Preventing Vulnerabilities: Eating to Support Mental Health | Counselor Toolbox Episode 101

This episode was pre recorded as part of a live continuing education webinar on demand. CEUs are still available for this presentation through all CEUs. Register@Allce.com Counselortoolbox I'd like to welcome everybody to today's presentation. Happiness isn't brain eating to support mental Health. Now with the recognition that most people in here are mental health counselors, social workers, marriage and family therapists, etc. That is not nutritionists or registered dietitians. This information is simply educational. It's not designed to enable you to prescribe any sort of nutrition protocol for your clients, but it is designed to give you some understanding of how nutrition impacts mental health so you can educate your clients and point them in the right direction. So if the both of you working together think that it's worth approaching that with their physician or going to see a nutritionist, then they might go ahead and do that. Over the next hour we're going to review the nutritional building blocks for health and wellness. Examine how these nutrients, or lack thereof, contribute to neurotransmitter imbalance or balance. You'll notice a lot of things don't work in isolation. So if you have a lot of one element, vitamin, mineral, whatever, but you don't have the CO factors, they're not going to work. So it's important to have a balanced diet. And we'll talk about some simple ways to help clients do that a little bit later in the presentation. And we'll also identify several nutrient dense foods that you can include in your diet. Not every food is appropriate for every person. Some medications you can't, like maois, you can't eat cheese or drink wine. So we're obviously again not going to prescribe any course of nutrition for any of our patients. But it is interesting to note some of the foods that you can get more bang for your buck, if you will. And there's a chart at the end of the presentation that will show you that. Why do we care? Well, in early recovery now from addiction, from depression, from anxiety, whatever they're seeing you for, nearly every person's neurotransmitters are out of balance. They're not feeling good. So it tells me their feel good chemicals are either insufficient or not in the correct proportion to the get up and go neurotransmitters. This causes feelings of depression, apathy, anxiety and or exhaustion. So encouraging people to understand why they feel the way they do is the first step. Why is it when I eat certain things I feel this way? Why is it that when I Do this, I feel this particular way, helping people understand that everything we do probably has an impact on our neurotransmitters because it will either use up or cause us to be more excited or it'll help us calm down. But all of that is triggered, if you will, by the neurotransmitters. Figuring out how to help yourself feel better is next. So this is why we want to educate our clients about a holistic approach. But what are neurotransmitters? Well, we've got 86 billion neurons, and the neurotransmitters make the communication go between those two neurons. It's kind of like the circuit completion. Neurotransmitters regulate mood, cravings and addictions. Energy, libido, sleep, attention and concentration, memory and pain sensitivity. And I've said this before, but when we think about, we'll take depression because that's the easiest one to use. But a lot of other mental health diagnoses have similar symptoms. Mood. If your mood is, you know, low, anxious, that's a neurotransmitter issue, or can be if your energy, you know, we're talking about fatigue and lethargy in depression. Well, neurotransmitter may be implicated. Libido. When people are depressed, they typically don't have as much libido. So again, we're looking at neurotransmitters. Sleep is regulated by neurotransmitters, which, when people are depressed or anxious, they either sleep too much or can't sleep enough. Poor concentration, characteristic of a lot of mental health diagnoses. Neurotransmitters and memory. Yeah, pain sensitivity is more linked to serotonin and your endogenous opioids. But serotonin is that neurotransmitter that we so often refer to as the antidepressant neurotransmitter. 86% of Americans have suboptimal neurotransmitter levels, mainly because we do it to ourselves. Chronic stress, you can only go so high, so hot, so fast for so long before your body goes, I give up, wave the white flag. Poor diet, we're not getting the building blocks that we need. Now, some people are trying to get the building blocks that they need, but they're eating foods that are too heavily processed or grown in nutrient poor soil. So it is important to look at, where is your food coming from. Environmental toxins, drugs, either prescription or recreational, will affect neurotransmitter levels. Alcohol, nicotine, and caffeine. So think for yourself. In the past week. How many of these have impacted your life? Chronic stress, not eating so well, environmental toxins, pretty much. I say if you look on the label and you can't pronounce it, probably a toxin of some sort. That's not always true, but it's kind of a good rule. Drugs, prescription or recreational. I've been sick for about, I'm getting over it now, but it was about a week and I don't normally take medication and I've been taking decongestants, which are stimulants. So guess what? You know, I've been a little bit more revved than normal. Altering those excitatory neurotransmitters and caffeine. You know, for me, caffeine is kind of a staple of my morning ritual. So, you know, all of those are things that I do that could potentially negatively impact neurotransmitters. So just thinking for yourself how easy it is to do things that aren't necessarily the best for us. How do you feel when you're not getting enough oxygen? And you know, I put hint here because most of us are like, well, I'm not oxygen deprived, but a lot of times we are. When we are not getting enough oxygen in, we tend