In Another Land

No, I'm not joking! And, no, veggies won't cure your depression. But it might just help.

A healthy diet is beneficial for you in all kinds of ways, and recent research are showing that diet deficiencies can aggravate depression, sometimes quite dramatically. I'm not going to list all the studies, but I'd like to give you the essence of what I've learned so far.

Follow up:

Firstly, make sure you eat a balanced diet, even when you don't feel like it. This is one of the most important management aspects of depression and bipolar disorder. Especially if you live alone, the great temptation is to do as little as possible, just scrape together enough to take care of your hunger (or get a take-away), but that is looking for trouble. A balanced diet means that you get in enough of the various groups of foodstuffs: Carbohydrates, proteins, fats/oils, and enough liquids. Of course you need to adjust for other problems you might have: For example, if your cholesterol is stalking you, lower it in accordance with your doctor's orders - which normally means specific adjustments to your diet.

Secondly, eat three proper meals. Having one huge meal and a few snacks means that the levels of everything you get out of that food is also following the daily eating rollercoaster - having such a dramatic cycle of up and down every day is bad news for depression, and even worse for bipolar disorder, which already follows the see-saw pattern.

Thirdly, go natural. Avoid heavily processed foods as far as possible. Research indicates that our modern ways of processing food are actually destroying a lot of the food's good ingredients, often leaving us with the bulk without the nutrition. (In one interesting study it was reported that factory rats would rather eat the cardboard packaging of a popular cereal than the cereal itself!) Rice is nice, but brown (wholewheat) rice is better, more filling, and consquently easier on your budget. And the same goes for bread. Quite a few food preservatives have also been implicated in depression studies, so beware!

Fourth, eat fresh stuff. There are absolutely no substitutes for fresh fruit and vegetables. I know a naked carrot may not look as good as some great chef's creation, but it's usually the better option from a nutritional point of view! Fruits contain lots of good stuff, and very often we tend to walk right past it.

Which brings us to point five, buy the best, especially the fresh stuff. It's great to rush off to your neighbourhood shop, but the fresh produce on their shelves have a lot of hidden minuses. A lot of the very good-looking fruit and veggies in our supermarkets have been developed with only shelf-life in mind: It must look good for as long as possible - not a bad idea for the supplier, but you need to remember that an increase in one characteristic usually means a decline in something else. A lot of modern tomatoes are more cube-shaped than round, which is great for packaging, but compare the taste with a good old-fashioned garden-grown tomato, and you'll be shocked!

[People may think you're strange, but smell the fresh stuff: the better it smells, the better it usually is!]

Almost every town has some form of a regular farmer's market. Try to find yours and buy there, and you won't look back. You get it fresh as can be, usually also cheaper, and it's the real thing; full of nature's goodness, with nothing added or taken away.

But, in all the excitement about good food, please don't ever decide that proper diet can be a substitute for medication. If you've gone the whole route of tests and therapy, and the diagnosis was depression/bipolar, you need that medication! Proper diet is a helpful resource, and it can do you a lot of good, but quitting your medicine to go organic will not take your depression away. It will undoubtedly make things worse for you. Don't take the risk: A well-fed healthy-looking suicide victim is still well and truly dead...

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