Something is eventually going to have to give. The United State’s debt which has shot up over $21 trillion dollars cannot be sustained by printing money forever, says a financial analyst.
According to TeleTradeBel analyst Mikhail Grachev, the US debt, supported by the printing of dollars could be coming to an end. “From 2009 to 2014. The Fed was actively buying Treasuries as part of a quantitative easing policy (QE). After the QE was scrapped, the Fed continued to purchase the securities, only in smaller quantities. American legal entities and individuals have always been the third major buyer of debt. The growth of debt and the volume of issuance of securities was possible due to the continuous flow of liquidity from the Fed at zero interest rate. It has also supported the unrestrained growth of the American stock market,” Grachev told RT.
But the tides have now turned and the Federal Reserve has begun hiking interest rates citing a “strong” market. In fact, interest rates are expected to increase to 3.75 percent by 2020, the analyst noted. The investors’ interest in treasuries began to decline and the yield automatically went up. This week, 10-year securities showed a yield of 3.018 percent. “This factor led to nervousness in the markets and raised a lot of questions,” Grachev says.
As other analysts have pointed out, rising interest rates and a $21 trillion debt present a problem. With the rising interest rate and Treasuries’ yields, the question of servicing the mounting debt could become a problem for the US economy, the analyst warns.“Although the economy of the US is great, even they don’t always have the extra money,” said Grachev. When the yields on the 10-Year US Treasury Note rise, it indicates that the demand for the American securities falls, Grachev explains.
“If the yield continues to grow, it can lead to a massive exodus of capital from Treasuries, and even result in the collapse of the world dollar financial system,” Grachev said. The analyst added that a dollar collapse seems far-fetched at the moment since the global economy is very dependent on the greenback. According to the expert, it is more likely that the dollar bubble will continue growing for the while, but a dollar collapse is all but imminent.
(TMU) — A new study, published in Clinical Psychological Science, has discovered a class of words that can accurately assess whether someone is suffering from depression. Utilizing a technologically advanced set of linguistics algorithms, computerized models cull through massive data banks of spoken or written text in minutes to determine if someone shows signs of being depressed. What […]
(The Real Agenda News) An unbalanced broken brain is responsible for many mental diseases.
The result of those diseases in children, teenagers, adults and the elderly are usually untreated or not even discovered by mainstream medicine.
Most doctors aren’t capable of diagnosing most brain-related diseases, much less treat them or cure them.
Perhaps the main reason why mental disease is wrongfully treated or not treated at all is that brain health does not necessarily start from the brain itself, but from outside of it.
The lack of proper diagnosis and treatment causes the number of people with mental disabilities to rise out of control.
Broken brain count surpasses 1 billion
Today, that number stands at 1.1 billion patients. From those millions of people who are mentally ill, 1 in 6 are children who suffer from mental disorders.
Estimates show that 1 in 2 elderly are most likely suffering from mental disease and along with them, the global average is 1 in 4 people.
The current epidemic of brain disorders is what Dr. Mark Hyman calls the Epidemic of Broken Brains.
Hyman is a practicing physician with 10+ best selling books. His documentary shows how humanity, at least western populations arrived at the current state of mental imbalance.
During the documentary series, Hyman shows the assessment of several medical doctors who explain how normal-looking people are actually mentally ill and they got there.
More importantly, they explain how to attack and overcome the current epidemic of broken brains.
The documentary series promises to show how Alzheimer’s, Dementia, ADHD, Autism, Depression, Anxiety, and Brain Fog have common origins.
In its preview, Dr, Hyman also promises to show people steps to “optimize” their brain function and “reclaim” their mental health, energy and mental clarity.
If you are interested in learning more about brain function and how to keep it sharp, make sure to watch the preview below and then subscribe to watch the complete documentary series.
Fill out the form and subscribe to watch the documentary series here.
The connection between the brain and the immune system
In a stunning discovery that overturns decades of textbook teaching, researchers at the University of Virginia School of Medicine have determined that the brain is directly connected to the immune system by vessels previously thought not to exist.
