starting in Africa.  He drew attention to the fact that it was important to de-colonise your mind as a first step in freeing yourself-from the oppressors, the dominant ideas, the colonisers.   He pointed out that it just wasn’t your country  that the colonisers had taken over-they had taken over our minds: how we felt about ourselves, what we thought was important, what we gave value to, what gave us pleasure-in other words, we don’t have to be controlled and policed by the outside, but we are controlling and policing ourselves from the inside.   This fits also with Foucault’s ideas about power.  So, Fanon argued that when the colonisers have taken over our minds we think about ourselves as they think about us and we want to be like them.  He was referring to the black people of Africa taking on the coloniser’s ideas that they were inferior to the whites and should stay in a master/slave or servant relationship.   In the colonisation of our minds we have taken on the idea of the big companies that we are worthless, we have no inherent value, but we can accrue value by getting and having things-buying and consuming.  The culture of consumption:always having more, getting more pleasure.   This is partly why people are always happy to add something to their diet, that is the latest fad to cure all ills, like fish oil for example.  But they are not so keen to take things away from their diet, which is curious as the problem with people’s diets is too much fat,sugar and protein: excess not deficiency.  Our biology sets us up to seek pleasure and consumer culture blows that up or uses that propensity.   But nothing happens in isolation: every action that we take effects how we see ourselves and how we see ourselves effects every action.

John Butler the Australian muso has a couple of songs very relevant to these ideas:  Better Than and Used to Get High.   In Used to Get High, he uses the idea of  getting high from drugs as being out of touch with reality but in the chorus, hooks it right into food.

“I used to get high for a living, believing everything I saw on the TV

I used to get high for a  living, eating or the bullshit food that  they sold me”

So, have a listen.

used to get high-right click to open link in new tab and hear song

Like most chronic illnesses we are in an epidemic of depression.  The rate of prescription for anti-depressants doubled in the 10 years to  2011, putting Australia 2nd in the OECD countries for rate of prescription, with nearly one in 10 Australians on anti-depressants.  (If there was an Olympics in ill-health it would be a battle between Australia and America to see who got the gold!)    Think about what this means for your acquaintances, friends, family and workmates as to how many of these may be on anti-depressants.   Notice I am not saying how many of these are depressed.  Obviously, some of them would be truly depressed, but many of them taking anti-depressants would be dealing with normal issues of life, in a normal way.  Life can be a struggle, you can  have trouble sleeping sometimes or you can feel down or wonder what is the point of it all.  These are all perfectly normal part of life-at least life as we know it, in the west and that is the life I know about.

I believe the doubling of prescriptions for anti-depressants is not due to a doubling of the rate of depression in the population or that twice as many people who are truly depressed feel free to come forward due to the lessening of stigma about being depressed.  It is my belief that the majority of this doubling has come about by over diagnosis of depression fuelled by “a pill for everything mentality”.   A pill for everything is driven by drug company profits, Dr’s 10 minunte consulting times, this cultures and therefore patients mentality of quick fix or immediate gratification, which is linked to doing  everything the easy way.

Depression as defined by the Diangostic Statistical Manual 1V for mental conditions is a very serious condition.  To meet the criteria for depression a person has to have:

DSM-IV Criteria for Major Depressive Disorder (MDD)
• Depressed mood or a loss of interest or pleasure in daily activities for more than two weeks.
• Mood represents a change from the person’s baseline.
• Impaired function: social, occupational, educational.
• Specific symptoms, at least 5 of these 9, present nearly every day:
1. Depressed mood or irritable most of the day, nearly every day, as indicated by either subjective report
(e.g., feels sad or empty) or observation made by others (e.g., appears tearful).
2. Decreased interest or pleasure in most activities, most of each day
3. Significant weight change (5%) or change in appetite
4. Change in sleep: Insomnia or hypersomnia
5. Change in activity: Psychomotor agitation or retardation
6. Fatigue or loss of energy
7. Guilt/worthlessness: Feelings of worthlessness or excessive or inappropriate guilt
8. Concentration: diminished ability to think or concentrate, or more indecisiveness
9. Suicidality: Thoughts of death or suicide, or has suicide plan

You may be surprised at how serious a condition depression is and how many issues a person needs to have to meet the criteria and then be given the treatment that the drug companies want you to have: medication.   I repeat medication can be helpful and in my profession as a social worker I often recommend to people they seek medication.  Like most chronic illnesses that are treated with drugs, food and lifestyle can have a huge postive impact.

This would not be so serious if these were not such serious and expensive medications.  The problem is that many people end up on these medications for life and these medications are changing your brain chemistry-that is what they are designed to do.  They are based on the idea, that depression is a physiological problem that arises from within you due to an imbalance(your serotonin levels are too low) and that if this imbalance is corrected with drugs, then you will feel better.