to yawn more. Most of the time when we yawn, it actually is due to oxygen deprivation. Why does that matter with nutrition? Because if you don't get enough iron and your hemoglobin is not able to carry oxygen throughout the body, then you're going to feel oxygen deprived, fatigued, boggy headed. What effect might a low carb diet have on mood? And we're going to talk about some of those things as we look at how frequently the nutrients we need are actually in whole grains. What effect might a low protein diet have on mood? Now this is one we don't think about a lot. But some people don't get enough protein. Most non vegan Americans do. But we're going to look at the quality of the proteins. This is less of an issue unless somebody's intentionally cutting protein from their diet or they have to because they're on a renal program or something like that. But it is interesting to look at the impact that changing carbohydrates or proteins has on our moods. And why do doctors test for vitamin D levels in patients with depressive symptoms? And I hinted at this in the last presentation, but they found that there are a lot of vitamin D receptors in the brain. They don't exactly know what they do, but they know they're in parts of the brain that regulate mood. So they figure if there are receptors there, they must do something. They also know that when we look at seasonal affective disorder, people who aren't getting enough sunlight, and that is their body's not making enough vitamin D, tend to have more depressive symptoms, which is why a lot of doctors recommend people take vitamin D supplements when there's not a lot of sun outside. So we're going to start with the amino acids, our proteins. And the reason I'm starting with this is because amino acids are what your neurotransmitters are built from. So L tryptophan is the only amino acid that is broken down in order to make serotonin. Serotonin, we know, makes melatonin. So if you don't have enough tryptophan, then it's going to affect anything that serotonin is involved in. I've got a cute little graphic for that in a little while, but it's also going to affect sleep. So we want to make sure people are getting that. Now, the cool thing with proteins is when you eat something that is a protein, like chicken or fish or eggs, it has most every amino acid in it. So it's not like you've got to try to find high tryptophan or high tyrosine or high this or high that. Just eating a good quality protein is going to get people what they need if they want to spend. You can spend hours trying to balance out amino acids, and it's just not worth the effort. Tyrosine is broken down to make L dopa, which is broken down to make dopamine, which is broken down to make norepinephrine. Wow. So imagine we have somebody who has been stressed out for a really long time. Their body's kind of turned down the sensitivities. They don't have the energy, they don't have motivation. Dopamine is our pleasure chemical. Norepinephrine is our motivation to get up and go chemical. So if you don't have tyrosine, you're not going to have reward or motivation, you know, and that's kind of a gross overstatement. Again, you need to understand that these things are vital for our body because sometimes we can't get them from just our own bodies. We need to actually ingest them, which takes us to our essential amino acids. A lot of these slides have a lot of information on them that you're able to read. So I'm not going to go through each one and read them to you. Well, I'll Just leave it at that. Essential amino acids must be acquired from diet. So all of these essential amino acids, and there's nine of them, can't be manufactured within the body. So if you're not ingesting them, you're not getting them. And if you'll notice, the bottom one is tryptophan. Guess what? Tryptophan is the only amino acid precursor to serotonin. So if you're not getting that, then your body's gonna have a hard time making serotonin. So just that's the big one. That's really impactful, if you will, in terms of, in terms of your proteins. Then we've got this whole other issue of complete versus incomplete proteins. And if you took nutrition when you were in college, when you were in high, so you've probably heard something about this, but you may not remember a lot. And there's a lot of research on it and there's a lot of competing opinions. So I will start out by saying that some proteins are what they call complete. They have all of the amino acids in them. The essential amino acids, which are again, the ones we cannot manufacture. They are both meat, fish, dairy, eggs, and then there are also some non meat, if you will, sources of complete proteins. So vegetarians and vegans can get complete proteins. There's no issue with that. Incomplete proteins are those that don't contain all nine essential amino acids. Now the big controversy comes up right now in the fact that there used to be a theory that in order to, for your body to be able to use the proteins that you were eating, if you ate an incomplete protein that had five of the essentials, then you had to eat another incomplete protein at the same time that had the other four essentials in order to give your body a complete protein that it could use. The research has since shown that that's not so much true. Your body uses the amino acids when it gets them. Now it's helpful. The compromise, I guess, between the two sides has been to say if you eat an incomplete protein, you probably want to look at including the other kinds of amino acids. So you know both types that will eventually give you all nine essential amino acids in your diet at some point within a 24 hour period. But there's still a lot of argument about whether that's necessary or whether you can just kind of mix it up throughout the week and you'll be a. Okay. Which brings us to. So you've got incomplete and complete proteins. Both of those provide your essential amino acids. This is the take home message that's the meta concept, if you will. And those are the ones that we need in order to