The fact that such vessels could have escaped detection when the lymphatic system has been so thoroughly mapped throughout the body is surprising on its own, but the true significance of the discovery lies in the effects it could have on the study and treatment of neurological diseases ranging from autism to Alzheimer’s disease to multiple sclerosis.
“Instead of asking, ‘How do we study the immune response of the brain?’ ‘Why do multiple sclerosis patients have the immune attacks?’ now we can approach this mechanistically.
Because the brain is like every other tissue connected to the peripheral immune system through meningeal lymphatic vessels,” said Jonathan Kipnis, PhD, professor in the UVA Department of Neuroscience and director of UVA’s Center for Brain Immunology and Glia (BIG).
“It changes entirely the way we perceive the neuro-immune interaction. We always perceived it before as something esoteric that can’t be studied. But now we can ask mechanistic questions.”
“We believe that for every neurological disease that has an immune component to it, these vessels may play a major role,” Kipnis said.
“Hard to imagine that these vessels would not be involved in a [neurological] disease with an immune component.”
The unexpected presence of the lymphatic vessels raises a tremendous number of questions that now need answers, both about the workings of the brain and the diseases that plague it. For example, take Alzheimer’s disease.
“In Alzheimer’s, there are accumulations of big protein chunks in the brain,” Kipnis said. “We think they may be accumulating in the brain because they’re not being efficiently removed by these vessels.”
He noted that the vessels look different with age, so the role they play in aging is another avenue to explore. And there’s an enormous array of other neurological diseases, from autism to multiple sclerosis, that must be reconsidered in light of the presence of something science insisted did not exist.
As human beings continue to make enormous strides in the artificial intelligence technology, many continue to sound the alarm that it’s already gone too far. Some are warning that this imminent robot dystopian apocalypse “will eventually affect you.” But by then, it might be too late.
Pulling no punches, Joe Joseph of The Daily Sheeple says that this kind of a future is already here, and the elites “solution” to this problem (universal basic income) will result in a societal collapse of a magnitude not seen before. “This dynamic is already happening here in the United States,” says Joseph. “And it will eventually affect you and your inner circle very personally.’
Dr. Subhash Kak, a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Oklahoma University, told Daily Star Online: “The beginnings of the dystopia are already there. There will be massive unemployment. People want to be useful and work provides meaning, and so the world will sink into despair. Policymakers have begun to speak of a minimum guaranteed income with everyone provided food, shelter, and a smartphone, and that will not address the heart of the problem.”
Artificial intelligence will eventually sink world into unemployed despair in hellish dystopia. Many warn of a global depression as humans realize they are useless and obsolete to the machines they themselves created.
“There’s a lot of people taking an ominous tone to this,” says Joseph. “And I too am, only because humanity does not have a great track record of rolling out new technology. We just don’t. We don’t. We rush to do it because money’s a driver. We don’t think thing through. We don’t weigh the risks involved. We don’t look at the health aspects of things. We don’t look at the important things until it’s too late. And in this case, it’s the point of no return.”
But Joseph does not believe that eventually, robots will enslave the human race, unlike Dr. Kak. Kak previously stated that killer conscious robots may “bide their time” before enslaving humans. “The current revolution is replacing the thinking human and so its impact on society will be enormous.”
A new study published this month in the American Journal of Psychiatry showed that during in-hospital trials, Ketamine relieved suicidal thoughts almost immediately.
I have been traveling a lot the last couple of weeks, so a big “Thank You” goes to Michael Lebowitz for “pinch hitting” for me. This week, I just want to review a couple of things as we begin to wrap up 2017.
Earlier this week, I wrote a piece called “This Is Nuts.” If you haven’t got a chance to read it, I suggest you do. It outlines my view on the current market extension in the short-term and the potential for a mean-reverting correction at some point in the future. To wit:
“More importantly, a decline of such magnitude will threaten to trigger ‘margin calls’ which, as discussed previously, is the ‘time bomb’ waiting to happen.
Here is the point. The ‘excuses’ driving the rally are just that. The election of President Trump has had no material effect on the market outside of the liquidity injections which have exceeded $2 Trillion.
