Devon Cosgrove RHN

Happy Canada Day everyone! 🇨🇦

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What you put on your fork can increase or decrease your risk of anxiety.

Your food is how your body provides the brain with what it needs to make neurotransmitters, many of which are implicated in anxiety when out of balance.

Specifically, the typical American diet sets you up for chronic low-grade inflammation that often leads to anxiety—refined flours, sugars, distorted fats, preservatives, pesticides, herbicides, alcohol, and other chemical toxins.

These fake and adulterated foods can increase intestinal permeability, disturb the microbiome, cause physical stress, overexcite the brain, and create hyperarousal, leading to a greater susceptibility to anxiety.

On the other hand, the ideal diet for mental health is one that consists of the nutrients you need to make outstanding neurotransmitters: whole organic foods like vegetables, fruits, healthy fats, nuts, seeds, and fish—and eating a diverse range within each food group. These foods actually help calm your brain and promote restful sleep.

EAT FOR CALM:

1️⃣Magnesium-rich foods like almonds, cashews, spinach, pumpkin seeds, and avocados.
2️⃣B vitamin-rich foods - deficiencies in B9 (folate) and B12 may be linked to anxiety.
3️⃣Great sources of B vitamins include oysters, mussels, mackerel, and organ meats (liver and kidney). Excellent sources of folate are asparagus, spinach, and liver.
4️⃣Healthy fats - like avocado, nuts, seeds, oily fish (salmon, herring, sardines), olives, and coconut. Healthy omega-3s and omega-6s play a vital role in reducing neuroinflammation and anxiety.
5️⃣Probotic foods like sauerkraut and kimchi.
6️⃣Bone broth helps to seal leaky gut (anxiety has a strong gut/brain connection) and simply feels soothing.
7️⃣Clean protein, like oily fish and pastured poultry, to build up calming neurotransmitters.

AVOID
⭕Caffeine, sugar/refined carbs, processed/packaged foods, GMO/glyphosate, alcohol, lectins.
Lectins are proteins found in raw legumes and grains that can bind to cell membranes and may increase your chance of leaky gut.

Have you noticed your anxiety lessen when you changed your diet?

Dr. Low Dog is an excellent healer to follow on FB.❤️

Think Differently: Supporting Your Mental Health With Natural Methods Living in tumultuous times, it can be hard to maintain mental well-being. Here are some of the methods to support your mental health naturally.

This!

As a doctor, it is increasingly clear to me that the health of our citizens, the health of our society and our planet depends on disruptive innovations that decentralize and democratize food production and consumption, innovations that produce real food at scale, restores the health of soils, water, air and the biodiversity of our planet and that reverses climate change.⁣

When I say diabetes, I mean Type 2 diabetes, which can be reversed, and Type 1 diabetes is an organ-specific autoimmune disease. However, a diet full of real, whole foods can help in managing both Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes.

If you’ve ever had butterflies in your stomach before giving a talk, a stomach ache when you had to have a ‘tough conversation’ with someone, or had to run to the bathroom a bunch of times before going into a job interview, you know first-hand that acute stress messes with your gut. That’s because your brain has a direct connection to what goes on in your gut - hence why we call the gut “the second brain”.⁠⁠⁠
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Ongoing stress has a powerful impact on your digestive system; trauma is also now known to be a ‘hidden’ form of stress that can unfavorably alter the microbiome in an ongoing way (i.e., there’s strong correlation between history of sexual trauma and IBS). In fact, new research shows that IBS is a combination of irritable bowel and ‘irritable brain.’⁠⁠⁠
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The major effects of stress on gut physiology include:⁠⁠⁠
🌀 Speeding up or slowing down your gastrointestinal motility (loose stools, constipation, gas, IBS)⁠⁠⁠
🌀 Increase in visceral perception, meaning you’re more aware of sensations, including pain, in your gut⁠⁠⁠
🌀 Increasing leaky gut, partly through the release of mast cells via your immune system⁠⁠⁠
🌀 Negative effects on the regenerative capacity of gastrointestinal lining and reduction in blood flow⁠⁠⁠
🌀 Negative effects on intestinal microbiota numbers, types, and diversity⁠⁠⁠
🌀 Decreased levels of an important antibody called secretory IgA which protects the intestinal lining⁠⁠⁠
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When the Stress Response gets activated, blood flow gets diverted away from your digestive system - digestion can happen after the emergency is over - but when the emergency never fully ends because you’re chronically stressed, this can lead to a variety of changes in your immune system and directly in your intestinal cells that cause leaky gut, including increased production of mast cells.⁠⁠⁠
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I have so much to share with you on this that I've created a course called the 28-Day Women's Gut Reset (and yes, it's totally for gutsy women!!!). You can join between now and Oct 14 at the link in bio. Have gut questions? Join me here on IG at 1pm ET when I answer those and more!!! xx, Aviva

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′′ Bike is the slow death of the planet ".
A banker made economists think this when he said: ′′ A cyclist is a disaster for the country's economy: he doesn't buy cars or borrow money to buy. He doesn't pay insurance policies Doesn't buy fuel, doesn't pay to take the car to revision and repairs needed. Does not use paid parking. It doesn't cause major accidents. Does not require multi lane highways. He doesn't become obese
Healthy people are not necessary or useful to the economy. They don't buy medicine They don't go to hospitals or doctors They add nothing to the country's GDP.
On the contrary, each new McDonald's store creates at least 30 jobs, actually 10 cardiologists, 10 dentists, 10 diet experts and nutritionists, obviously as well as the people who work in the store itself ".
Choose carefully: a bike or a Mc Donald? Worth thinking about
PS: walking is even worse Pedestrians don't even buy a bike!