function, build tissue, make everything that our brain needs. But not all proteins are created equal. So not only could they be incomplete, but even some of your complete proteins aren't completely digestible. So they created the protein digestibility Corrected amino acid score. And that acronym doesn't even say anything. But the take home from this is to understand that if you need 80 grams of, let's do 100, because it's easier on my math skills. If you need 100 grams of protein a day and you get 100 grams of protein from egg whites or ground beef, then it's one for one. You got it. But if you need 100 grams of protein a day and you're getting it from pinto beans, then you're going to need. You're only going to be able to synthesize about 61% of that for protein. So you're going to need a little bit more protein if you're not getting it from something that is easily digestible. The big concept here is if you're working with somebody who is a vegetarian or a vegan, they may need to talk with a nutritionist about whether they're getting enough protein. And on to my favorite neurotransmitter building block, tryptophan. Where does it come from? Egg whites and chia seeds are two of your biggest ones. Interestingly, turkey doesn't have as much available tryptophan as egg whites or chia seeds. So something to know. A lot of us talk about tryptophan. As you know, when we eat turkey at Thanksgiving dinner, that makes us sleepy, and that's not true, actually. It's the carbohydrates from Thanksgiving dinner that makes our insulin go hooey. That makes us sleepy. The turkey. The bioavailability of the tryptophan is actually pretty low in a lot of the turkey we eat. As far as making it available to your body, your body also has to have iron, magnesium, B6 and vitamin B or vitamin C to convert tryptophan to serotonin. So it's not. You can't just pop a tryptophan pill and go, okay, I'm gonna feel better. Your body needs a balanced diet, more readily absorbed when eaten with a high carbohydrate meal, which again is Thanksgiving dinner, if you will, because amino acids are used throughout the body. When you eat a high carbohydrate meal, a lot of the competing amino acids are absorbed into the tissues to rebuild and do all that kind of stuff that they do. And tryptophan just makes it beeline for your brain. So more tryptophan is able to get into the brain. As I've said, it's the only precursor to serotonin. Now I've included on these slides a lot of journal articles, so you can go back and review the research, which if you're like me, it's kind of interesting to look at what they've studied and see how nutrition really does make a significant impact. And here's that little graphic I told you about, Tryptophan. We eat it, chia seeds, egg whites, turkey, whatever. But in order for it to actually be broken down, we have to have iron, which is Fe, magnesium, calcium, B6 and folic acid. Alright, so it's broken down and it's made into five htp. Great. So we're on our way to serotonin. We know 5 HTP is a precursor of serotonin, but got to stop because 5 HTP has to be broken down again. In order to do that, you need all of these things, which vitamin C again, B6, zinc and magnesium. More different vitamins are needed in this process, in this mixture in order to make serotonin. We know that serotonin is involved, insufficient serotonin is involved in fibromyalgia and other pain conditions, cravings for carbohydrates, alcohol and certain drugs, sleep problems and gut and heart problems. So serotonin is really a big player throughout our body, not just in our mood. And if you think about it, a lot of these physical issues can set someone up to feel depressed, can set someone up to feel anxious. If you're in pain all the time, or if you're having stomach problems or intestinal problems, you know, it can kind of cramp your mood a little bit. And then serotonin is broken down in order to make melatonin. If you don't have enough serotonin to spare, it's got to come from somewhere. So most of the time your body goes, you know, we just won't make as much melatonin. So the person doesn't sleep as well. And we know from last week's presentation that sleep is imperative to neurotransmitter balance and good moods. So essential amino acids are those that you cannot manufacture in your own body, non essential amino acids. And a lot of our neurotransmitters come from non essentials. That's the good thing. But a couple of them that we want to hit on Arginine helps with insomnia. Glutamine is broken down to glutamate, which we know is an excitatory neurotransmitter. And glutamate is broken down to make gaba, which we know is our antianxiety transmitter. So all of these things kind of work together in concert, if you will. Theanine, which you've probably heard as one of the components of green tea, it increases GABA and serotonin levels. So theanines are really interesting. Neurotransmitter, or not neurotransmitter, but amino acid and tyrosine, as you saw in the first graphic, is used to make dopamine, which is broken down to make norepinephrine and, and thyroid hormones. So thyroid hormones are obviously not neurotransmitters. But when somebody has hypothyroid, what are their presenting symptoms? Almost exactly the same as clinical depression. So we want to look at what's going on, what are we treating and what does this person need in order to start feeling better? Low levels of B vitamins may be linked to depression. So we're going to go through some of these B vitamins because there's a lot of them. Vitamin B3, which is also known as niacin, is found in meats and whole grains. So again, with the whole grains in a low carbohydrate diet, you're not going to have as many of those. It helps with digestion and changing food to energy, which we need in order to function and feel not fatigued. And it helps the body conserve tryptophan to convert it to serotonin. So vitamin B3 helps conserve that amino acid in order to make a neurotransmitter. So it's our friend. Pantothenic acid is in beef, eggs, legumes and a whole lot of other