Importantly, on a weekly basis, the market has pushed into the highest level of overbought conditions on record since 2005. I have marked on the chart below each previous peak above 80 which has correlated to a subsequent decline in the near future.”
As I noted, the problem for investors is not being able to tell whether the next correction will be just a “correction” within an ongoing bull market advance, or something materially worse. Unfortunately, by the time most investors figure it out – it is generally far too late to do anything meaningful about it.
“As shown below, price deviations from the 50-week moving average has been important markers for the sustainability of an advance historically. Prices can only deviate so far from their underlying moving average before a reversion will eventually occur. (You can’t have an ‘average’ unless price trades above and below the average during a given time frame.)”
“Notice that price deviations became much more augmented heading into 2000 as electronic trading came online and Wall Street turned the markets into a ‘casino’ for Main Street. At each major deviation of price from the 50-week moving average, there has either been a significant correction, or something materially worse.”
However, in the short-term, the market trends are CLEARLY bullish, very overbought, but nonetheless bullish.
As such, our portfolios remain “long” on the equity side of the ledger…for now.
I am still somewhat suspicious of the markets going into 2018. As I laid out over the last couple of weeks, I believe the risk of “tax-related” selling is a strong possibility at the beginning of the year as portfolios lock in gains without having to pay taxes until 2019. While the risk to the overall market trend remains small, a correction of 3-5% is possible. I am still looking for the right “setup” by the end of the month to add a small “short S&P 500” position to portfolios and increase longer-duration bond exposure to hedge off some of the potential risks. I will keep you apprised.
Importantly, while the short-term backdrop is clearly bullish, and as noted above, the longer-term overbought condition remains worrisome. The monthly chart below shows the current market extension is at levels rarely seen in market history. With the market trading into 3-standard deviations above the 3-year moving average, RSI pushing well above 70, and the MACD line hitting the highest level since 2000, the risk of a market reversion has risen.
While there is plenty of discussion of the support of Central Banks keeping markets afloat indefinitely into the future, it should be remembered that at the peak of every major market throughout history, it was always believed to be “different this time.”
I have discussed, along with Doug Kass, several different “meme’s” running around as of late trying to justify the current market extension. To wit:
“The advance has had two main storylines to support the bullish narrative.
It’s an earnings recovery story, and;
It’s all about tax cuts.”
We can add to that list “economic growth” given the strength of the rebound over the last two-quarters which followed two quarters of exceptionally weak growth in Q4 of 2016 and Q1 of 2017. While the growth has certainly gotten everyone excited as of late, it is quite possible we have seen the peak of the “restocking cycle” for now.
Under the guise of these “meme’s” it is currently believed that a “recession” is nowhere to be found and therefore it should be “clear sailing” for investors as we head into 2018 and beyond.
But, is that necessarily the case?
A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Recession
The majority of the analysis of economic data is short-term focused with prognostications based on single data points. For example, let’s take a look at the data below of real economic growth rates:
January 1980: 1.43%
July 1981: 4.39%
July 1990: 1.73%
March 2001: 2.30%
December 2007: 1.87%
Each of the dates above shows the growth rate of the economy immediately prior to the onset of a recession.
You will remember that during the entirety of 2007, the majority of the media, analyst, and economic community were proclaiming continued economic growth into the foreseeable future as there was “no sign of recession.”
I myself was rather brutally chastised in December of 2007 when I wrote that:
“We are now either in, or about to be in, the worst recession since the ‘Great Depression.’”
Of course, a full year later, after the annual data revisions had been released by the Bureau of Economic Analysis was the recession officially revealed. Unfortunately, by then it was far too late to matter.
However, it is here the mainstream media should have learned their lesson.
The chart below shows the S&P 500 index with recessions and when the National Bureau of Economic Research dated the start of the recession.
There are three lessons that should be learned from this:
The economic “number” reported today will not be the samewhen it is revised in the future.
The trend and deviation of the data are far more important than the number itself.
“Record” highs and lowsare records for a reason as they denote historical turning points in the data.
For example, the level of jobless claims is one data series currently being touted as a clear example of why there is “no recession” in sight. As shown below, there is little argument that the data currently appears extremely “bullish” for the economy.
