Tagged With "Mental Health"
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Meditations on Enough: 5 meditations on what “enough” means, from food to rest to diversity. (yesmagazine.org)
“Enough food” is each person having daily access to an average of 2,353 calories of culturally appropriate, locally available, affordable, unrefined, and delectable nourishment. The good news is that we already grow enough food to feed 10 billion people . The challenges are that the food is not fairly distributed, a lot of it is thrown away, and the process of growing it industrially is trashing the planet. Contrary to conventional mythology, smallholder farms and regenerative agriculture...
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Nourishing the Brain Wounded by Childhood Adversity
The right mix of nutrients revitalizes the brain that's been wounded by ACEs. Good nutrition can quickly improve mood and functioning in the present, while improving the potential to rewire disturbing memories imprinted in childhood.
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The Health Benefits of Gardening (healthiergeneration.org)
From a young age, individuals learn about the world through observation, discovery, and interaction with their surroundings. If you have ever taken a walk through a park with a child, you may have noticed a change in their behavior. Spending time in nature benefits the health of both our minds and our bodies . A home, community, or school-garden provides the perfect setting to explore the wonders of nature. With spring just around the corner, there is no better time to start planning a...
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Free Webinar: How to Integrate Nutrition into Trauma Treatment
Proper nutrition is a key ingredient in rewiring your client's traumatized neural pathways. Yet, research shows that nutrition is not part of trauma treatment. In fact, Nutrition and trauma are on two different planets. Join Dr. Scott Sells, to learn
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Weight Bias: Moving from Loud to Quiet
Weight bias is a moving target. It is moving from a shout to a quiet murmur, from explicit shaming to implicit insults. In 2015, a peer-reviewed medical journal would publish advice to tell patients bluntly that obesity is their fault.
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The Food Aid Delivery App (ssir.org)
Between 30 and 40 percent of the US food supply goes to waste each year. The US Environmental Protection Agency estimates that nearly 80 billion pounds of food end up in landfills annually. This figure takes on a greater significance in the context of another food crisis: food insecurity. More than 10 percent of US households are food insecure, and the nonprofit Feeding America reports that this number will increase due to the economic and unemployment consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic.
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Food Insecurity & Children With Disabilities
Dear PACEs Community, Sharing out my new policy brief about the developmental consequences of food insecurity among children with disabilities: Household Food Insecurity Associated with Decline in Attentional Focus of Young Children with Disabilities A downloadable PDF version is attached. Please feel to forward to your networks who might find this relevant to their work. And, of course, please reach out if you have any questions or comments. Thank you! --Kevin Kevin A. Gee, Ed.D. Associate...
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Discriminatory Housing Practices and Food Environment Disparities [publichealthpost.org]
By Rick Sadler , July 15, 2022, the Public Health Post We know that structural racism has far-reaching and enduring impacts on the built environment of neighborhoods and on the health of the people who live there. Structural racism both contributes to and is compounded by neighborhood disadvantage , the overconcentration of alcohol outlets , the incidence of firearm violence , the unequal redevelopment of urban areas via gentrification , and rates of childhood obesity . And yet, most of the...
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The U.S. diet is deadly. Here are 7 ideas to get Americans eating healthier (npr.org)
Photo: FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP via Getty Images Author: Allison Aubrey's article, please click here. The data are stark: the typical American diet is shortening the lives of many Americans. Diet-related deaths outrank deaths from smoking, and about half of U.S. deaths from heart disease – nearly 900 deaths a day – are linked to poor diet. The pandemic highlighted the problem, with much worse outcomes for people with obesity and other diet-related diseases. "We're really in a nutrition crisis...
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Nutritional Neuroscience, Whole Body Mental Health
https://onbeing.org/programs/kimberley-wilson-whole-body-mental-health/ The British psychologist Kimberley Wilson works in the emergent field of whole body mental health, one of the most astonishing frontiers we are on as a species. Discoveries about the gut microbiome, for example, and the gut-brain axis; the fascinating vagus nerve and the power of the neurotransmitters we hear about in piecemeal ways in discussions around mental health. The phrase “mental health” itself makes less and...