things, but also flour and whole wheat. So some of these can be gotten, as you will see from the last slide. Vitamin B3 is in meats. So even if you're not eating a super high carbohydrate diet, you can get some of it from meat sources. Same same thing with pantothenic acid, but we're looking for variety here. Pantothenic acid helps with the control and secretion of cortisol, our stress hormone. When cortisol is secreted, then norepinephrine is secreted because we are getting ready for this fight or flight for whatever that stressor is. It's been shown to help with migraines and chronic Fatigue syndrome. But supplementation in very high doses can increase panic attacks. One thing that I do want to point out is just like the neurotransmitters like to be in a nice balance, our body uses foods and chemicals and vitamins in certain ratios. It is always better to get the nutrients that you need from foods. When you get them from foods, you pretty much can't overdose. You know, there are a few exceptions, but they're rare. When you start taking supplements, you may start taking too much of one, which may deplete another one completely, and there's a much higher risk of overdose. So I encourage patients to start looking at if they're going to change their diet, how can they do it in a way that is meaningful and as holistic as possible. B6 food sources are your fortified cereals, soy based meat substitutes. So there again for the vegetarians, baked potatoes, bananas, meat and spinach. Spinach actually has a whole lot of amino acids and vitamins in it. B6 supports your nervous system by helping your body break down those proteins so it can use it to make neurotransmitters. A lot of us know folate or folic acid. If we've been pregnant, then, you know, it was something the doctor really wanted us to have to ensure good brain development in our fetus. Well, let's keep it going. Even when we get a developed brain, theoretically when we're older, it can reduce depression when taken in conjunction with B12. So you want to look for foods that are high in B vitamins, the B complex vitamins, not just one or the other, which I don't even know if it's possible to find a food that's only high in one B vitamin. B12 is the other one that a lot of people talk about taking supplementation in order to help increase their memory and increase their concentration. You know, again, you can get it from a lot of really easy sources in your diet. Beef, eggs, poultry, soybeans. Again, yogurt. Yogurt actually is, will come up quite a few times. And salmon. Salmon will come up when we talk about aminos, not Aminos, Omega 3s in a little while. So looking for those foods that have lot of nutrient density that you like. And I think everybody can find a fair number of foods that are nutrient dense that they like, even if they don't want to eat Brussels sprouts and spinach at every meal. B12 helps with cell division, mood problems, depression, anxiety, poor memory and difficulty concentrating. So that's pretty much half of your mood disorder symptoms, right? There. So B12 is important. Let's make sure we're getting it. Vitamin C. A lot of us think about vitamin C as the vitamin you take in order to not get sick, which is true. However, vitamin C is also important to help make collagen, regulate norepinephrine, dopamine and serotonin. So motivation, pleasure and antidepressant. It's a good thing. We really want to have vitamin C and it's associated, interestingly, with significant reductions in anxiety. I would really encourage you to take some time out and look at some of these studies when you have time, if you're interested in how all that happens, because I found it fascinating that vitamin C could do that. Vitamin D3 is known as our sunlight vitamin because it's what our body manufactures. When we're in the sun, anything we take as an oral supplement isn't as bioavailable as what we get from the sun. So if people can get outside, if there's not a medical contraindication, it's 15 to 20 minutes a day. It's not a huge amount of. We're not telling somebody to go out and bake in the sun, but always have them talk with their doctor about what they need to do in order to get enough vitamin D3. It maintains bone health and helps process calcium. It's important for immune system function. None of us is in a good mood when we're sick. I've never met anybody who's in a good mood when they're sick. So helping people stay healthy is one of the first steps to helping them stay happy. It's also related to a reduction in depression affecting the amount of monoamines such as serotonin, and how they work in the brain. Scientists still really don't understand how all that works, but they know that it does have some sort of a regulatory effect. Calcium not just for strong bones, it also helps muscles work and support cell communication. If you don't have enough, you can have nerve sensitivity, heart palpitations. Think about your clients who may have panic disorder, may have anxiety, and if they get a little palpitation, they may be able to kind of work themselves up into a full blown panic attack. But it's also associated with irritability, anxiety, depression, and insomnia. So calcium is good. Not a lot of adults, some, but not a lot of adults get enough calcium. Because we're not drinking milk as much as we used to, like at every meal, we're not eating as much high calcium food. So, you know, it's something to Pay attention to. And it's usually pretty easy to get back into your diet if you're, you know, not averse to Greek yogurt or cottage cheese or something else. Too much calcium can also cause depression and difficulty concentrating. So there's too much of a good thing. This is another one where supplementation can really backfire on you. Chromium is in some cereals, your meats, broccoli, and, interestingly enough, grape juice. It helps maintain your blood sugar levels, which is what most people know it for, but it also influences the release of norepinephrine and serotonin. So we want somebody to get motivated and happy. Let's