However, if we step back to a longer picture we find that such levels of jobless claims have historically noted the peak of economic growth and warned of a pending recession.
This makes complete sense as “jobless claims” fall to low levels when companies “hoard existing labor”to meet current levels of demand. In other words, companies reach a point of efficiency where they are no longer terminating individuals to align production to aggregate demand. Therefore, jobless claims naturally fall.
But there is more to this story.
Less Than Meets The Eye
The last two-quarters of economic growth have stronger than the last two, but not breaking any records by any measure. However, these two stronger quarters of growth come at a time when oil prices are recovering modestly from their crash boosting activity and earnings.
Furthermore, this widely touted economic and earnings “recovery,” as witnessed by surging asset prices, should have certainly been met by stronger activity from the majority of Americans, right?
What’s going on here?
Economic cycles are only sustainable for as long as excesses are being built. The natural law of reversions, while they can be suspended by artificial interventions, cannot be repealed.
More importantly, while there is currently “no sign of recession,” what is going on with the main driver of economic growth – the consumer?
The chart below shows the real problem. Since the financial crisis, the average American has not seen much of a recovery. Wages have remained stagnant, real employment has been subdued and the actual cost of living (when accounting for insurance, college, and taxes) has risen rather sharply. The net effect has been a struggle to maintain the current standard of living which can be seen by the surge in credit as a percentage of the economy.
To put this into perspective, we can look back throughout history and see that substantial increases in consumer debt to GDP have occurred coincident with recessionary drags in the economy. No sign of recession? Are you sure about that?
There has been a shift caused by the financial crisis, aging demographics, massive monetary interventions and the structural change in employment which has skewed the seasonal-adjustments in economic data. This makes every report from employment, retail sales, and manufacturing appear more robust than they would be otherwise. This is a problem mainstream analysis continues to overlook but will be used as an excuse when it reverses.
Here is my point. While the call of a “recession” may seem far-fetched based on today’s economic data points, no one was calling for a recession in early 2000 or 2007 either. By the time the data is adjusted, and the eventual recession is revealed, it won’t matter as the damage will have already been done.
As Howard Marks once quipped:
“Being right, but early in the call, is the same as being wrong.”
While being optimistic about the economy and the markets currently is far more entertaining than doom and gloom, it is the honest assessment of the data and the underlying trends that are useful in protecting one’s wealth longer term.
Is there a recession currently? No.
Will there be a recession in the not so distant future? Absolutely.
Whether it is a mild, or “massive,” recession will make little difference to individuals as the net destruction of personal wealth will be just as damaging. Such is the nature of recessions on the financial markets.
Of course, I am sure to be chastised for penning such thoughts just as I was in 2000 and again in 2007. That is the cost of heresy against the financial establishment, unexperienced investors consumed by complacent optimism and emotionally-driven willful blindness. I am okay with that, it is a price I will gladly pay to keep my clients, and loyal readers, from being burned at the stake, not if, but whenthe next recession begins.
Saffron is an extravagant, sweet-smelling spice commonly used in Indian, Turkish, and Persian cuisine and is closely related to turmeric. Its use in traditional health approaches has spanned thousands of years, and modern research seems to back up its commonly-reported benefits. Like any spice, saffron may be a formidable force against internal swelling and irritation in the body. For years, research has also linked this red grass-like spice with mood health, showing it could be a powerful tool against varying forms of depression.
Saffron for Mental Health: A Depression Fighter?
While it may not be a one-size-fits-all approach, saffron supplementation may be helpful for some people in regulating mood and mental health. A recent meta-analysis examining the years of saffron research has found many clinical trials suggest the spice could improve the symptoms of depression. [1] The exact mechanisms behind which saffron exhibits beneficial effects against mood-related disorders is largely unknown; however, it’s hypothesized that it may be due to its antioxidant content. [2]
Not only does saffron provide a lower risk-to-benefit ratio compared to antidepressants, saffron may also inhibit the side effects commonly experienced by antidepressants. That means, as an adjunct to conventional approaches to depression, saffron may be an ideal supplement for reducing side effects from antidepressant drugs. That’s not to say you should stop taking antidepressants–far from it. But, if you do have concerns about the medications you are taking, talk to your doctor about the types of strategies you can use to support mental health.
