Mania made worse by consumption of cured meats!

Its now finally becoming a more generalized belief in allopathic medicine that diet plays a big role in mental health.  As it turns out, its also been known for years that people with mania, and even other neuropsychiatric disorders, have generally a poor diet.  An amazing new study just published in Molecular Psychiatry found a very strong correlation between consumption of cured meats such as beef jerky, turkey jerky, beef sticks with their high nitrate content, can influence the severity of a mania episode, or even set one off.  The study wasn’t large enough to conclude definitively the role of nitrates in other psychiatric disorders such as, bipolar disorder, schizoaffective disorder, schizophrenia, bipolar depression, or major depressive disorder which according to this study showed no effect:  the effect was only for mania!  A larger study will clear this up.  I am certain that diet will show to play a significant role in all mental health disorders to some extent as what we eat will then become the media thru which molecules interact and eating the right foods with the right amino acids,  getting essential fatty acids, not getting irritating chemicals in the blood,  plays an essential role in frequency and severity of these episodes, including depression.

After getting these interesting results with cured meats and mania, the researchers did experiments on mice where they fed them equivalent to a hot dog or beef jerky amounts of nitrates, and found that the rats also showed increased hyperactivity and mania!

The intestinal microbiota not surprisingly, also changed.  Recently the importance of microbiota in health has grown exponentially and now there is evidence to suggest that the microbiota is also contributing to the onset of Parkinson’s Disease so keeping the right gut bacteria flourishing with the right foods and probiotics is essential and foods that destroy this microbiota should be avoided.

A compounding factor in all this is that people with mania have generalized anxiety as well and they reach for something easy for consumption as they go thru the day such as a big bag of beef jerky or turkey jerky .  Now we know these are not helping.