help them regulate the release of those neurochemicals. So encouraging them to look at foods to include in their diet that are high in chromium. A daily dose and not that we're recommending this for our clients, of 600 micrograms of chromium led to a significant decrease in symptoms among those with atypical depression, which they defined atypical depression as those people with depression who have a tendency to overeat. And I'm not sure if that's atypical or not. There's a lot of. Most of the people I work with tend to overeat and have difficulty finding satiation when they're depressed. So chromium has been shown in a pretty robust study to help with that. Copper, not just metal. Food sources of it that most of us would be have access to seafood, cashews, sunflower seeds, wheat bran, cereals, whole grains, avocados, and cocoa products. And when I say cocoa, it doesn't have to be chocolate. Chocolate's really high in calories. Dark cocoa powder is, you know, really high in both magnesium and copper. But the rest of them, you can probably find. Copper helps break down iron and make red blood cells. So we're getting that oxygen in there. Helps produce energy for cells, maintains bones, connective tissue, and blood vessels. The interesting thing with copper is if you have too much copper, it competes with zinc, so it'll lower your zinc levels. If you have an inadequate or imbalanced copper to zinc ratio, people have symptoms of depression, again, looking at natural sources to get it instead of overdosing on supplements. Iodine. You know, you didn't think in America that most people were lacking iodine, but the trend towards sea salt has actually moved a lot of people in America to having an iodine deficiency. Most people, if you look at your bottle of salt when you get home, most people are not using iodized salt anymore. If you're using sea salt, there's no iodine in there. So understand understanding that iodine is an important mineral for people to have, but you only need an itty, itty bitty bit of it. You know, you don't need to be overdosing on salt in order to get it, but it is something to take a look at if you have someone who has weight gain, fatigue, difficulty concentrating, and just general depressive symptoms and apathy. Part of this is because iodine is really important in, in regulating the thyroid hormones. So hypothyroid depressive symptoms, hyperthyroid people can have some anxiety like symptoms. So we really need to pay attention to iodine and whether somebody's getting any at all. Iron. Most of us try to look to include iron in our, in our diet, and we can get that from meats and soy foods and some fortified foods. It carries oxygen to all parts of the body through the red blood cells, and it helps with the synthesis of neurotransmitters and fighting fatigue and brain fog. So what are the symptoms that people are presenting with, what might be going on? Let's take a look at what their average week of their average meal plan looks like for an entire week. And I encourage people to download an app, keep a food diary for a week or even a month just to get an idea about what minerals, vitamins and minerals they're getting enough of. I've told you before, SparkPeople and MyFitnessPal and there are other apps out there that you can put your food in. You can keep your food diary on your app and at the end of the day, it will give you totals for all of these vitamins and minerals. And you can even add some of the amino acids in there to see if you're getting what percentage of the US RDA you're getting for each of those. Magnesium, one of my favorites. Whole grains, leafy vegetables, and I'll point out, cocoa again, helps muscles and nerves work. And you remember from that first graphic that we looked at, magnesium is involved not only in the first breakdown of tryptophan to 5 HTP, but also a 5 HTP to serotonin. So magnesium is kind of important for us. It can steady heart rhythm, maintains bone strength and helps the body create energy and optimizes thyroid function. So it's not directly involved in, well, kind of is indirectly involved in making neurotransmitters, but it doesn't make us feel better, but it allows our body to make the rest of the chemical reactions that are necessary in order to create the neurotransmitters that make us feel better. I told you we would get to omega 3s. And this is another one where people just kind of sit there and roll their eyes and they're like, oh my gosh, there is so much information out there. And there is the big things we're going to hit on today. And I've given you a bunch of links. Dr. Oz actually has a four page article that's pretty easy to understand if you want to know more. But you have Omega 3s and Omega 6s, both are important. Omega 3s are what we're going to talk about first because that's what most Americans don't have enough of in their diet. They come from walnuts, chia seeds, mackerel, tuna and salmon fish oil. Now those portion sizes that I put up there, what I found one site recommended in order to get 100% of what you needed for the day. So it's not a lot. It's not like you have to go out and eat, you know, five pounds of fish or something. It's not too hard to get into a meal. But it is interesting to look at where it comes from. And I know I look at this and I go, yeah, I haven't eaten any of those in forever. The other ways to get omega 3s in your diet are to use canola oil, olive oil or flaxseed oil when you're cooking. Now, flaxseed oil has kind of a bitter taste to it, in my opinion, so I don't typically use that when I cook, but I do put it in sometimes when I'm making sauces or something that's going to cover it up. Flax seeds themselves are sometimes touted as something you can use in order to increase your omega 3s. And they can, but they're not as efficient at producing positive effects because the ala's in the flax seeds actually have to be converted to the EPA's and the DHAs. EPAs and your DHAs are your acids that are your omega 3s that are really useful to your body. So there's breakdown process