What are other ways to make yourself feel better, that is change your brain chemistry besides taking  drugs?  This is not a complicated question to answer.  As part of my job I run groups with criminals-people on parole or bonds in the community.  When I ask them, how do you make yourself feel better without drugs or what advice or ideas would they have for a friend who was depressed these are the things they say:

• find out what the problem is and do something about it, if you can and accept the situation if you can’t do anything about it
• talk it over with friends or family
• exercise
• do something you enjoy
• get up early in the morning
• get a good nights sleep
• eat well
• get out in the sun

These are all really good suggestions and in fact are really helpful in dealing with depression.  Exercise  has been proven to be just as effective as anti-depressants without any negative side effects just postive ones.  Positive ones like improved bowel movements, improved immune system, weight loss and  oh yeah-you’re not depressed.  Doesn’t sound too bad-but of course you have to do it! Another huge benefit of exercise is the weight loss and fitness of cardiovascular system(blood pumping around your body) is you have a better oxygen supply and much more energy for daily living.

Exercise produces endorphins a brain chemical and this relates to  what you have probably heard of as the runners high.  Endorphin comes from two words: endogenous meaning coming from within and morphine.  Yes morphine  the powerful pain reliever that heroin is closely related to.  Endorphins are part of the bodies feel good system.  We were designed to move and moving makes us feel good.  If we are overweight or unfit it doesn’t make us feel good, it makes us feel terrible.  We weren’t designed to be overweight and unfit, we were designed to be fit and trim.  Look at photos of Aboriginal Australians taken by early explorers and anthropoligists.  Endorphins probably played a part in enabling us to run long distances, like Aboriginal people and particularly Kalahari bushmen did to  capture their prey.  The body doesn’t have an endorphin system to enable us to sit around watching TV!

Eating well, means eating foods that are not going to get you addicted and  therefore swing your mood.  This means staying away from high fat foods(yes, fat is addictive) and high sugar foods(yes sugar is addictive)  Fat and sugar trigger pleasure experiences by releasing dopamine into the brain.  This makes sense as when we were hunter gatherers fat and sugar were in very short supply.  They should be pleasurable so we would seek them out.  In our world today  they are available everywhere, most noticeably in processed foods(anything made in a factory), take away food and  animal products, like meat, eggs, fish and dairy products.  If we eat a lot of these foods, then like any addictive substance we need more of it to  get the same feeling of pleasure.  Of course, eating is a pleasureable activity, but in this society our taste buds and our dopamine response are trained to look for high  taste foods:fat, sugar and salt.  Processed and take away food relies on these three substances to give us the big hit and hijack our taste buds and pleasure receptors.    If you make the change to eating plant foods that haven’t been tampered with, then all of a sudden(well after a couple of weeks actually)  you can start to taste how sweet cabbage is for example.   These subtle flavours are overwhelmed by the fat, sugar and salt of animal based foods and processed foods.

Particularly good foods to eat in terms of mood are seeds, like pumpkin seed or sunflower seed.   This is because the protein in them(yes they have protein, in fact protein is everywhere!) is high in the  amino acid, tryptophan, which is a precursor for the production of Serotonin.   Remember increasing the amount of Serotonin in your brain is what the anti-depressants are doing for you.    In  general though, plant foods will improve your mood.   They do this by reducing an enzyme in the cells of your brain.  This enzyme reduces the amount of neurotransmitters available for communication between brain cells.  These neurotransmitters include our friends Serotonin and Dopamine.

See http://nutritionfacts.org/video/fighting-the-blues-with-greens-mao-inhibitors-in-plants/.

It turns out that your parents and grandparents were right.  “Early to bed and early to rise,  makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise”   The Foo Fighters were also right when they said, “Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man and a woman,  miss out on the night life”  If you want to be healthy you should mainly miss out on the night life!  Studies show that people who sleep between 6- 8 hours/night live longer than others.  Dr Neil Barnard from PCRM in his book on Power Foods for the Brain, states that if you are reading this book and it is past 10 pm put it down and go to sleep!  Sleep before midnight is for laying down of memories and sleep after midnight is for dreaming and resolving our emotional life.

We are daytime animals not nightime animals like owls and it turns out that getting early morning sun on you is good for re-setting of your body clock to daytime activity, nightime sleeping.  It is also good for getting vitamin D which is made by our bodies in response to sunlight.  Exactly how Vitamin D is implicated in our moods, schizophrenia and motor neurone diseases is not understood, but there is a correlation between  how much sunshine you get and the rates of these conditons and it appears that vitamin D levels are an important part of the development of these conditions.

Like everything though, the main line of treatment offered for having low Vitamin D (which by the way is not an illness) is take a tablet.   Have Dr’s and  the general population forgotten about the thing which powers all life on this planet-the sun!  It is not a surprise to know that it appears that the recommended levels of vitamin D required by us has been set higher than necessary.  There is only one beneficiary of you taking  Vitamin D tablets when you don’t need to and that is drug companies.

Fighting the Blues With Greens? | NutritionFacts.org.