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Food Matters: Mental Health and Our Kids
As a doctor who likes to keep up on research, I am sometimes struck by the kinds of things we are studying. Before naturopathic medical school, I had a paid internship in a research lab. My job was in part, to walk pregnant pygmy goats on a treadmill, I kid you not, in the process of trying to prove the hypothesis that exercise was good in pregnancy. I learned a lot about keeping records, paying attention to detail, using objective measurements and more, but the whole time I kept thinking to myself, why are we testing this? Isn’t it obvious that exercise is good in pregnancy?
I felt the same way when I read a recent report from BMJ Prevention, Nutrition and Health Journal, which reports that children and teens who eat regular breakfast and lunch and who choose more fruits and vegetables, have better mental health. It was a long-term study on thousands of kids and used accepted standards of assessment of mental health to draw its clear conclusions.
So, while to me, these results are not surprising, I am happy this study was done, because it underscores the role that consistent and healthy food choices play, not just for physical health, but also for mental health, not just for adults, but also for children. And we know that poor mental health in childhood predicts poor mental health throughout life. There are many factors that go into mental health…
