The Mood Cure: Take Charge of Your Emotions in 24 Hours Using Food and Supplements. Julia Ross

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СКАЧАТЬ safely resulted in more and better sleep.

      Believe it or not, getting too little healthy fat may be another way in which your diet has contributed to your low serotonin state. Increasing fat intake increases the availability of tryptophan in the brain.² Did you notice on the Mood-Type Questionnaire that anger and negativity are reliable symptoms of serotonin depletion? Both emotions increase on low-fat diets. A study comparing a 41 percent fat diet with a 25 percent fat diet found that subjects’ moods deteriorated with reduced-fat intake.³

      Last, and certainly not least, our fast foods and skipped meals have depleted us of many of the vitamins and minerals that assist in the magical conversion of tryptophan to 5-HTP and then to serotonin. Without enough calcium, magnesium, vitamin D, and B vitamins, for example, the neurotransmitters can’t be made consistently. With so many of us eating far from enough fresh, whole vegetables, fruit, beans, and grains, we’ve become deficient in many mood-crucial nutrients, which is why it is important to eat good-mood foods and take the basic supplements laid out in the master plan in step three.

       Serotonin’s Enemies

      Don’t inadvertently sabotage your serotonin defense efforts. Here are some tips on how to avoid common anti-serotonin substances:

      

      1. Stimulants like caffeine (also ephedra, diet pills, ma huang, cocaine, and the like)—They stimulate rather than relax, narrow rather than broaden focus, and inhibit rather than promote sleep. They are serotonin’s number one enemies. If the idea of doing without them appalls you, turn to chapter 4 for better natural ways to get more alert and energized.

      2. Aspartame, alias NutraSweet, is enemy number two. One of its primary ingredients, the amino acid phenylalanine, converts to the stimulating substances tyrosine, dopamine, norepinephrine, and adrenaline. Aspartame also contains aspartic acid, one of the most “excitatory” of nutrients. Both aspartic acid and L-phenylalanine compete with and trounce tryptophan and serotonin. If you are low in serotonin, you will need help relaxing and, in the evening, drifting toward sleep, so you should avoid aspartame as well as caffeine, particularly any time after lunch, when serotonin levels always begin dropping for the day.

      Is Stress Sapping Your Serotonin?

      Chronic exposure to high-stress situations can sap your brain of serotonin as it quickly uses up your serotonin supplies trying to keep you calm and centered. Although all of the chemicals responsible for your sense of well-being are exhausted by too much stress, serotonin is often the first and most significant causality.⁴ And stress, these days, can be never-ending.

      Is It Your Genes, Gender, or Sex Hormones?

      Like all the other mood chemistry deficiencies that I discuss in this book, a deficiency in serotonin function can be inherited. Through genes that under-program serotonin-producing activity, you can inherit a tendency to be shy, angry, depressed, obsessive, or sleepless. Look around at your family members and chances are you’ll see the same symptoms that you circled in part 1 of the Mood-Type Questionnaire. The good news is that these symptoms can all be eliminated using the nutritional suggestions in this chapter. We used to think of genes as immutable, but now we know that they are capable of changing their messages in response to changing circumstances, such as their nutritional environment.⁵ Regarding gender and sex hormones: Females simply produce less serotonin than males do, as much as a third less. This is a primary reason why women are almost twice as likely to have mood problems as men, though many men are now becoming serotonin deficient as well. In women, PMS and menopausal mood problems result when levels of sex hormones, notably estrogen, which help program serotonin production in the brain, fall too low. One of our clients suddenly became suicidal and her periods stopped, though her life circumstances were at an all-time high. Neither our nutrients nor her MD’s antidepressants helped till she got a hormone level test and an estrogen patch. In males, depression and anger are common symptoms of andropause (male menopause). But they are tied to lowered testosterone levels and raised estrogen levels and the role of serotonin is unclear. (See the Sex Hormone Tool Kit for more.)

      Are You Getting Enough Light, Especially in Winter?

      Serotonin is one of the few body chemicals that is stimulated by light. And not just any light will do. How you feel may vary, depending on the type and amount of light available to you at each season of the year and even at each hour of the day. For lower-serotonin people, the late afternoon tends to be the beginning of the “unhappy hours.” Many of them hate the fall, the winter, the twilight, and the night, for good reason. More than 25 percent of Americans suffer from a special sensitivity to the natural decrease in sunlight that occurs during the fall and winter.⁶ Technically known as “seasonal affective disorder” (or, appropriately, SAD), this condition’s “dark cloud” symptoms significantly increase when the angle of the sun drops and serotonin levels drop along with it.

      But don’t fret if you know or suspect that you suffer from winter depression. You can raise your serotonin levels any time of the year with the amino acids and other supplements I’ll be describing later. These nutrients are especially effective if you combine them with some bright light. At least half of SAD sufferers respond well to bright lamp therapy.⁷ And then there are supplements of vitamin D, the sunshine vitamin, which can be even more effective than bright light in helping relieve SAD.

      Part of the problem is that even on a summer day, we may not get enough light. Natural sunlight ranges from 2,000 lux (a standard unit of illumination roughly equivalent to 125 watts) on a cloudy winter day to 100,000 lux on a clear summer day, but most of us spend our days indoors and get less than 100 lux a day! Being exposed to bright natural or artificial light during the day may raise your mood by raising your serotonin levels, but only if the light gets bright enough. That translates to at least thirty minutes a day within three feet of a light bulb burning 150–200 watts, which is equal to 2,500 lux (or lumens). There are stronger light boxes, but we’ve generally found 2,500-lux lamps very effective without the potential side effects of stronger lamps, including anxiety, nervousness, or even eye damage.⁸

      If your spirits are not lifted by nutritional supplements alone, plan to spend a total of thirty to sixty minutes a day under your lamp without glasses or contacts on. Try to have your sessions before three P.M., as bright light later might suppress your sleep. Start with ten to fifteen minutes under your lamp and increase as needed.⁹ Make sure that the light can reach your pupils while you read, talk, or work on your computer. You should be able to feel the benefits right away.

      We worked with a whole family, born in Mexico but living SADly in Northern California, who fell in love with the 2,500-lux Ott lamp in our office during their family education session. They each bought one to take home and extras to ship to other relatives also stranded too far north in the United States. The lamps, designed by John Ott, a pioneer in the study of the effect of light on behavior and health, contain full-spectrum fluorescent bulbs, providing natural as well as intense light.

      Interestingly, exposure to bright light during the day not only improves your emotional outlook, it also helps your sleep. Bright light in the morning decreases your daytime levels of the hibernation-and-sleep-promoting СКАЧАТЬ