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The Mood Cure: Take Charge of Your Emotions in 24 Hours Using Food and Supplements
The Mood Cure
Take Charge of Your Emotions in 24 Hours Using Food and Supplements
JULIA ROSS, M.A.
Dedication
To all those who have sought help and not found it.
And to Emmanuel.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Foreword
STEP 1 Gaining a New Perspective on Your Moods
CHAPTER 1. Are Your Emotions True or False?
CHAPTER 2. Identifying Your False MoodsMoods: The Four-Part Mood-Type Questionnaire
STEP 2 Eliminating the Four Most Common Mood Imbalances
CHAPTER 3. Lifting the Dark Cloud: Eliminating the Depression and Anxiety Caused by Inadequate Serotonin
CHAPTER 4. Blasting the Blahs: Rebuilding Your Energy, Motivation, and Capacity to Focus
CHAPTER 5. All Stressed Out: How to Recover from Adrenal Overload
CHAPTER 6. Too Sensitive to Life’s Pain? How to Amplify Your Own Comforting Endorphins
STEP 3 Creating Your Nutritherapy Master Plan
CHAPTER 7. Out with the Bad-Mood Foods: Ridding Your Diet of Emotionally Hazardous Edibles
CHAPTER 8. Your Good-Mood Food Master Plan: Choosing the Best Foods for You
CHAPTER 9. Good-Mood Menus: Recipes and Ideas for Everyday Eating
CHAPTER 10. Your Master Supplement Plan: Putting Your Mood Repair Program Together
STEP 4 Getting Help with Special Mood Repair Projects
CHAPTER 11. Moods and Meds: When Antidepressant Nutrients Can Do a Better Job
CHAPTER 12. Sleep and Your Moods: Getting the Kind of Rest You Really Need
CHAPTER 13. Nutritional Rehab: The Missing Key to a Successful Recovery from Addiction
The Mood Cure Tool Kits
RESOURCE TOOL KIT Finding Practitioners, Testing, Supplements, Special Foods, Products, and Services
THYROID TOOL KIT Testing and Rebalancing
ADRENAL TOOL KIT Testing and Rebalancing
SEX HORMONE TOOL KIT Testing and Rebalancing
FOOD CRAVING TOOL KIT Are You Addicted to Sweets, Starches, or Fats?
Index
Acknowledgments
Author’s Note
Notes
Other Works
Copyright
About the Publisher
Foreword
We certainly need a Mood Cure in the United States, but do you need one in the United Kingdom? Let’s compare the emotional facts of life in the U.S. with those in the U.K. They’re similar, but there are some interesting differences.
U.S. rates of depression and anxiety have tripled in the past ten years, with more than one in five adults now affected. The use of antidepressants is increasing so rapidly among both adults and children that Prozac (Fluoxetine) has become one of the ten top-selling drugs in the country.
How does the mood climate in the U.K. compare? According to the World Health Organization, depression is the second most common disability, after heart disease, throughout Europe, including the U.K., just as it is in the U.S. Within the U.K. itself, more than one in six adults were found to be either depressed, anxious, or both, in a large government survey published in 2001. As a result, Britons are also using antidepressants routinely, but not at quite the U.S. rate. In 2000, Fluoxetine became the seventeenth largest selling drug in the country and Efexor the eighteenth.
What accounts for the British having a serious, but somewhat less alarming, incidence of mood malaise than we have in the U.S.? There are three major factors at work here: food quality, exercise frequency, and access to bright sunlight. The food quality in the U.K. is slightly superior to that in the U.S., with more fresh food and less packaged food eaten, though that quality is steadily declining as it follows U.S. trends. On the other hand, British weather is much worse and Britons are almost as sedentary as Americans. This means that the dietary advantage that you in Britain still have is partly counterbalanced by lack of sunlight and lack of exercise, so you must vigilantly safe-guard it.
The Mood Cure is intended to help you discover mood-healthy foods and avoid mood-toxic foods by learning from our Yankee mistakes. For example, as you read about the low-fat experiment that failed in the U.S., you can consider enjoying butter on your potatoes once again.
This book will also recommend some wonderfully helpful nutrient supplements. Take Vitamin D, for example. It can be a powerful mood enhancer and is especially critical for you in the U.K. because you don’t get enough sunlight to stimulate its natural production. In 2002 the results of a study on the use of supplements made headlines all over the U.K. In it two groups of prisoners in a maximum-security prison were given identical meals three times a day. One group was given vitamins, minerals and essential fats as supplements, including 800 IU’s of Vitamin D, the Sunshine Vitamin. The other group was given dummy capsules. Those given the supplements committed 40% fewer violent crimes than those who were not.