that has to happen in there. If you like flax seeds and you're used to using it in your cereals or whatever you do with it. More power to you. It's a whole lot better than Nothing at all. Omega 3s help your body transmit nerve signals, maintain serotonin balance. Interesting to know. And reduces inflammation. They've actually found a lot of links between inflammation in the body and depressive symptoms. So putting that all together, if you can figure out a way to get omega 3s into your diet in some way. And there are a lot of fish oil supplements and those things that people can talk with their doctor about that make it easier to get the Omega 3s. It's one of those things that seems to be really critically important for preventing depression in a lot of people. The ideal ratio of threes to 6s is either 1 to 1 or 2 to 1, omega 6 to omega 3. So we already have a ton of omega 6s in our diet. It's getting the omega 3s up. These different articles here, like I said, this article from Dr. Oz, Daily Dose, Omega 3 really effective. This one from Harvard explains why flaxseed is not. It's bioavailable, but it gives you a lot of information. And this one from the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, EPA E is actually the clinical term that they were using for supplementing with omega 3s for major, major depressive disorder. So don't let the very foreign titles seem make you not want to go read the article. Another one we're going to talk about, and this isn't. This is an antioxidant, and it's lycopene. It prevents brain degradation with age. And this is the only one in this category we're going to talk about. But I thought it was important enough to add it to this slide or add it to this presentation. Lycopene is found in your red foods. Watermelon, pink grapefruit, apricots, tomatoes, to a certain extent, sweet potatoes. Interestingly enough, it becomes more available to our bodies when it's cooked. So lycopene is something you might want to consider looking at potassium if you've worked with clients with eating disorders, especially clients who are bulimic. Potassium is something that we really watch and to a certain extent with anorexia too, because it becomes very disrupted during the purging process. Sources of potassium, broccoli, potatoes. Again, most people like baked potatoes. It keeps coming up. And that's what I try to do, is I go through the slides here and I find foods that I like. Then I start putting hash marks next to them for how many different vitamins or minerals or whatever they'll give me. And the ones with the highest number of hash marks are the ones I try to include. My diet. Prune juice and prunes. I can't tolerate prune juice, but I love prunes, green leafy vegetables, orange juice, bananas. We all think of potassium and bananas. It's required to activate neurons and helps maintain a healthy water balance in our body. And potassium is really involved in the kidneys and everything else. It's. You could do a whole class on it. But without the electrical charge sparked by potassium, neurotransmitters like serotonin can't be used. So it's basic. Basically acts like a spark plug to initiate a chemical reaction. So you know how well your car works if the spark plugs are shot. So most people, again, they'll eat bananas, potatoes, broccoli, selenium. Now this is one of the ones that I said you can actually get a toxic level from the diet if you eat Brazil nuts, those big nuts that kind of look like. Shaped like bananas and mixed nuts. I love them. But if you eat more than two or three and they've been grown in an organic, organic environment that has a lot of selenium in the soil, you actually can get too much selenium and start feeling nauseous. But that aside, so it's found in Brazil nuts. Brown rice, we all like brown rice. Turkey, that's another one that's come up a lot. Spinach. Told you. Spinach was an oddly nutrient dense food. And sunflower seeds, it too regulates the thyroid hormone, but it also helps regulate the circadian rhythm. So it helps helps us regulate that sleep wake cycle and the sleep wake, eat cycle. If people are having difficulty feeling satiated, if they're having difficulty feeling like they know when to eat or they know when to stop eating, or they don't know they're never sleepy or they're always sleepy. Might look at whether they're getting enough selenium in their diet. If they eat a lot of chicken, they probably are. But zinc. Food sources of zinc include red meat, fortified cereals, oysters, almonds, peanuts, soy foods and dairy products. Zinc balances with copper, and they found that too little zinc really results in depression or anxiety. So that ratio is really important. It supports immune, reproductive and nervous systems. So it's necessary. It's in most of your fortified cereals. If you grab a box of bran flakes or Cheerios or whatever it is you eat at your house, it's usually on there. So it's not something that you're going to have to go hunt for really hard. So in summary, you know, we went through a lot of different vitamins and minerals and your head's probably spinning right now. And I put all of that information on these slides. So it was easy for you to print out and kind of go through and circle the foods that you like to eat and see which ones might help improve your diet or things you might consider adding, like avocados. Avocados aren't my favorite, but they do. They are nutrient dense. Eating foods with a low glycemic index improves the quality and duration of intellectual performance. Whole different presentation that I watched one time the presenter was talking about how our brains are actually one of the biggest users of blood glucose. So when we're presenting, we're taking a test when we're thinking hard. That's why if you go to a training and you sit there all day long, even if you have a physically demanding job, you walk out of that training and you're like, oh, I'm beat. Your body is actually used lot of energy trying to process all that stuff. But low glycemic index foods are ones that when you