Nestled among the psychiatrists who habitually prescribe prescription drugs to their depressed patients, are a few who believe that nutrition, not medication, is the key to mental wellbeing.

Whether it’s in response to an increasing distrust of antidepressants or a natural follow-up to studies that have linked nutrients to the control and reversal of psychological disorders, nutritional therapy is becoming a legitimate field. “There have been huge advances over the past few years finding that nutritional intervention can treat many behavioral and mental conditions we used to think were untreatable,” explains Lewis Mehl-Madrona, associate professor of clinical psychiatry at the University of Arizona College of Medicine.

Los Angeles psychiatrist Hyla Cass has even written 10 books on the subject. In Natural Highs: Feel Good All the Time and 8 Weeks to Vibrant Health she’s combined her mental health expertise with a background in nutritional medicine and has come up with some definitive theories on how what we eat affects our happiness. “Diets high in refined foods, sugars, and unhealthy fats can actually interfere with our natural brain chemistry,” she says.

While experts in nutritional therapy support dietary changes, simply adjusting what we eat is not always enough to change the way the brain functions. To increase the chances of actively influencing our mental health, they recommend a regimen of supplements that can include the following: [Note: Of course, it's important to consult a health care professional before embarking on a major course of supplements. Check out the integrative medicine clinics at Drweilselfhealing.com or the list of holistic doctors at Holisticmedicine.org.]

B Vitamins All B vitamins boost mood by facilitating neurotransmitter function. This is especially good news for women over 65 who have notable B-12 deficiencies.

Essential fatty acids There have been great results from these superhero fatty acids. They’re an essential part of every cell membrane, and healthy membranes help your brain function efficiently.

Amino acids As the building blocks of neurotransmitters, amino acids can help elevate mood by increasing the production of serotonin.

Saint-john’s-wort A classic, this herb is best for mild to moderate depression.

Rhodiola rosea An adaptogen - it can increase your resistance to a variety of stressors - rosea may decrease mild to moderate depression.

Health News

By Rachel Brand

Buddhists, yogis and ayurvedic doctors have said for centuries that meditation improves health and well-being. Now scientists are trying to prove it.

Several clinical studies have documented specific ways that meditating may help people stay healthier, sharpen mental focus and gain more power over their emotions. Some studies even show that the brain of someone who meditates may be physically different from the next guy’s.

Scientists say it’s a very new field of study. But their findings to date offer compelling confirmation to the 10 million Americans who meditate — and tell skeptics that those who are getting on the cushion every day might be onto something.

Can meditation make you happier?

When emotions wreak havoc, it helps to “get it out” — ranting to a therapist, friend or spouse, or writing about your feelings in a journal. Sitting down on a cushion to meditate is seemingly the polar opposite of this catharsis. But could it be that the two approaches are helpful for similar reasons?

Talking or writing about your feelings forces you to call them something. And one technique taught in mindfulness meditation is naming your emotions. It’s part of noticing and detaching from those emotions vs. letting them hijack your bliss. Meditation instructor Dianna Dunbar calls it “the mindfulness wedge.” It’s about “helping people develop that pause button,” she says, so they can observe emotions from the outside.

Two UCLA studies showed “that simply labeling emotion promotes detachment,” says David Creswell, Ph.D., a meditation researcher at the university who joined colleague Matthew D. Lieberman, Ph.D., in heading up the studies.

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to record brain activity and pinpoint where in the brain it occurs, Lieberman’s team found that assigning names to negative emotions turns down the intensity of activity in the amygdala — an almond-sized sector of the brain that acts like an alarm system: When you witness a car crash, argue with your spouse or get yelled at by your boss, it’s your amygdala’s job to set off a cascade of stress-related reactions.

But if you simply name the distressing event, Lieberman says, you can wield more power over your amygdala’s freak-out. “When you attach the word ‘angry,’” he explains, “you see a decreased response in the amygdala.”

Creswell’s 2007 study supported these findings. His team asked 27 undergraduates to fill out a questionnaire on how “mindful” they were — how inclined they were to pay attention to present emotions, thoughts or sensations. They found a striking difference between the brains of those who called themselves mindful and those who didn’t: Mindful patients showed more activity in the areas that calm down emotional response, known as the prefrontal cortex; and less activation in the amygdala.

Twenty-year meditation practitioner Joyce Bonnie says the UCLA findings aren’t surprising to her. But she says having that emotion-diffusing ability is one thing, and using it is another.

“It’s very challenging to bring what you practice on the meditation cushion out in a real-life situation,” says Bonnie, an independent filmmaker in Santa Monica, Calif. “When you’re actually in that moment — say someone is yelling at you — you have to remember to step back, say, ‘Oh, that’s anger I’m feeling,’ and change what you do with that emotion, all in a millisecond. It takes a lot of practice.”

