There’s a link between diet and depression

I have spent some days this month with someone who is depressed. I’m not good with depression. Like many other people, faced with someone deep into self-loathing and inertia, my instincts are to push them to take one small step, and then another, to build a sense of satisfaction and rising esteem and engagement.

It doesn’t work. Indeed, it can make the depressed feel even more isolated and misunderstood when we don’t understand the black hole in their lives. In their heads, there ‘is no point to any of it.

It makes matters harder that few of us are experts, or even versed, in how to deal with mental health issues in our homes, in our families, in our workplace, or in our lives.

Yet how many of us, truly, have no relative or friend who isn’t grappling with such issues? Retreating into alcohol, or over-eating, being advised to exercise, and spend time with others, but still alone with themselves at night and facing a dark and off-kilter train of thoughts in their heads?

So how do we help, and what is the answer? Well, diet, it seems, can make a huge difference.

Reading one commentator, who had been depressed for years, his own story was of how he finally resolved his depression by changing what he ate.

He radically reduced his intake of sugars and carbohydrates, and his mood began to lift. The dark thoughts, the tiredness, the despair, all of it, it seems, have far more to do with chemistry than I had certainly understood. And our chemistry is driven, to a very large degree, as in more than 90 per cent, by what we put in our mouths.

Now that makes for some big thinking.

We see cigarettes packets plastered with pictures of the horrible diseases they cause. Alcohol is advertised with hefty warnings on not over-consuming.

Elsewhere in the world, sugary drinks are taking a hammering, as consumers progressively join up the dots on what soda does to mood, health, and general wellbeing.

Yet, ours is a market where sugar gets piled into every tea cup, and we are one of the few growth markets left anywhere for soda.

Nor is depression, or mental health, a big conversation for us. We have few psychiatrists, few therapists, and live in circumstances in development and wealth, weak legislation and poor enforcement that require unusually high levels of resilience from everyone.

Eating and drinking foods that move us to low energy and negativity just doesn’t seem to be a bonus addition in that context.

Moreover, nutrition has long been an elephant in our room. For many years, the general diet was so unbalanced in Kenya that the country had one of the highest rates on the globe of Vitamin A deficiency, called VAD by medics. For me, vitamins are a largely esoteric thing: I still confuse them generally, and no one ever teaches us at school which ones we really need and how to ensure we get them.

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But VAD causes immune deficiency. According to paediatricians, it is the underlying cause for Kenya’s persistently high infant morbidity, and the streams of infants who fold into severe illness from minor water-borne germs, and pneumonia and respiratory infections from the air-borne.

Thus, some years back, our government moved on this, and insisted on Vitamin A supplements in all our mealie maize. For most, the significance of that nutritional advance was lost. But it was a big deal.

Yet now, as we stare at a world getting increasingly negative about sugar and carbohydrates, isn’t it time we also dug a little deeper into their health impact, and stopped kidding ourselves that what we put in doesn’t matter?

If cutting back on sugar and ugali were to lift even a fraction of our populace out of haunting negativity, and back to productive energy, that, of itself, would be a shift in consumption that we would have cause to celebrate permanently.

For not all that is packaged, or even that we’re used to and familiar with, is good for us: and sometimes it helps a lot to be told more about what it can and might do to us.