Whole new fields of research such as nutritional psychiatry have emerged since I wrote The UltraMind Solution about how the body affects the mind in 2009. Stanford has a department of Metabolic Psychiatry. Harvard now has a department of Nutritional Psychiatry. Studies show that simply swapping out processed, sugary starchy foods for whole foods is effective in treating depression. ⁣
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Studies also show kids with severe violent behavior transform when swapping out processed foods for whole foods, including a 75% reduction in the use of restraints and a 100% reduction in suicides, which is the 3rd leading cause of death in that age group. ⁣
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One study of violent juveniles found that simply giving children a vitamin and mineral supplement reduced violent acts by 91 percent compared to a control group. Why were they violent? ⁣
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Their brains were starving for nutrients that regulate mood and behavior including iron, magnesium, B12, and folate. Just giving these kids vitamins for three months fixed their abnormal brain waves on EEG. The kids who also changed their diet had an 80% reduction in violent crime and those who stayed on a processed diet continued their violent ways.⁣
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While many children are not eating enough brain food, they are also eating too many chemicals, including about five pounds of dyes, preservatives and additives that are linked to hyperactivity and worse.⁣
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While therapy, stress reduction, and movement are equally critical in many brain disorders, food plays a pivotal and often overlooked role. ⁣
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Start small. Start with the Pegan Diet. Eat loads of veggies, some fruit (especially the low-sugar, nutrient-dense ones), whole grains (not flours), nuts and seeds, low-starch beans and legumes, and some high-quality meat, poultry, and fish. Focus on brain foods that have been shown to impact mood and reduce symptoms of depression and anxiety— foods rich in omega-3s, zinc, magnesium, vitamin D, antioxidants, and B vitamins. ⁣

This book is next on my list! 📖

Tot and I want to share a great book we’re reading and we hope you’ll pass it on to anyone with a child struggling with mental health.

It’s called Brain Inflamed, by my dear friend and integrative doc, Kenneth Bock, M.D. (Kenneth Bock, M.D.). It uncovers many of the hidden causes of anxiety, depression and other mood disorders in adolescents and teens.

While I don’t have kids, this book also offers clues to some of my own early health issues. For wellness detectives like us, those clues are pure GOLD. They help us create solutions where there often are none—even decades later!

According to Dr. Bock, over the past decade, the number of 12 to 17 year olds suffering from mental health disorders has more than *doubled*.

While adolescents and teens are notorious for mood swings and rebellion (I sure was!) parents today are navigating new terrain as their children are increasingly at risk of struggling with a mental health issue.

But the question remains: What’s causing this epidemic?⁠ Dr. Bock suggests that many of the common issues (including depression, anxiety, and OCD) may share the same underlying mechanism: systemic inflammation. Boom!

Brain Inflamed is a game-changer for parents desperately seeking answers to their children's unexplained struggles.

Order it here: https://amzn.to/3b38ja8. And please tag the folks in your life who could use this info.

Love you!

This is important.

Your thoughts have real and measurable effects on your body and brain. Your immune cells know your deepest feelings.⠀⁣
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Your stem cells are wired to your brain and help you repair and regenerate. But they only turn on and make new brain cells when you relax. And I don't mean sipping a glass of Chardonnay while watching TV or practicing retail therapy. ⠀⁣
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In school, we all learned how to read and write, but we never learned how to use our minds to help us with the most important survival skills of all: staying happy and healthy! Research has shown over and over again that learning to relax is one of the most important keys to long-term health and vitality. ⠀⁣
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To engage the powerful forces of the mind on the body, you must DO something. Learn how to ACTIVELY relax. ⠀⁣
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Whether you practice deep breathing or take a simple leisurely walk, find an active relaxation that works for you and do it. Here are a few more ideas on how to push your pause button:⠀⁣
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1) Make choices that make your life balanced — practice saying “NO” to others and “YES” to yourself.⠀⁣
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2) Try yoga or meditation.⠀⁣
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3) Get enough sleep.⠀⁣
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4) Eat whole foods that decrease the stress response.⠀

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And many more! Food sensitivities might affect you immediately or it might take a few days. ⁣
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This can make it difficult to determine what foods might be causing various problems. ⁣⁠⁣
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Eliminating specific trigger foods such as gluten, dairy, grains, sugar, alcohol, and caffeine for a duration of time is a way for your body to hit the reset button on your health. ⁣⁠After following an elimination diet for a certain period of time, you can then strategically add foods back in to see how you tolerate them.⁣⁠⁣
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You can learn more about this in a past episode of The Doctor’s Farmacy with Functional Medicine nutritionist, Lisa Dreher. We discuss how we use elimination diets to identify and treat food sensitivities in our patients. ⁣
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Check out our full conversation here: https://bit.ly/3rm9nM3