Still, the clinical results “may explain the beneficial health effects of mindfulness meditation,” Creswell says, “and suggest why mindfulness meditation programs improve mood and health.

“For the first time since [the Buddha’s] teachings,” he adds, “we have shown that there is actually a neurological reason for doing mindfulness meditation.”

Can meditation make you healthier?

Thirty-seven-year-old mom Nikki Ragonese has meditated for six years as one way to cope with painful degenerative osteoarthritis. Meditation, she says, makes it easier to accept her pain and the difficult emotions it fuels.

“Often when you feel something, you don’t acknowledge it,” Ragonese says. “And by avoiding that feeling, you perpetuate greater pain. Meditation helps me realize that I create my own feelings. If I’m in a state of frustration and I stop and observe it, I realize there’s another way to deal with the pain.”

Ragonese’s mindfulness meditation instructor in Boulder, Colo., therapist Dianna Dunbar, agrees. “I’ve seen patients who gain a greater sense of awareness of their pain become nonjudgmental observers of their pain,” she says. “They are less irritable, and more able to calm down and relax.”

Science is starting to churn out more evidence echoing Ragonese and Dunbar’s experience, showing signs that mindfulness meditation can help ease symptoms of conditions including psoriasis and hypertension as well as chronic pain.

Meditating also slows breathing rate, blood pressure and heart rate, and there’s some evidence that meditation may aid treatment of anxiety, depression, high blood pressure and a range of other ailments.

Can meditation make you smarter?

The buzz about meditation’s ability to turn out shiny, happy people makes you wonder: Do people who meditate have something different going on upstairs than non-meditators do?

A noted 2005 study by Sara Lazar, Ph.D., an instructor in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, aimed to find out which parts of the brain become active when a person practices mindfulness and meditation. Her team studied 20 people who meditate regularly and 20 who don’t.

The results were astounding: Brain regions associated with attention, sensory awareness and emotional processing — the cortex — were thicker in meditators. In fact, meditators’ brains grew thicker in direct correlation with how much they meditated.

The findings suggest that meditation can change the brain’s structure — perhaps because certain brain regions are used more frequently in the process of meditation, and therefore grow.

Lazar says it’s a “huge, huge, huge” leap to assert that meditators’ brains function better. “We really don’t know how meditation works,” Lazar cautions, stressing that scientists are merely uncovering “pieces of the puzzle.”

Yet for anyone accustomed to waiting for a chorus of nods from science before trying alternative methods, these tip-of-the-iceberg findings may be ample proof of what Eastern cultures have been saying for centuries: Meditation is good for you.

remedy's

Okay, so I was overly ambitious when I set about planting at least 14 different types of vegetables, plus assorted herbs, in my 15’ x 16’ back yard. But that’s the way you learn right?

And sure, I have learned a lot about what works and doesn’t in urban veggie gardening — particularly in a humid Washington, D.C., summer.

First the don’ts:

•Don’t plant cucumber, squash, or zucchini. My dad was right when he said they spread to 20 feet. Those things will just keep on growing until they crowd out all your other plants. Plus the rats like to gnaw on the fruits before they can fully ripen, and there’s the risk of cross-pollination in subsequent growing seasons.

•Don’t plant lettuce. It just gets too hot too soon for them, in this climate at least. The seedlings also get eaten by an unknown urban pest.

•Don’t plant spinach. The reasons are the same as with lettuce.

•Don’t plant corn. The plants are too big for a small area—not that I had to worry about this. My corn seeds didn’t even germinate.

Now the dos:

•Do plant tomatoes. I especially recommend the smaller varieties, like sweeties, for urban areas. My sweeties came up nicely and produced beautiful juicy red fruits. A word of advice from my experience: Use netting to ward off pests that like to steal tomatoes while still green. I suspect rats. Another bonus for urban gardening: Tomatoes grow fine in containers; mine are in wooden ones.

•Do plant green beans. The plants aren’t overly big and they love hot, humid summers, but they do like to spread. I recommend training them along a trellis to keep them under control and to allow for easier picking. Soy beans also grow well (mine got crowded out by zucchini—see above).

•Do plant green peppers and eggplant. They thrive in hot, humid weather, are small and contained, and like tomatoes, they easily adapt to container growing. I especially recommend the mini Japanese eggplant (Ichiban).

•Do plant herbs. They’re ideal for urban gardening: I’ve successfully grown a variety of herbs, including lemon thyme, parsley, basil, tarragon, marjoram, sage, oregano, rosemary, and dill.

The wild cards? Radishes and broccoli. My radishes came up woody and soon died out—I think it got too hot for them. And, of course, something chomped my broccoli. Netting may also be the answer there.