eat them, your blood sugar kind of goes up and goes down and it's a gentle rolling hill. High glycemic index foods are more like table sugar, where you eat it and you get this spike, but then you crash and you're even more tired than before you had the sugar in the first place. So what do we usually do? Eat more sugar and crash even lower. So by the end of the day, we're just kind of dragging and all but drooling on ourselves because we're so exhausted. Dietary proteins contribute to good brain function. So when we're talking about a lot of these foods that we talked about, vitamins and minerals are also found in meats. So if you're not a vegetarian, that bodes really well for you being able to get stuff in there if you are. There are vegetarian sources. It's just little bit more complicated. We need tryptophan to create serotonin and melatonin so we can have the relaxation, calming, and so we can sleep. But also remember that serotonin is responsible for pain sensations. So when you don't have enough serotonin, you actually hurt more, which is one of the reasons it's implicated with fibromyalgia and some of the intestinal disorders like Crohn's disease, that have a lot of pain with them. I think 80% of your body's serotonin is actually found in your gut. Interesting little side note, brain cell functioning requires. Doesn't want. It requires omega 3 fatty acids. So if we want our brains to be healthy, we need to give them omega 3s. Omega 3s have also been found to help prevent or treat mood disorders, particularly depression. As I said, when we Were back on the, on that slide. There are Omega 3 supplements that you can take if that's what works with you and your health practitioner and all that stuff. But you can also start using olive oil in your cooking and that'll help get your omega 3s up. Any is better than none. Iron is necessary to ensure oxygenation and for the synthesis neurotransmitters. So we want to make sure to get that in there. Iodine helps energy metabolism in the brain cells. So iodine will help us, you know, use up all that energy when it gets to our brain. Your B vitamins are necessary for the utilization of glucose in the brain and the creation of neurotransmitters. Nerve endings contain the highest concentrations of vitamin C in the human body. So if we want to prevent neuropathy, if we want to make sure that our nerves and our synapses are all communicating well, vitamin C is a good thing. Vitamin C and vitamin B. All of your vitamin B's are what they call water soluble. So if you get too much, you will excrete them and generally within certain tolerable limits. No harm, no foul, except for really expensive urine. Some of your other vitamins like D and E and a lot of your minerals are not water soluble. So it's easier, they build up in the body and it's easier to overdose on those. Vitamin E is necessary for transmission of your neurological signals. So again, getting it all through that network, 84 billion synapses. And I've seen a couple questions come up and I will try to answer those. My answer to a couple of them is, I don't know yet, but we'll get there. When you get nutrients from real foods, there's much less danger of toxicity and they're more bioavailable in most instances because they're in a useful ratio to something else. Obviously they were there and they helped the plant grow or they helped the critter grow. So it's in a ratio that's useful to the body. Nature's all about balance. So increases in one may decrease the others. They may compete, which is why once you start taking supplements, it can be a really slippery slope. Organic fruits and vegetables are generally grown in soil that is healthier. Current commercialization and practices. The same crops tend to be grown in the same soil and they extract the same nutrients every single time. So with the exception of the artificial fertilizers that are put on top of them to help them grow, they're not able to get the nutrients they need actually from the soil. They're kind of waiting for dinner, if you will, every time the farmer comes by and puts on fertilizer. So if you can get organic fruits and vegetables. A lot of us who garden organically use a system of crop rotation, so we're allowing the soil to rest between growing seasons, and we'll grow cabbage one season and then we may grow melons the next season, which uses a whole different set of nutrients, and it allows the microorganisms in the soil to balance out. Use an app such as SparkPeople or MyFitnessPal to track your nutrition at the end of the day, as I said, it'll give you a whole printout of or whatever screenshot of what you got in terms of what percentage of the recommended daily allowance for your gender, age, and body weight. Smaller changes are longer lasting, though, so try to add more of one type of food that has multiple vitamins instead of turning your nutritional protocol upside down overnight. So maybe just start trying to use olive oil for the next month and then maybe start trying to drink a little bit more milk or whatever it is that when you look at your individual needs, you need to increase more of. Deficiencies of nutrients are common, especially if you eat refined foods. There are a variety of different vitamins and minerals involved in addiction and mental health disorders. And when I say addiction, I'm talking about cravings. And when people, especially when we're talking about alcohol. It can do a number on some of the nutrients in your body. So it's important to understand that it'll take time to recover from that, but the body can. It may just need more of those raw materials. Human brains try to maintain homeostasis, and too much or too little of anything can be bad. So a balanced diet will provide the brain the necessary nutrients in synergistic combinations. Now, this is the whatever table that I was telling you about earlier. And if you Google eat by color, there are a lot of really pretty infographics that you can print out for your clients that help them see what falls in the different colors. And they