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From Trauma to Resiliency: Reflecting on our inner journey
Back in 2019, we began planning to write a book, From Trauma to Resiliency, that would describe the experiences of survivors who have experienced multiple traumas and who have benefitted from relationship-based, collaborative family-school-community-based services. We asked colleagues doing amazing work in San Diego County to contribute chapters, and they shared stories of oppressed, traumatized groups of survivors that include, people who have faced abuse, war, and poverty,...
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The Link Between Highly Processed Foods and Brain Health [nytimes.com]
By Sally Wadyka, Illustration: Jess Ebsworth, The New York Times, May 18, 2023 Roughly 60 percent of the calories in the average American diet come from highly processed foods. We’ve known for decades that eating such packaged products — like some breakfast cereals, snack bars, frozen meals and virtually all packaged sweets, among many other things — is linked to unwelcome health outcomes, like an increased risk of diabetes , obesity and even cancer . But more recent studies point to another...
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Chemical found in 'widely used sweetener' damages human DNA, new study says (katu.com)
FILE: artificial sweetener (Getty Images) To read more of Zachary Rogers article, please click here. According to a new study, a chemical that forms when humans digest a certain type of "widely used" sweetener is "genotoxic," meaning it damages DNA. That chemical is also said to be found in the sweetener itself in trace amounts and researchers claim "the finding raises questions about how the sweetener may contribute to health problems." North Carolina State University shared the findings of...
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Why a food addiction many Americans say they struggle with is one experts can’t agree on
https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/15/health/food-addiction-help-symptoms-wellness/index.html CNN — "About 1 in 8 Americans over 50 struggle with an unhealthy relationship with highly processed food that goes well beyond the occasional binge or midnight snack, according to a recent poll. Known as food addiction, the condition isn’t limited to older adults — previous food addiction data had primarily centered around young- to middle-age adults up to around 50, said Ashley Gearhardt, lead author of...
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Paradox of Listening to Our Bodies
The Paradox of Listening to Our Bodies Interoception—the inner sense linking our bodies and minds—can confuse as much as it can reveal. By Jessica Wapner July 6, 2023 "My husband worries a lot about his heart. “I feel something right here,” he’ll say, pointing to a spot on his chest. I have a hard time knowing how to respond to these reports; unless I’m doing cardio, I’m never aware of my heartbeat, and even then I can’t really feel it. After my husband’s cardiologist told him that there was...
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Our Brains Weren't Designed for This Kind of Food
Our society has long treated weight gain as a function of insufficient willpower. If you’re overweight, it’s because you chose to be. You ate too much, or you didn’t exercise enough. You lack the virtue and the discipline of the thin. This story is great. It is great for punishing anyone who struggles with weight. It is great for justifying discrimination and maltreatment. But it is just nonsense if you take even a cursory look at the data. And Stephan Guyenet has looked — and I put this...
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They Rejected Diet Culture 30 Years Ago. Then They Went Mainstream.
It’s 6 p.m. on the patio at Il Moro, a twinkly-lit Italian gastro pub in West Los Angeles, and Elyse Resch and Evelyn Tribole are intuitively eating their dinner. They start with warm, crusty bread, liberally dipped in olive oil, and then move on to salad, branzino and the penne tossed with little pillows of burrata that Ms. Resch ordered for the table. In accordance with one of intuitive eating’s 10 principles — “challenge the food police” — neither woman moralizes about the carbs. “The...
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The Link Between Highly Processed Foods and Brain Health
Roughly 60 percent of the calories in the average American diet come from highly processed foods. We’ve known for decades that eating such packaged products — like some breakfast cereals, snack bars, frozen meals and virtually all packaged sweets, among many other things — is linked to unwelcome health outcomes, like an increased risk of diabetes, obesity and even cancer. But more recent studies point to another major downside to these often delicious, always convenient foods: They appear to...
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The Surprisingly Dramatic Role of Nutrition in Mental Health | Julia Rucklidge
To listen to Julia Rucklidge TedTalk, please click here. "In 1847, a physician by the name of Semmelweis advised that all physicians wash their hands before touching a pregnant woman in order to prevent childbed fever. His research showed that you could reduce the mortality rates from septicemia from 18%, down to 2% simply through washing your hands with chlorinated lime. His medical colleagues refused to accept that they themselves were responsible for spreading infection. Semmelweis was...