These recommendations are based entirely on my urban gardening experience; others may have different advice based on theirs.

Anyone else care to share?

Garden

During that straw bale building workshop a few weeks back, a guest speaker who also happens to be my architect, Brian Fuentes, talked about trying to work with green methods … He said something like “Building with straw bales isn’t just for the hippies and freaks anymore.”

Which is to say, more and more people are seeing the value and practicality of building with this cheap, plentiful, natural, super-insulating, user-friendly material. A 45,000 square foot public building in Santa Clarita, is one of the first straw-bale buildings to be LEED-certified; Ridge Vineyards, also in California, built their tasting, storage and barreling rooms out of bales; even in Aspen, CO, the locus of conspicuous consumption in the American West, straw bale homes are popping up.

All of which is righteous and radical; green building huzzah! But on the business end of things, where I’m sitting right now, I’m dealing with a couple of pitfalls the green building biz has yet to overcome.

I’ve already bitched about how none of the suppliers and subcontractors I need for this project are calling me back. [The guy I have sort-of working for me as my sort-of general contractor (translation: I pay him to tell me what to do next) says big suppliers don’t put a whole lot of care into small projects like mine. Sweet.]

But another issue is that a few key supplies that I need — like my recycled-polystyrene-and-cement foundation blocks — aren’t quite standard building supplies, at least not yet. Which is to say, I can’t just pop down to WhopperMart and pick up what I need; I have to hunt around for a specialized supplier and wait til he calls me back and see if he has my stuff in stock and most likely special order what I need which might have to be custom fabricated specifically for my project and before you know it it’s April 2010.

I may be wrong, or just barking up all the wrong trees, but to me it looks like a lot of these materials and their suppliers are still going through a bit of market Darwinism: There are an awful lot of teeny tiny players with weak supply chains and as-yet-unformed sales teams. No dominant monster (or even ambitious proto-mammal) has emerged as the place to call for your foundation blocks. Or your cork floors.

Case in point: We need to put new floors in one of the rented apartments attached to our house, and we were looking for the greenest alternative. (And no, it ain’t bamboo, people.) So we found a place here in Boulder that sold cork flooring and carpeting made from recycled plastic bottles, called them up and asked if we could come take a look at their stuff. Sure, they said. Only thing is, they have no showroom, so would we mind coming to their apartment to check it out?

Don’t get me wrong. The grassroots groove is right on. I’m glad the movement is starting to really move. I don’t mind coming to your apartment to see your cork floors. I’m willing to take the time to find my foundation blocks. But that’s me. I’m one of the freaks. But if I think it’s a pain in the apple to work all this out, what’s Joe Average gonna think?

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The flavors of Thanksgiving are captured in this fast and easy vegetarian main course. It’s so yummy you’ll probably want to make it even when it’s not holiday time! The leftover goat cheese mixture is delicious on crackers or toast points.

1 tablespoon plus one teaspoon olive oil, divided
1 shallot, minced
4 ounces goat cheese
¼ cup canned cranberry sauce (with whole berries), divided
1 tablespoon minced fresh sage, or 1 teaspoon dried sage
pinch chipotle seasoning or cayenne pepper
salt and pepper
4 Quorn cutlets, defrosted (see note below)
4 whole sage leaves

Preheat oven to 400˚F. In a small saute pan, heat 1 teaspoon olive oil. Add shallot and saute until translucent and starting to turn golden. Transfer to a small bowl and allow to cool. To cooled shallots, add the goat cheese, 2 to 3 heaping tablespoons cranberry sauce and sage, stirring until creamy and completely combined. Add chipotle or cayenne, salt, and pepper to taste.

Make a horizontal slit into the side of each quorn cutlet, making the pocket as deep as possible without cutting through to the other side. Brush each cutlet on both sides with olive oil. Using a butter knife or your fingers, stuff each cutlet with some of the goat cheese mixture and place the stuffed cutlets on a sheet pan. In a small bowl, stir about 1-2 tablespoons cranberry sauce (berries removed) until it has a liquidy consistency. Add a pinch of chipotle or cayenne to taste. Brush the top of each cutlet with cranberry sauce. Brush sage leaves with olive oil and press one sage leaf into the top of each cutlet. Bake for 15 minutes or until heated through.

If desired, top each cutlet with a dollop of the remaining goat cheese mixture.

Note: This recipe can also be prepared using Veat Vegetarian Breasts in place of the Quorn.

Recipes

 January 17, 2008

At the risk of sounding like I’m bragging, my 14-month-old Sadie is a very good eater. I’ll never know if this is because of the wholesome, organic homemade baby purees I labored over or, as one of her grandfathers believes, because she comes from a long line of hearty appetites. At any rate, I consider myself pretty lucky that, when faced with a waffle and a bowl of peas, she’ll dive into the veggies with gusto.