encourage you to eat one color each week. I've said before that one of my good friends who's a nutritionist had suggested try to have three colors on your plate at least two meals a day. So something green, something yellow, red or orange, and then something tan or brown, which is usually your. Your meat or your golly grain. And when they talk about eating in color and they talk about whites and browns, they're actually talking more about potatoes and onions and things. But I'm not going to split hairs. If they've got three of anything, three of any different colors, I'm pretty happy. But Omega 3 is almonds and walnuts really easy, not having to eat a whole lot of walnuts because walnuts are high in calories. Bananas are another one that dopamine, norepinephrine, Gaba, they have vitamin C and all of your B complexes. So bananas kind of rock, lima beans. And you know, you can go through this yourself, but these are not all of the foods that we talked about. But it is a good summary of some of the ones that are more nutrient dense because I've seen several of you say, wow, I can't even think about trying to get all of those into my diet because I'm just too busy to cook and do all this stuff. And it's really, like I said, a matter of making small changes and finding the foods that you like that are nutrient dense. And here's some other resources you can look at. Now onto your questions. I had a question come in a little while ago about sugar. Sugar has no nutrient value whatsoever. So even though tryptophan is more easily absorbed into the body when you eat it with a high carbohydrate meal, I would encourage people to stay away from sugar because it's going to be a high glycemic food. Spike your blood sugar and then you're going to feel kind of bleh afterwards. If you don't like sugar or if you like things sweet and you don't want to use artificial sweeteners, but you don't want to use sugar, there are a lot of things out there like honey and agave that can be substituted that that are a little bit better on your blood sugar, on the glycemic index than others. Let's see. The lack of omegas and Alzheimer's and I need to look that up again. But I'm pretty sure it was the omegas that helps clear out some of the plaques that are in the brain that collect during that end up causing Alzheimer's. But I will research that and I will put the information in the additional resources in your class. But there is some indication that there's a nutritional component to Alzheimer's prevention now Alzheimer's treatment once it started. Nutrition, obviously good nutrition is important for the rest of the brain functioning, but it hasn't been found to actually reduce anything. Mental health drugs, most mental health drugs don't actually deplete your most of these vitamins and minerals. The biggest exception or the biggest one that I can think of right off hand would be your maois, because there are so many foods you can't eat on an maoi. But it is important to look at kind of what's going on. For example, an SSRI selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor just keeps the serotonin that your body makes in the synapse for longer. But if your body's not making enough, you know, keeping a whole lot of nothing in there for longer isn't going to do a lot of good. So if people are not getting a good enough diet for their body to produce those neurotransmitters, then I won't say no amount of pharmacological intervention is going to help. But it's going to be a lot harder because you're going to have to work a lot harder mental health drugs. Also, when we're looking at some of your anti anxiety medications that activate the GABA systems, well, where does GABA come from? GABA is broken down from glutamate. So we know that glutamate is an excitatory neurotransmitter. Again, if you're not making enough, then once you start breaking it down, what helps you get excited, what helps you get motivated to do things? So the antidepressants, the anti anxiety medications certainly amp up the effectiveness because it helps your body make better use of whatever you've got left. So if you don't have a lot of serotonin or dopamine or your body's not producing it at the rate you need it, some of your pharmacological interventions can be helpful. They've also found a lot of herbs and other things like kava valerian and 5 HTP is a hormone, but those are sold over the counter. Now my one other soapbox if you will. 5 HTP is the precursor to serotonin. And they have found that some people, if they're taking serotonin reuptake inhibitors and 5 HTP or if they take too much, 5 HTP can produce a serotonin crisis. So you want to make sure that people don't overdose themselves on what I call raw serotonin eating the building blocks, the foods that get you there are not going to lead to serotonin syndrome. And I'm not sure if there's a relationship between. I will look up both Alzheimer's and schizophrenia when the presentation is over and I will put that in the additional resources section of class for you. I am going to take a lot of this information and create an infographic so kind of keep an eye out on that. It'll be, well, you won't be in your class anymore. It'll be on my Pinterest page, which is just Dr. Snipes. Pinterest, DoctorsNipes. So if you want to use that to print out to give your clients, if you haven't found another one that you like better, this one will be specifically geared towards eating with color to support mental health. Okay everyone, I actually got finished close enough to 1:00 clock so you can go ahead and take your quiz. Okay, as far as. I just put my emails up there, if it's something that's support related or just kind of general, you can send it to supportlce.com that way either one of us can answer it. If it's a question that is only applicable or can only be answered by the course presenter, which in this case would be me, you can email me at drperiodsnipeslce.com. All right, I'll see everybody on Thursday. Have a wonderful Wednesday. 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