How Diet Can Change Mood & Resolve Anxiety Disorders
Read this before medicating for anxiety disorders
Remember the Zoloft commercials on TV in the 90s? That little sad rock with the perpetual raincloud looming over it while the narrator programmed us to think of anxiety and depression as a chemical imbalance in the brain?
If not, chances are that by now you understand anxiety and depression as a chemical imbalance in the brain because this concept — largely manufactured by the pharmaceutical industry — has been propagated throughout American society by media, friends, family, counselors, psychologists, psychiatrists, and doctors.
Three decades later and doctors continue to offer drugs in such a way that seems, at least to me as a layperson suffering from Panic Disorder and Generalized Anxiety Disorder, like the only effective solution other than psychotherapy. It is by now a widespread belief that this chemical imbalance requires a drug to fix.
Sadly, our society continues to accept these drugs as the solution (that approximately 1 in 8 Americans are prescribed) without question.
Why should you care
Why should you care? Because if you are seeking treatment for an anxiety disorder, it is unlikely that you’ve been informed about another incredibly effective treatment option: healing your gut.
I suffered from extreme Panic Disorder for almost six years throughout my 20s and from Generalized Anxiety Disorder beginning in early childhood. I was prescribed drugs like Xanax at age six then Zoloft by age fourteen.
And because of my childhood experience on drugs, I refused any pharmaceutical drugs in my adulthood as an option to manage anxiety. I knew that numbing myself was only kicking the can down the road. Years of suffering without results from drug or talk therapy meant that I needed to figure out a different approach.
I knew in my gut that there must be another way out of this mess...so I began my own research. I want to emphasize that during this time, I was under the care of a medical doctor (MD). Over his 57 year career, he had served as an orthopedic surgeon for the United States Air Force, faculty for multiple medical schools, and later opened his own holistic practice. He helped me to shift my mindset.
Serotonin and the gut-brain connection
Serotonin is a neurotransmitter or a chemical messenger that transmits a signal between neurons. Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs), like Zoloft, are the most widely prescribed antidepressant drugs commonly used to treat Generalized Anxiety and depression.
These drugs treat anxiety and depression by increasing levels of serotonin in the brain. But what’s most interesting to me — only 5% of the body’s serotonin is located in the brain.
That’s right —only 5% of the body’s serotonin is located in the brain. Approximately 95% of serotonin is physically located in your gastrointestinal tract and there are over 30 different neurotransmitters including serotonin, norepinephrine, and GABA (the three main neurotransmitters associated with mood and anxiety) that are actually manufactured by bacteria within our gut.
And since we know the gut bacteria produces and stores important chemical messengers that regulate mood and anxiety (Serotonin and GABA), then we should be taking into account gut health for our mental health.
What’s more intriguing is that the gut is physically connected to the brain.
The vagus nerve, the longest cranial nerve in the human body, connects the gut and brain. Beginning at the base of the brain stem, this nerve travels down the neck then through the chest branching off to connect other organs like the lungs and heart. It ends in the abdomen at the intestines.
This nerve is the body’s main communications network — a physical infrastructure to collect and transmit sensory and motor information through a fibrous network that links our central nervous system to our respiratory, cardiovascular, and gastrointestinal systems.
What is most interesting to me though — this system commonly, called the Gut-Brain Axis, is a two-way street. So not only does the brain send signals to the gut (ie butterflies in your stomach), but the gut can send signals to the brain too. Much like a fiber optic cable, the vagus nerve contains multiple different fiber cables to send information.
So basically, way more fibers are dedicated to the upward transmission of information to inform the brain of the body’s environment.
Because we now know that the gut can send signals to the brain (not just receiving information from the brain), we need to do a better job of nourishing and protecting our gastrointestinal health and the integrity of the intestines as this link has a profound impact on our mental health.
But an outdated understanding perpetuates
I have trouble with the commonly held belief by healthcare providers that Panic Disorder is just a false alarm.