But I’m not naïve enough to believe that it’ll always be so easy. I’m sure Sadie will go on hunger strikes and white-food-only phases, and there will be battles over our ban on McDonald’s that we won’t always win. That’s why I’ve already built up a library full of kid-friendly cookbooks, each one promising to help moms create fun meals that are so yummy that their kids won’t even realize they’re healthy.

The two latest additions to my collection are The Sneaky Chef: Simple Strategies for Hiding Healthy Foods in Kids’ Favorite Meals by Missy Chase Lapine, and Deceptively Delicious: Simple Secrets to Get Your Kids Eating Good Food by Jessica Seinfeld.

The Sneaky Chef’s premise is to “hide the foods kids should eat in the dishes they will eat,” according to the cover copy. She has a number of smart methods on how to do this, some of which are common-sense, like using alternative cooking methods to frying, or making food look appealing and fun. But others are more unconventional and unexpected, like using fruit and vegetable purees that can be blended unobtrusively into a dish, combining refined ingredients like white flour with more wholesome versions, using creamy or fine-particle ingredients that can “disappear” into the finished dish, and using nutritious liquids like juices or broths in place of plain water.

Lapine has certainly done her homework, discussing not only the psychology behind how children perceive foods and mealtime (and how to use this knowledge to your advantage) but also outlining the framework for a healthy diet with regard to nutritious ingredients, avoiding toxins like pesticides and mercury, and focusing on slow-releasing sugars and carbs.

A rainbow of puree recipes are the backbone of the many meal recipes. For instance, Purple Puree, containing spinach and blueberries, appears in Cocoa Chocolate Chip Pancakes, Bonus Burgers and Brainy Brownies. And White Puree, a blend of cauliflower and zucchini, is used in Masterful Mac n Cheese and Triple Stuffed Potatoes. For each vegetable and fruit puree, Lapine outlines the nutritional information and benefits of the ingredients. And she even has “quick fixes” for packaged meals, such as adding pureed tofu or white beans to boxed macaroni and cheese, or mixing wheat germ into tuna salad.

Deceptively Delicious, meanwhile, is glossier, filled with adorable retro illustrations, and certainly has the added cachet of a celebrity author, but has a similar premise (a fact that hasn’t gone unnoticed by Lapine, who is suing the Seinfelds for plagarism.) Seinfeld’s recipes, which she developed with the help of chef Jennifer Iserloh and nutrition expert Joy Bauer, are also based on having an arsenal of single-ingredient fruit and vegetable purees. The book also contains a helpful section of nutrition guidelines for children and a breakdown of the nutritional benefits of various fruits and vegetables.

There are quite a few similar recipes—grilled cheese sandwiches in both contain sweet potato puree, twice-baked potatoes are blended with cauliflower puree, and brownies contain spinach. You can try some of Seinfeld’s recipes (including that of the brownies made with spinach and carrot puree) on her Web site. And no, you really can’t taste the spinach in those brownies.

With all the similarities, you definitely don’t need both of these books, and with all of its extensive nutrition information, not to mention the tips on doctoring up packaged mixes, I suspect I’ll be turning more often to Lapine’s book. But nonetheless, I know that when Sadie hits her picky-eating phase, I’ll be armed and ready.

Books

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The Truth, Videos

(NaturalNews) “You are what you eat.” A once universal theme of awareness has become all but lost to us when it comes to improving our children’s eating habits. I fondly remember my first grade teacher, Mrs. Hooks, warmly walking down each row of desks passing out snacks. It was the time of the day every one looked forward to. As usual I would play with my two quarters, rolling them on my desk anxious to choose my usual chocolate milk and chocolate chip cookie. To my surprise as she lowered the tray, there was only apple and pear slices and grape juice. I asked her where the cookies and milk were as I clinched my quarters in my hand for safe keeping. She smiled and said, “We have to be careful what we eat. Cookies taste good but are not meant to be eaten all the time.” I frowned and place my quarters in my pocket. She placed the plate of fruit and juice on my desk recognizing my defiance and said, “If you want to be healthy and strong, you have to eat healthy and strong foods. Remember, you are what you eat.”

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(NaturalNews) McDonald’s paid the $1,700 tab for Seminole County, Florida’s report card jackets in exchange for a coupon, featuring Ronald McDonald, on the card’s cover (1, 2). With good grades and attendance, the coupon can be redeemed for a free Happy Meal.

This appears to violate the Children’s Food and Beverage Advertising Initiative, which McDonald’s joined last year (3). Created by the Better Business Bureau, the initiative “provide(s) companies that advertise foods and beverages to children with a transparent and accountable advertising self-regulation mechanism.” Members are not allowed to advertise at schools and cannot place materials in editorial or entertainment content.

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