Caffeine

january wrote:What do anti oxidents have to do with mental illness?

If you have to ask that question, then you shouldn't be in this thread.

I know about anti-oxidents and physical health but not mental health.

Maybe someone else can give me an answer?

Guest wrote:I know about anti-oxidents and physical health but not mental health.

Maybe someone else can give me an answer?

There is no seperation between mind and body. They are simply two parts of the whole organism.
As you will be aware anti-oxidants are an important part of our bodies natural defences and without sufficient of them in the diet the physical aspect of the body will deteriorate. As there is no seperation between the mind and body, what harms the physical also harms the psychological (and vice versa).
Is it any suprise that the poorest people in society eat the worst quality food and also suffer from the highest levels of mental illness?

Interesting caffeine fact: The acute lethal dose of caffeine is 6g.

quiet-loner,

Thanks for your civil reply!

No problem, that's the role I thought anti-oxidants played in mental health nothing new, just the obvious. I've been a vegetarian for 25 years and I watch what I eat. I was interested if there was something about anti-oxidants I wasn't aware of.

You also wrote

"Is it any suprise that the poorest people in society eat the worst quality food and also suffer from the highest levels of mental illness?"

Shouldn't that be Westernised Society?

Poor people in poor countries suffer very little mental illness compared to the world leader of mental illness, the USA.

Guest wrote:quiet-loner

You also wrote

"Is it any suprise that the poorest people in society eat the worst quality food and also suffer from the highest levels of mental illness?"

Shouldn't that be Westernised Society?

Poor people in poor countries suffer very little mental illness compared to the world leader of mental illness, the USA.

You are correct to make that distinction, Guest.
When I said "worst quality food" I was refering to processed junk food.
If you read "Nutrition and Physical Degeneration" by Weston Price DDS you will see that regardless of what the indigenous diet is, as long it is unprocessed, the populations that remain true to their traditional dietary habits remain both phsyically and psychologically healthier than those who turn to a processed food diet.

guest and quiet-loner.....great conversation you have going!! Interesting stuff to think about...thanks for getting this one going!

quiet-loner wrote:

Guest wrote:quiet-loner

You also wrote

"Is it any suprise that the poorest people in society eat the worst quality food and also suffer from the highest levels of mental illness?"

Shouldn't that be Westernised Society?

Poor people in poor countries suffer very little mental illness compared to the world leader of mental illness, the USA.

You are correct to make that distinction, Guest.
When I said "worst quality food" I was refering to processed junk food.
If you read "Nutrition and Physical Degeneration" by Weston Price DDS you will see that regardless of what the indigenous diet is, as long it is unprocessed, the populations that remain true to their traditional dietary habits remain both phsyically and psychologically healthier than those who turn to a processed food diet.

quiet-loner,

You'd said pretty much the same above in a previous post.

Sorry for being so pedantic but I think the cultural causes of mental illness are just not being talked about enough and I hate to miss an opportunity to push this.

Personally, I cannot drink coffee; it's too much of a stimulant. I can handle tea no problems (an excellent source of anti oxidants) but coffee sends my mind racing to a point where it is uncomfortable.

Because I spend 98% of my time in isolation (bliss) I have been able to take note of reactions I get off different foods. Most people just don't have the time to eat a meal and quietly sit and take note of how that meal effects them. If you eat a meal and you get a reaction you should identify and avoid that cause of your discomfort. It cannot be good to continually eat food your body is basically rejecting.

You should try a raw food diet. You'll feel better than you ever have.

january wrote:You should try a raw food diet. You'll feel better than you ever have.

I have in the past, it is good, hard going though after a while. I like cooking and flavors.

I've done juice diets and I only ate sprouts for 3 months once, I went a funny color and moved really slowly, I felt great.

What I need is exercise, I’ve been a slouch this last 15 months and my body is complaining.

january wrote:You should try a raw food diet. You'll feel better than you ever have.

January, I currently eat a mostly raw food diet and I have to agree with you. I do feel great on it.
In my case though I was forced to do some experimenting with my diet due to a seriously nasty gasto-intestinal virus I caught last year. Most cooked foods now cause me to have a recurrence of the symptoms caused by the virus (mostly chronic gas an diarrhoea).
The only real drawback to a raw food diet is the lack of calories extracted from uncooked foods. Research has shown that cooking allows more calories to be extracted from food as the plants cell walls are broken down prior to digestion.
Our stomachs are not very good at breaking down cellulose so we would need to eat almost twice the portion size to get the same number of calories as from a cooked portion of the same food. This is the main reason why people who switch to a raw food diet often lack energy and feel tired all the time.
In my case I need a high calorie intake so I eat a lot of dried fruit. If I relied on vegetables I'd starve due to their high cellulose levels.

Guest, I also prefer green tea (Japanese sencha) to coffee, but I still have one cup of very strong coffee in the morning before my workout.
If you are looking for anti-oxidants there are much better sources than green tea though. Many foods have now been tested for their anti-oxidant content and the most concentrated sources last time I checked were; cocoa, dried prunes and raisins.
This is excellent news for me because I've been adding cocoa powder to my banana smoothies for years and I love raisins.

I have mentioned the Weston price book before in other posts Guest, but not everybody reading this will have read them. If you are interested in the links between diet and health, both physical and mental, I recommend you buy this book. Personally I believe that the research Weston Price did is so important that nobody working in any health related profession should be allowed to treat people without having read this book first.

quiet-loner,

I will have to see if my library has that book.

Diet is one thing, reality is another. Reality is the cause of my mental distress.

Waking up everyday to a world of horror that is progressively getting worse is intolerable to me. No diet or exercise is going to fix that.