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Scientists Don’t Agree on What Causes Obesity, but They Know What Doesn’t
LONDON — A select group of the world’s top researchers studying obesity recently gathered in the gilded rooms of the Royal Society, the science academy of Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin, where ideas like gravity and evolution were once debated. Now scientists were arguing about the causes of obesity, which affects more than 40 percent of U.S. adults and costs the health system about $ 173 billion each year . At the meeting’s closing session, John Speakman , a biologist, offered this...
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I Escaped Poverty, but Hunger Still Haunts Me
"About three months after I was born, my father was incarcerated. As a toddler, I was poor but housed. Mom and I stayed with a paraplegic meth dealer named Tony who used to employ my father. After that, up until the age of 14, life depended on Mom’s relationship with a man who sold insurance. When they were on, there was money. When they were off, there wasn’t. Through high school, it was all poverty — abject, uninterrupted and more severe than what had preceded it. I was on the margin’s...
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The Racial Language of Fatphobia
How can linguistic anthropology help illuminate the connections between dietetics, fatphobia, and racism? Recently, a Twitter user wrote: “There is a fat politics movement. Come on in. The water’s fine.” Linguistic anthropology needs to “come on in,” as it were, to the fat politics movement. Specifically, we need to harness our analytical insights into the co-constitution of language, the body, and social differences to understand how people in this “fat-talk nation” produce and contest...
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Incorporating Racial Equity into Trauma-Informed Care
Takeaways: Racism is trauma and should be treated as such in any comprehensive trauma-informed care framework. Trauma-informed care requires a nuanced understanding of not only how trauma impacts the lives and care of patients, but the root causes behind that trauma. This brief offers practical considerations to help health systems and provider practices incorporate a focus on racial equity to enhance trauma-informed care efforts. It draws from the experiences of two federally qualified...
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I’ve Always Struggled With My Weight. Losing It Didn’t Mean Winning.
There were a few bad moments, over the course of a few bad months, that led me to download the weight- loss app. These will probably sound trivial to anyone who is not me, and of course they are trivial — but we are talking about bodies here, and about my body in particular, and one of the defining features of having a body is that it is a fire hose of tiny humiliations blasting you constantly in the face, never allowing you to look away, even when you most want to. One bad moment happened...
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Using syndemic theory to understand food insecurity and diet-related chronic diseases
Syndemic Theory (ST) provides a framework to examine mutually enhancing diseases/health issues under conditions of social inequality and inequity. ST has been used in multiple disciplines to address interacting infectious diseases, noncommunicable diseases, and mental health conditions. The theory has been critiqued for its inability to measure disease interactions and their individual and combined health outcomes. This article reviews literature that strongly suggests a syndemic between...
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Whole Body Mental Health
The British psychologist Kimberley Wilson works in the emergent field of whole body mental health, one of the most astonishing frontiers we are on as a species. Discoveries about the gut microbiome, for example, and the gut-brain axis; the fascinating vagus nerve and the power of the neurotransmitters we hear about in piecemeal ways in discussions around mental health. The phrase “mental health” itself makes less and less sense in light of the wild interactivity we can now see between what...
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What the U.S. could learn from Japan about making healthy living easier (npr.org)
The author awaits a bowl of ramen noodles in a Tokyo restaurant. Yuki Noguchi/NPR To read more of Yuki Noguchi's article, please click here. I was born and raised in the American Midwest, but love visiting my parents' homeland in Japan. Central to every trip there is always the food: Oh my goodness, the food. Eating is a raging national obsession here, with good reason. Staggering varieties of food are available everywhere; it's all delicious and — most impressively, to me — always fresh.
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How stress can damage your brain and body
We all know what stress feels like physically — though the symptoms vary by person. Some people experience shakiness or a racing heart, while others develop muscle tension, headaches or stomach aches. But what we might not realize is that our physiological responses to life’s stresses and strains can have deeper, less obvious, repercussions for just about every organ and system in the body. “I think people really underestimate just how big the effects are,” said Janice Kiecolt-Glaser,...