Our experience at the U.S. clinic that I run is similar to that of the clinicians who administered the U.K. prison study: we have observed that, even when people adopt a relatively nutritious diet (most Americans subsist on diets inferior to the prison diet in the U.K. study!), it’s often not enough to reverse the deeper nutrient deficiencies that can trigger feelings like irritability, depression, anxiety and stress. The use of therapeutic dietary supplements, for a few months, is usually critical for the effective relief of these kinds of mood problems.
If you decide that you’d like professional help in your mood repair project, you’re in the right country. Fortunately, as you’ll see in The Mood Cure’s Resource Section pages 289–348, Britain is rich in practitioners trained to use specific supplements and dietary strategies to eliminate mood problems. Antony Haynes, whose busy London Nutrition Clinic is regularly featured in the national media, Patrick Holford, author and founder of The Institute for Optimum Nutrition, and Amanda Geary, author and head of The Food and Mood Project are three of the leading figures in this field, but there are many other holistic nutritionists throughout the U.K. Many are members of the British Association of Nutritional Therapists, whose contact information you’ll find on page 290.
Unfortunately, the British public’s access to many mood-saving nutrient supplements is threatened in the European Union by two international directives in particular, operating under the umbrella of CODEX. These are the Food Supplement Directive and the Traditional Medicines Directive. Should these be passed as law, nutrients such as 5-HTP and herbs such as Saint-Johns wort would be under threat. These two supplements feed and stimulate the area of the brain that produces serotonin, our most important natural anti-depressant. As I explain in Chapter 3 the use of these two specific nutrients can be essential for those of you experiencing depression or anxiety and who are looking for an alternative to drugs like Fluoxetine.
I wish you all the best in your personal and collective attempts to retain your access to mood and health-vital supplements. I include, in the Resource Section, specific U.K. sources for the supplements I recommend in The Mood Cure. However I also refer to many resources in the U.S., so that you can be guaranteed of your Mood Cure no matter what local restrictions you may encounter.
CHAPTER 1 Are Your Emotions True or False?
If you’re often feeling depressed, anxious, or stressed, you’re not alone. We’re in a bad-mood epidemic, a hundred times more likely to have significant mood problems than people born a hundred years ago.1 And these problems are on the rise. Adult rates of depression and anxiety have tripled since 1990,2,3 and over 80 percent of those who consult medical doctors today complain of excessive stress.4 Even our children are in trouble, with at least one in ten suffering from significant mood disorders.5 Our mood problems are increasing so fast that, by 2020, they will outrank AIDS, accidents, and violence as the primary causes of early death and disability.6
It’s clear that our moods are deteriorating at unprecedented rates. What isn’t so clear is why. What is this tidal wave of emotional malaise all about? Are our lives so much more unhappy than they were a hundred years ago, or even ten years ago? It’s true that we’re facing some unprecedented adversity in the twenty-first century. But even if it is the high pressure, or the absence of family support, or the terrorist threat, for example, why are we now so unresponsive to traditionally reliable remedies like long vacations, psychotherapy, and spiritual counsel? Why are we forced to turn more and more to medication for solace?
In this book, I’m proposing that much of our increasing emotional distress stems from easily correctable malfunctions in our brain and body chemistry—malfunctions that are primarily the result of critical, unmet nutritional needs. More important, I am proposing a complete yet easy-to-implement nutritional repair plan that can actually start to eliminate what I call our “false moods” in twenty-four hours.
TRUE EMOTIONS VS. FALSE MOODS
Some negative feelings are unavoidable and even beneficial. They’re what I call “true emotions.” These true, genuine responses to the real difficulties we encounter in life can be hard to take. They can even be unbearable at times, depending on the kinds of ordeals we face. But they can also be vitally important. True grief moves us through our losses, true fear warns us of danger, true anger can defend us from abuse, and true shame can teach us to grow and change. These true emotions typically pass, or diminish naturally, and even when they get repressed or misdirected, they can usually be relieved through counseling. But when we suffer for no justifiable reason; when the pain of a broken heart doesn’t mend like a broken bone; when rest, psychotherapy, prayer, and meditation can make little impact—then we must suspect the emotional impostor, the meaningless biochemical error—the “false mood.”
Figuring out the difference between false moods and true emotions is the first step in your Mood Cure. Once you’ve mastered that, you can move on to eliminate the fraudulent feelings, of depression, anxiety, sadness, and irritability, that are interfering with your natural capacity to enjoy life.