Saffron: Natural Support for Mental Health
There are many things you can do to protect your mood and even strengthen it without having to rely on pharmaceutical methods. While antidepressants may be necessary in some cases, you should also consider optimizing your vitamin D, exercising, and getting plenty of high-quality sleep. Don’t forget about nutrition. Omega-3 fats are excellent mood supporters, and you can get them easily from vegan sources such as chia and flax seed.
What do you do to support your mental health and mood? We’d love to hear your tips in the comments!
(ANTIMEDIA) — The U.K.’s Financial Conduct Agency recently fined Merrill Lynch $45 million, once again sparking concerns over the massive derivatives market.
The wealth management division of Bank of America failed to report more than 68 million derivatives transactions dating all the way back to 2014. It had already been forced to pay $20 million in 2015 for an earlier offense. Despite major players throughout the financial industry paying a total of over $350 billion in fines since the 2008 crisis, those same institutions are still thriving and have amassed more than a $1 trillion in profits.
The current penalties amount to little more than a slap on the wrist for these megabanks and have become a normal part of doing business. It’s no surprise that the same reckless behavior that helped lead to the Great Recession is still rampant. The global derivatives market was reportedly as large as $1.5 quadrillion in 2016, and things haven’t improved much since then. Collusion between large financial institutions, central banks, and governments around the world has fostered an environment with almost zero accountability. Hopefully, as more people become educated about the possible dangers associated with complex financial derivatives, it will be easier to prevent wild speculation like what is seen today.
Derivatives are one of the most complex and least understood financial instruments. Instead of establishing their value through a share of a company’s profits or a future dividend, derivatives are essentially side bets made between third parties. Commodity futures contracts are an example of a simple derivative. Farmers have used them to protect themselves against price changes that could significantly impact their businesses from season to season.
However, these financial tools aren’t just limited to hard assets and can be used to speculate on every industry, asset, and currency in the world financial system. The growing attention from regulators on the derivatives market may uncover what many investors and economists previously warned about. In 2003, Warren Buffett infamously classified derivatives as ‘weapons of mass destruction’ and ‘time-bombs.’
He doubled down on the assertion during a more recent interview, saying:
“At some point they are likely to cause big trouble…Derivatives lend themselves to huge amounts of speculation…The problem arises when there is a discontinuity in the market for some reason or another…When the markets closed like it was for a few days after 9/11 or in World War I the market was closed for four or five months – anything that disrupts the continuity of the market when you have trillions of dollars of nominal amounts outstanding and no ability to settle up and who knows what happens when the market reopens.”
Merrill Lynch and Bank of America haven’t been the only ones prosecuted over their derivatives exposure and practices. Deutsche Bank is poised to lose $60 billion for using currency derivatives to speculate on U.S. inflation rates, the ‘London Whale’ scandal ended up costing JPMorgan $920 million, and just a month ago, Citi was ordered to close $2 billion worth of derivatives taken over during the collapse of Lehman Brothers. These potentials for volatile swings in market valuations can quickly undermine the solvency of institutions that hold a majority of the pensions, savings accounts, and retirement funds for the public.
The first overview report on the E.U. derivatives market was just published by the Europe Security and Markets Authority. It found that the nominal value of derivative holdings within the European Union was valued at $536 trillion. London alone handles nearly 40% of all interest-rate derivative trades for the European Union, and uncertainty continues to grow about the impact Brexit will have on the strength of major European banks.
Confidence in the current system seems to be eroding with each failed promise and debt crisis. If faith in central planning is shaken again like in 2008, the result could impact the daily lives of almost everyone. The once responsible stewards of the public’s wealth have been corrupted by power, greed, and self-preservation. The that have been perpetually fined trivial amounts by inept regulators will continue to make trillions while the savers and retirees suffer as a result.
The science is in: Processed food is addictive, can make you extremely unhappy and will prematurely kill you. How did this happen? And how have food manufacturers been able to deceive the world about these facts? Dr. Robert Lustig has written a new book, “The Hacking of the American Mind: The Science Behind the Corporate Takeover of Our Bodies and Brains,” in which he explains how and why this occurred.