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The Neuroscience of Emotional Eating
For some people, no matter how much they try to eat healthy, when intense emotions surface, overcoming food cravings seems impossible. We reach for the comfort foods that we hope will make us feel better in the short term, but afterwards often end up feeling down in the dumps. That feeling of shame can be overwhelming — particularly in a diet-driven society where maintaining a healthy relationship with food is difficult, especially if it’s used as a coping mechanism. But why do some people...
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Diets Make You Feel Bad. Try Training Your Brain Instead.
How eating habits are formed Dr. Brewer, an addiction psychiatrist, has tested a number of mindfulness practices to help people quit smoking, lower anxiety and reduce emotional eating. He has also created an app called Eat Right Now that uses mindfulness exercises to help people change their eating habits. One Brown University study of 104 overweight women found that mindfulness training reduced craving-related eating by 40 percent. Another review by scientists at Columbia University found...
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Health Equity and the Social Determinants of Health Are NOT Synonyms
Successful health equity strategies must be inclusive, and focus on all marginalized and minoritized persons and their communities. Any lesser view will continue to yield a faulty health equity equation.
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What Children Really Need Is Adults That Understand Development
The brain doesn’t fully develop until about the age of 25. This fact is sometimes quite surprising and eye opening to most adults. It can also be somewhat overwhelming for new parents and professionals who are interacting with babies and young children every day, to contemplate. It is essential to realize however, that the greatest time of development occurs in the years prior to kindergarten. And even more critical to understand is that by age three 85 percent of the core structures of the...
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Early Relational Health Innovators Partner In Program Supported by PACEs Connection Cooperative of Communities Members in Twelve California Counties
Christina Bethell, Ph.D, MBA, MPH, founder of the Child and Adolescent Health Measurement Initiative (CAHMI), principal author of the groundbreaking study on positive childhood experiences, and creator of the free Well Visit Planner, among other innovations. Two internationally-respected leaders and innovators in complementary aspects of early relational health and childhood and maternal health equity recently launched a partnership they believe will benefit everyone from newborn babies and...
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Re: What Children Really Need Is Adults That Understand Development
Yes! I have been saying this (to myself mostly) for years. One cannot address ACES if understanding of child development is not part of it.
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Vitamin B-12
Vitamin B-12 (cobalamin), is essentially used to treat healthy red blood cell formation, increase metabolism and energy, improve cognition, and assist in the proper breakdown of nutrients in foods (Mayo Clinic 2024). There are several foods that contain this essential vitamin to promote wellness. These include foods that are rich in protein, such as meat, poultry, seafood, eggs, fruit, fiber rich cereals, and dairy products such as milk, butter, cheese, and yogurt. B-12 is a supplement that...
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Re: Why Nutritional Psychiatry Is The Future of Mental Health Treatment (theconversation.com)
I like the idea of nutritional psychiatry that takes into account individual needs. I think it's important to not only eat healthy foods, but also take natural supplements that can improve your mood and reduce stress. For example, I read that theanine and vitamins can increase dopamine and serotonin levels in the brain, which promotes relaxation and reduces anxiety. I myself tried gaba theanine from https://www.amazon.com/GABA-Su...eanine/dp/B0BZQBB3CX and felt the difference. I recommend...
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Why is Our Culture Preoccupied with How Bipoc Children Eat?
https://thesociologicalreview.org/magazine/october-2020/food/why-is-our-culture-preoccupied-with-how-bipoc-children-eat/ "Almost all of our public health solutions for children rely on individual behaviours, like not drinking soda. Not drinking soda will not solve racism. Whether a person does or does not eat any amount of potato chips is not the key to ending structural poverty. Disproportionately relying on public health measures that target individual behaviours doesn’t appropriately...
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Re: Health Equity and the Social Determinants of Health Are NOT Synonyms
Thank you for drawing attention to this. I also find it frustrating. In addition to your point about "gender disparities present in pain management, especially for those who identify as women" I would also add that there are sex based differences in that females are more likely to suffer from immune disorders, inflammatory, menstrual, and menopausal health issues that are under recognized and under treated.