Eating healthy also influences mental health

You’ve heard the advice: Follow a healthy diet, don’t smoke, maintain a healthy weight and exercise for physical health. Within the past couple of decades, researchers started wondering if the same applied to mental health. And you guessed it: it does.

This is hugely significant, since 5.1 percent of adults in Washington had a serious mental illness from 2001-12, among the highest in the nation. In Benton and Franklin counties, adults report that their mental health is a problem about 10 percent of the time, because of stress, depression or troubles with emotions.

Unfortunately, there’s no panacea here, at least not yet. You can’t cure bipolar disorder by eating more broccoli, but it might make you feel better. So far, the science shows that eating more whole foods and fewer processed and fast foods can beneficially affect mood and lower the risk of acquiring mental health disorders.

In 2011, researchers in Australia found that diet quality appears to play a part in preventing mental illness in children, which is noteworthy since anxiety disorders can start around age 6 and depression around 13. They defined a healthy diet as including two or more servings of fruit a day and four or more servings of vegetables, and avoiding processed foods, including chips, fried foods, chocolate, sweets and ice cream. Children whose diets got worse over two years had a worsening in their mental health, while those whose diets improved felt better.

In 2010, these same researchers found that women who regularly ate fruits, vegetables, whole grains, fish and low fat meats cut their risk for depression and anxiety disorders by more than 30 percent. Studies in other countries have verified these results.

A study published in 2015 followed 292 Geico employees, who switched to a plant-based diet for 18 weeks. Researchers found that the diet reduced depression and anxiety and increased productivity. Other research suggests that people who eat a diet high in tomatoes or orange vegetables have lower risks for depression, as do people who consume more folate. This B vitamin is found primarily in leafy greens, broccoli family vegetables, asparagus and beans. Omega-3 fatty acid sources like fish and flax seed meal seem to benefit mental health while trans fats seem to increase the risk of depression.

If you suffer from mental health problems, you may want to keep a food and mood diary. Write down what you eat each meal, and then go back to your list about two hours later and indicate how you feel. You could simply draw a face with a smile or a frown. See if any patterns develop.

Try this one-dish meal, which doesn’t contain processed foods.

This story was originally published November 11, 2015 at 12:18 PM with the headline "Eating healthy also influences mental health."