He is perhaps most well-known for his brilliant research into sugar and obesity, and his previous book, “Fat Chance: Beating the Odds Against Sugar, Processed Food, Obesity and Disease,” was a New York Times Best Seller. Lustig is an emeritus professor of pediatrics in the division of endocrinology at the University of California, San Francisco, and a member of the Institute for Health Policy Studies. Since the last time I interviewed him, he’s also completed a master’s in public health law.
The Genesis of ‘Hacking of the American Mind’
The motivation for “The Hacking of the American Mind” began some 30 years ago, while still a postdoctoral fellow in neuroscience at Rockefeller University. There, he learned about the interaction between dopamine and serotonin in the brain. At the time, only basic correlational data existed, but there appeared to be a very specific interaction going on between these two neurochemicals.
“As I was researching the data for ‘Fat Chance,’ four years ago, it became very clear that the data had come in on the role of diet and behavioral health,” Lustig says. “In addition, we also now had neuroimaging studies. I realized everything was falling into place — that this issue, dopamine and serotonin, was actually at the core of what had now become our depression and opiate crises.
At the same time, I was giving Psychiatry Grand Rounds at a U.S. medical school in 2014. The woman who ran their outpatient treatment program took me on a tour of their facility. She was a recovered addict herself. She said something to me that was so jarring. She said, ‘When I was shooting up, I was happy. What my new life has brought me is pleasure.’
I thought to myself, ‘That’s wrong. That’s exactly turned around.’ But I didn’t say anything to her. I went home and talked to some psychiatry friends. They said, ‘Oh yeah, a lot of people seem to get addicted with this concept in mind.’ I said, ‘Well, there’s a book there.’ That was the genesis of this book.”
Why Processed Food Diets Fuel Depression
Tryptophan, which is the precursor for serotonin, is one of the rarest amino acids in our diet. But it’s a mistake to think the answer to depression is as simple as taking tryptophan to boost serotonin. The reason for this is because most of the tryptophan is converted to serotonin in your gut, and it does not freely travel into your brain. Lustig explains:
“Tryptophan is the only amino acid that can be converted into serotonin. Tryptophan is the rarest amino acid in our diet. Eggs have the most. Certain poultry and other avian species have some [tryptophan]. There’s very little in vegetables. Obviously, carbohydrates have virtually no tryptophan whatsoever.
It’s actually pretty hard to get tryptophan into your body to start with. Take processed food on top of that, then it’s even harder because it tends to be tryptophan-depleted. [Moreover], 99.9 percent of the tryptophan you ingest either gets turned into serotonin in the gut for your gut’s purposes, or it goes into your platelets to help your platelets help you clot. [So] very little tryptophan actually gets to the brain.
Top that off with the fact that tryptophan has to share an amino acid transporter with two relatively common amino acids: phenylalanine and tyrosine, which, by the way, are the precursors for dopamine. You can see that the more processed food you eat, the more dopamine you will make because you will have the precursors for that.
They will actually crowd out the ability to get tryptophan across the blood-brain barrier … Yet, serotonin is the nidus of contentment, of happiness. It explains why diet is so problematic … “
Face-to-Face Interaction Has Neurochemical Effects
Many try to bolster their happiness through certain food choices, but this actually does not work, and Lustig provides compelling arguments that the foods you crave drive up dopamine and drive down serotonin. Rather, it’s experiences that make you happy. People can make you happy. You can make yourself happy. In his book, Lustig outlines a number of different strategies to become happier.
“Ultimately, the goal is [to increase] your serotonin,” he says. There are four ways to boost your serotonin, and they’re all free. They’re also things your grandmother likely told you to do. First and foremost is making human connections.
“Turns out that Facebook does not count as connection. When we’re talking about interpersonal connection, we’re talking about eye-to-eye,” Lustig says. “The facial emotions of the person you’re talking with activate a set of neurons in your brain called ‘mirror neurons,’ which are the drivers of empathy and specifically linked to serotonin.
