We’ve all heard of we are what we eat. We’re also what we think and our brain needs good food in order for you to be the best you.
A mind is a terrible thing…… especially when you are unknowingly sabotaging it. Part 1
Mental illness seems to becoming quite a common phenomena and we do not have a shortage of drugs so maybe we should rethink it a little bit. Sure it is hard not to go completely crazy living in the world that we currently do and our DNA is not prepared for the revolutionary changes to our society that have occurred since the industrial age. But we’re in the digital age and it is just as brutal, but in different ways. I’ve already discussed in a 4 part blog series the negative consequences on our health due to the electric light bulb and how it is destroying our health. Many reasons and if you want to know them all here is a link to that blog.
But besides sleeping, we also eat and we never think of the consequences of what that supposed food can do to us, especially our mental health. Some of us may focus on mental illness, but we seem to not realize that the rest of the body is part of the equation.
We now live in an age of specialized medicine and doctors that have been trained for a number of generations back by medical schools that are owned by drug companies and the purpose of medical school is to get a doctor to write a prescription. Sure they do lots of good things as well, but doctors get reprimanded when they are not selling drugs or as we saw last week, they get destroyed for recommending a cheap drug that has been safe for decades when a new drug that is 3,000% more expensive may soon become available.
We know that certain autoimmune diseases and things like cancer can spread to other organ systems, but we can get sick from a number of things that we normally don’t associate with being a root cause. As a chiropractor most of my patients come to me after they’ve been many specialists. They often get rid of some problem that they would never associate with their neck as being the cause of it. They never realize that 20% of the central nervous that controls every system in our body is running through their spine. But I don’t want to talk about that tiresome old subject that I’ve been dealing with for the 4 decades of my career. Let’s talk about what you are doing to yourself with your poor food choices. Specifically have it can affect your mental status. We know that very greasy food can give you acne or a heart attack, but we don’t think much about getting mentally ill from our food choices and of course I don’t think one psychiatrist would ever agree with that thought. All mental illness to them is not having enough psychotropic drugs in your blood stream.
We should know that depression can affect your heart. A slight tumor in your adrenal gland could create a severe panic. I wrote a few blogs about the brain gut connection and until recently it was dismissed rather quickly by the experts. Here is a link to those blogs. If you don’t want to read about 20 chapters I wrote on the subject, in a nutshell, 75% of our immune system is in our gut and that is mostly in the form of someone else’s DNA, namely bacteria. That bacteria is what makes us human and our experts want you to kill every last one of them. These bacteria can communicate directly with your brain via the vagus nerve. Ever get an impulse to eat a lot of sugar that you know is not good for you. The bacteria told your brain to feed them.
When we are little embryo’s our nervous system begins to form and a large part of it is placed in our gut. The enteric nervous system is comprised of between 100 and 500 million nerve cells. It is often referred to as our 2nd brain. You know this, you’ve had a gut feeling about this, haven’t you? Whatever your eating gets broken down into chemicals. They can travel to your brain via the circulatory system. Our central nervous system makes all kinds of chemicals such as , serotonin, acetylcholine, GABA, dopamine and the affect our mood. BTW, the chiropractic adjustment affects nerves that strongly affect the beginning driver of the specialized part of our nervous system that takes thoughts and makes them into chemicals. It is called the Hypothalamus. It drives our automatic nervous system known as the autonomic nervous system. You really don’t want to consciously be thinking about the millions of things you need to do in an hour to survive.
Chiropractors can lower your cortisol levels by 30 units immediately. Cortisol is your main stress hormone. Too much stress can drive you crazy. Ever get into a big fight before dinner and you lost your appetite? Your brain has to work smoothly with your digestive system. It is a very chemically complex dance. Your brain makes you not want to eat because if you do, things can go terribly wrong and we can eat ourselves into a disease known as cancer.
So technically, I’m not allowed to think these thoughts or discuss them, so to be on the safe side, yes psychiatric drugs are necessary for some people. Those chemicals can change someone’s life. But how did people get by before pharmaceuticals took over our lives? Well, people did eat real food back in the day. We didn’t have a destroyed microbiome from all the toxic chemicals and antibiotics in our environment. Those small things known as bacteria certainly do matter with regard to our mood. Chances are, a psychiatrist is not going to entertain that thought without having you locked up in a straight jacket.
Our brains need bacteria to make the chemicals necessary to make our brains happy and our gut depends upon our brain to keep a stable environment for them to work all these wonders for us. So, if you do not have depression, post traumatic stress disorders, hyperactivity, dementia, OCD, anxiety, decreased libido, attention deficits, insomnia, bipolar, or schizophrenia, you can skip the upcoming episodes.
End of Part 1