The Gut-Brain Connection: How Nutrition Affects Mental Health
Mental health is a crucial aspect of our daily lives. Staying invested in keeping our mind positive serves to guide your body. If your mind isn’t right it follows that your body also won’t be either. According to Lauren Owen and Bernard Cofe’s article ‘The Role of Diet and Nutrition on Mental Health and Well-being’, mental, neurological and substance use disorders account for 13 % of the global burden of disease placing mental illness at the top of the list, exceeding both CVD and cancer. Nutrition is vital to making you healthy and fit in terms of your body but we want to illuminate how it can also positively affect your mind!
Nutrition is a field that is being utilized more often to prevent mental illness because of the newly realized long-lasting effects on things like obesity, Alzheimer's and depression. Conversely, the impact of healthy nutrients, and energy serve to nourish the brain. The role nutrition plays in the improvement of mental health is pivotal to preventing mental illnesses. Simple things like eating healthy, on time and in the right amounts could provide a sense of routine and repetition that could improve mental health.
Here are some ways you can improve the connection between your brain and your gut are healthy eating, timing of your meals and the right portions. First, healthy eating is crucial to keeping your entire body healthy not only the mind but the after effect of that is that the mind functions more optimally when you take care of your diet. For example, Owen and Cofe state that practicing a Mediterranean diet decreases the likelihood of being diagnosed with a mental disorder. The Mediterranean diet features a majority of plant foods like vegetables, fruits, herbs, nuts, beans and whole grains. InsideOut Studio offers insightful consulting that helps you to improve your nutrition and is customized for you. These kinds of foods help improve the gut and bowel which makes things easier for the mind as it allows it to focus on other things rather than focusing on the other things about the body.
The timing of your meals and how many times a day you eat is overlooked because some people would say as long as you’re getting the food in you’ll be fine. That is not necessarily the case because according to the National Library of Medicine(US), consistent eating schedules are essential for healthy circadian rhythms since this system is partially regulated by the food that is consumed. Thus, as much as sleep habits are disrupted following a sudden shift in time zone, drastically altering our mealtimes from day to day may affect our physiology.
Portion control could tie in with all three because it gives the sensation of routine and discipline since it forces self-awareness for how much you consume which is complicated for people depending on external factors that might make them feel like they should eat more or less. The idea of trying to control that is difficult because it takes a lot of discipline for someone to restrict themselves from eating over or under the required limit. Having balance in this aspect will allow you to complete the other two steps that would improve mental health through food. Timing and portioning meals could be exciting and something to look forward to leading to that lovely dopamine release in the brain.
Mental health is vital to everyone’s well-being but the impact of eating routines with proper nutrition is just as important in improving mental health. Healthy diets provide people with healthy nutrient foods that give people more energy for their daily life as well as preventing things like mental disorders from the lack of a healthy diet. The timing and portioning of meals are as important because you might adhere to eating healthy but choose poor timing and it could be detrimental physically and mentally. Make sure you have the gut-brain connection the more you can improve your mental health along with your diet.
By: G.Gormu