Learning to Spot a False Mood
You shouldn’t have to live with these kinds of distorted moods on a regular basis. It’s like having an engine that sputters, preventing you from having a smooth emotional ride. When your brain’s emotional equipment needs a tune-up, you get clues: you don’t sleep well, you worry too much, you start feeling overwhelmed, you lose your enthusiasm or your ability to concentrate. You might also start depending on chocolate, wine, or marijuana to get some relief. If you experience these kinds of symptoms frequently, you may have just come to accept them, assuming them simply to be unfortunate features of your basic personality. But chances are you’re wrong. Now you have an opportunity to discover your true emotional nature.
The Primary Cause of Your False Moods
Your brain is responsible for most of your feelings, both true and false. In concert with some surprisingly brainlike areas of your heart and gut, it transmits your feelings through four highly specialized and potent kinds of mood molecules. If it has plenty of all four, it keeps you as happy as you can possibly be, given your particular life circumstances. But if your brain runs low on these mood transmitters—whether because of a minor genetic miscue, because it’s used them up coping with too much stress, or because you aren’t eating the specific foods it needs—it stops producing normal emotions on a consistent basis. Instead, it starts hitting false emotional notes, like a piano out of tune.
After more than thirty years of intensive, worldwide investigation, most of the false moods and their causes have been identified by one of the fastest-growing fields of science—neuroscience, the field that studies the workings and effects of the brain. Drug companies have been using this information to create products that can give our emotional equipment a quick charge. But that’s not the same thing as a real repair job. Fortunately, the emotional tune-up that we need so badly now is readily available. In fact, the repair tools we need for this crucial effort are shockingly simple. They’re specific foods and nutrient supplements that are so exactly what the brain needs that they can begin to correct emotional malfunctions in just twenty-four hours.
HOW I DISCOVERED THE MOOD CURE
I am the director of a clinic that’s been doing nutritional mood repair for over fifteen years, but I’ve actually been a professional dealing with emotional disorders and mood problems since 1975. Early in my career I worked in residential psychiatric settings; later I worked with individuals and families, led intensive therapy groups and workshops, and ran treatment programs for adults and adolescents with addictions and eating disorders. Now I run my own clinic, Recovery Systems, in Mill Valley, California, just across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco.
In 1980, as director of my first counseling program, I began to suspect that poor nutrition was playing a role in the cases that did not respond to our intensive programs of psychotherapy and spiritual support. Our less successful clients were often “emotional eaters.” They either consumed lots of cookies, ice cream, chips, and fast food or skipped meals altogether and drank lots of coffee and caffeinated sodas. I started hiring nutritionists to explore the possibility of a food-mood connection, and we soon realized that we were on the brink of a powerful breakthrough. Clients who could be persuaded to eat plenty of protein and fresh vegetables three times a day and avoid caffeine, sweets, and refined starches, like white bread and pasta, felt much better emotionally (as well as physically). When they ate well, even those who had major psychological work to do were able to make steady advances in counseling with much less anguish and backsliding. However, the clients who did not make the nutritional changes—despite new communication skills, exercise, long vacations, and moderate work hours—did not do nearly as well.
I was encouraged by these results, but I also had to admit that it took the clients who were able to stick with it about ten weeks to fully withdraw from their bad-mood junk foods. For most of them, this was ten weeks of food cravings, fatigue, headaches, and only very slowly diminishing mood swings. More important, too many of our clients just couldn’t wait it out and went back to their old junk foods and debilitating moods.
We needed something more.
THE AMAZING AMINOS
Around this time, in the mid-1980s, I read about the work of neuroscientist Kenneth Blum, Ph.D., at the University of North Texas. A prolific researcher, Dr. Blum was studying the brain chemistry of alcoholics and drug addicts. In the course of this work, he’d identified a few genes that could hardwire the brain to underproduce its most potent “feel good” brain chemicals and instead produce the “feel bad” mood chemistry that made his subjects so vulnerable to addiction. His research explained the perplexing feelings of anxiety, anger, and depression, the chronic insomnia, and the lack of a sense of well-being that plagued so many addicts even in recovery. He called it the “reward deficiency syndrome.” This finding was fascinating all by itself, but Dr. Blum made another, even more remarkable discovery. He found that he could override the bad-mood genes by giving his research subjects a few supplemental nutrients. These brain foods, called amino acids, are concentrates of common proteins found in food. They were able to jump-start the addicts’ genetically misprogrammed brain chemistry and radically improve their moods. The bottom line: The addicts who took the amino acids were able to stay away from drugs and alcohol. Those who took no aminos had four times higher relapse rates!7
I was very excited after reviewing Dr. Blum’s studies. I had a sense that the amino acids were the missing ingredients in my fledgling nutritional therapy program. Since these supplements were identical to nutrients found in food and, unlike drugs, not foreign to the human body, my nutritionists and I felt comfortable recommending them. It was certainly worth a try.