I understand the fight-or-flight all too well. But just because there is no tiger chasing you nowadays is not evidence to me that our bodies are just confused. And while it seems possible that there could be a false signal, it seems like our healthcare providers jump to that conclusion without any consideration for our gut health. (Even Hippocrates said, “All disease begins in the gut.”)
Our bodies are literally wired to interpret our environments for our survival, and I’m inclined to believe that the body is actually accurate in telling us something is wrong. It’s just not as immediately life-threatening as it feels.
I suspect for many others like me with Treatment-Resistant Panic Disorder, that the traditional treatment approaches like talk therapies, SSRIs, or anxiolytics don’t work long term because they do not address the root of the problem — the gut health.
How to improve gastrointestinal health
It wasn’t until the National Institute of Health (NIH) funded the Human Microbiome Project from 2007–2013 that scientists began to understand how these gut microbes impact human health.
There have since been over 650 scientific papers released by the project and accumulating evidence that shows the gut bacteria in our gastrointestinal (GI) tract has the ability to activate neural pathways and central nervous system (CNS) signaling.
Food is information and eating is the act of providing (or not providing) critical information to support functionality not only our human cells, but also the microbial cells that reside in our guts (the gut microbiome) too.
But American society has forgotten the importance of a high-quality diet in the post-industrialized food era. Not only are we consuming nutritionally void foods, but we are also exposing ourselves to artificial ingredients and poor lifestyle habits that can degrade and deteriorate the intestinal walls.
Here are just a few changes that can improve gut health:
- Avoid high fructose corn syrup and artificial sugars
- Avoid alcohol consumption (during recovery, limit post-recovery)
- Avoid smoking cigarettes (and avoid second-hand exposure)
- Limit NSAIDs and Aceteminiphine use
- Cut out highly-processed foods
- Eat vegetables, especially green leafy and cruciferous vegetables
- Take prebiotics and probiotics (best by food sources, but supplements too)
- Exercise regularly
Lifestyle changes require an enormous amount of effort for people that are already struggling to just get through the day. That said, people suffering would be more motivated to change habits if they believed the effort would be worth it — if they believed the changes would actually produce results.
Yet the people we trust most — doctors, psychologists, psychiatrists — many of these professionals that we assume to know what is in our best interest have zero knowledge of nutrition, the gut-microbiome, nor the gut-brain axis and its role in mental health symptoms.
Every medical professional should be educated on nutrition and diet with respect to maintaining a balanced and healthy gut environment. Apart from mental health benefits, some of the most costly illnesses that plague our society (diabetes, obesity, heart disease, etc) could be prevented and/or managed by diet and lifestyle. That medical school curricula in the United States does not educate our esteemed MD’s on the most fundamental building blocks to human health is, I would go as far to say, beyond ignorant and more of an atrocity to public health.
In conclusion
How is it that the United State’s #1 medical school for research, Harvard Medical School, has published public articles on this topic yet the mainstream standard of care has not seemed to change?
How it that there have been hundreds of research articles published linking gut health to mental health (available to the public on the National Institute of Health’s PubMed), but seems to be unnoticed and unrecognized by our healthcare providers?
Unless there is a product that could be sold to people, it is highly unlikely that any discoveries from this research in a capitalist healthcare market would reach the public with impact.
It is especially unlikely in an established and highly profitable industry — the pharmaceutical companies spend more annually on their marketing to make sure these drugs are widely perceived as an effective treatment option (SSRIs) than they do on research.
This is why it’s so important that counselors, psychologists, psychiatrists, and doctors become aware of the research and the power of diet and exercise — because they hold the most power to influence patients to appreciate their gut health as a critical component of the healing process.
Please note: This article was written from my personal perspective — from the perspective of someone suffering from treatment-resistant, spontaneous panic disorder. I am not a medical professional and this article is not a substitute for medical advice.