COMBINING NUTRITHERAPY WITH PSYCHOTHERAPY
Early on, I decided to give the aminos to three women struggling with bulimia, an eating disorder that is normally very difficult to treat. When they came to our clinic, all of them had been working hard in psychotherapy for some time with no improvement. Like most bulimics, they were depressed, obsessive, and self-critical. All were professionally well established, though, and all were married. One was a happily married 26-year-old, one was 35 and very unhappily married, and the third, at 48, needed marital help, but she and her husband were both determined to work things out.
In addition to taking the aminos, these women committed themselves to following our standard program of protein-and-vegetable-rich, reduced-carbohydrate foods and psychotherapy. I was astonished at how the aminos accelerated each client’s progress. Mood improvements that would normally have taken months to achieve began for these women in days. In two weeks on the aminos, all three women had freed themselves of their obsessions with food and most of their associated mood problems. And it kept getting better. After a few months on aminos, the happily married woman, having met all of her goals, graduated from therapy free of both bulimia and mood swings. The unhappily married woman began to do deep and productive therapy after years of being too weakened by her bulimia to use psychotherapy constructively. After her nutritional overhaul, she was able to work through her fears, leave her husband, and establish a happy life for herself. The third woman no longer felt much need for individual therapy (she’d been at it for years) but started couples therapy with good results. All three women were still making excellent progress six months later and starting to go off their aminos. Their psychotherapist was dumbfounded, and so were we.
More than fifteen years and several thousand clients later, the amino acids are still our most effective weapons for fighting false moods. We have consistently found that they not only improve mood almost instantly, but speed up psychotherapy as well. A well-nourished person who has had a brain chemistry tune-up with amino acids gets beyond psychological and emotional obstacles faster, deeper, and more successfully. Not only have our brain-tuned clients had quicker access to critical memories, but they’ve coped better with those memories, no longer paralyzed by biochemically exaggerated feelings of fear, guilt, or pain.
The effects of nutritionally stabilized moods on our clients’ relationships have also been extraordinary. I’ll never forget the first family that we treated with both psychotherapy and nutritherapy. A father and mother came to see us, concerned about their 14-year-old son, who was having attention problems and depression plus headache pain so severe that it often kept him at home from school. It soon became clear that Dad had some serious problems, too. He was obsessively controlling and verbally abusive. Though they had received family counseling many times in the past, nothing had ever improved. When it became clear, after a few sessions, that Dad was actually deeply devoted to his family but simply unable to control his critical, angry feelings, I suggested that he meet with the same staff nutritionist who was seeing his son. He agreed because he could see that his son’s headaches were responding to dietary changes and that his mood and ability to concentrate were improving on the amino acids. When Dad began taking amino acids himself, the change was immediate and powerful: his obsessive, explosive behavior evaporated entirely, much to the amazement and relief of his wife and son. Family therapy proceeded very constructively, since all family members were finally able to listen and respond to one another free of their false moods. Interestingly, Dad also needed some private psychotherapy to adjust to his new emotional style, especially in the business world, where his abrasive personality had become his trademark. In 1995, our staff began suggesting that our clients try potentially helpful aminos right in the office, during their initial assessments. As a result, we’ve actually been present as the amino acids have taken effect, typically within fifteen minutes. We’ve watched and cheered as hundreds of clients shed their false feelings of tension, apathy, irritability, and emotional pain right before our eyes. The word that our clients always use to describe this experience is “amazing.” What’s more, our clients typically need to take the aminos for only three to twelve months. After that, their mood chemistry repairs are usually complete. They must, however, continue eating plenty of protein, vegetables, and other fresh whole foods and taking their basic vitamin, mineral, and fatty acid supplements.
HOW DO THE AMINOS ELIMINATE FALSE MOODS AND REVIVE TRUE EMOTION?
This is the secret: There are twenty-two different kinds of amino acids in high-protein foods like chicken, fish, beef, eggs, and cheese. You may have heard them referred to as the building blocks of protein. Each amino has its own name and unique duties to perform, but only a few very special aminos can serve as fuels for the brain’s four mood engines. Just five or six of these amino acids, taken as supplements, can effectively reverse all four of the brain deficiencies that cause false moods.