To be able to generate a feeling of empathy, which ultimately turns into contentment/happiness, you actually have to connect. You can’t do it over the internet. You can’t have a connection with ‘anonymous.’ It just doesn’t work.”
On the contrary, social media generate dopamine, associated with pleasure, and hence can drive addiction. The main problem is that when dopamine goes up, serotonin goes down. So, online communication is actually a major causative factor of unhappiness.
Lustig also elaborates on how companies — both food manufacturers and electronics companies — capitalize on the biology of dopamine versus serotonin to get us addicted to their products. There’s even a book on this topic written by Nir Eyal, called, “Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products.”
Dopamine Versus Serotonin
It’s important to realize that the dopamine (or reward-generating) pathway is the same no matter what your source of pleasure is. It can be a substance, such as nicotine, alcohol, heroin or junk food; or it can be behavior, such as internet surfing, shopping or pornography. The problem, in a nutshell, is that dopamine is an excitatory neurotransmitter, and in excess is neurotoxic.
When dopamine is released, and the neuron on the other side accepts the signal, it can damage that neuron. Over time, excitatory neurotransmitters can cause cell death. To protect itself from damage, the postsynaptic neuron employs a self-protective mechanism — it downregulates its receptors.
By having fewer receptors, the dopamine cannot do as much damage. So, each time you get a “hit” or rush of dopamine, the number of receptors decrease. As a result, you need increasingly larger doses or “hits” to get the same rush. Eventually, you end up with tolerance, a state where even a large dose produces no effect. Once the neurons start to actually die off, you’re a full-blown addict.
“The point that you need to know is that it takes three weeks for the receptors to repopulate. The cravings can go on for upwards of a year when you’re addicted. This is a long-term process that sometimes requires medical intervention and medical management by physicians who understand addiction medicine,” Lustig says.
Serotonin, on the other hand, is not an excitatory neurotransmitter. When it acts on the serotonin-1a receptor (the “contentment” receptor), no damage occurs. Hence, happiness does not lead to addictive behavior. Keep in mind that dopamine downregulates serotonin, so it’s basically impossible to achieve happiness (related to serotonin) through pleasure-seeking behavior (related to dopamine).
One of the cheapest pleasures that stimulates dopamine is sugar. Many reach for sweet junk food when they feel down, thinking it’ll help them feel better, but neurochemical science reveals this simply cannot happen. Add the stress hormone cortisol to the mix, which downregulates the serotonin-1a receptor, and you have a recipe for both addiction and depression. “That’s what we’re seeing throughout all of civilized society, not just in America, but around the world,” Lustig says.
Other Serotonin Boosters
There are three other ways, besides connecting, that boost serotonin and happiness. The remaining three of the four Cs are:
1.Contribute: Meaning the act of contributing to something greater than yourself; making a contribution to society. “You can get happiness and contentment from your job, but there are certain criteria that have to be met,” Lustig says. “Most people, unfortunately, have a boss who is not contributing to their happiness. The workplace is not usually the best place to achieve meaningful contentment.”
2.Cope: Lack of sleep, insufficient exercise and multitasking are all causes of unhappiness. Sleep is extremely important for healthy serotonin production. Here, avoiding exposure to electronic screens is important, as blue light inhibits melatonin production, thereby making sleep more elusive. Electronics will also disrupt your sleep and deteriorate your health by exposing you to unnecessary microwaves, discussed in this recent article on depression.
3.Cook: If you cook, you’re likely going to increase your tryptophan, reduce your refined sugar intake and increase your omega-3 fats (anti-inflammatory) and fiber. Overall, this will result in improved gut health, which has tremendous impact on your mood and mental health.
“Numerous investigators … have shown that your gastrointestinal flora tell your brain what they want through signals that go through the bloodstream, and potentially even neural ones as well. If you do not feed your bacteria, you cannot get happy. Eating real food you prepare yourself is super important,” Lustig says.
Eating Real Food Helps Optimize Tryptophan and Other Vital Brain Nutrients
As mentioned, a big part of the happiness equation is to increase serotonin by optimizing tryptophan. However, the dilemma is that most of the serotonin produced in the gut is used there locally. It does not enter your brain. Lustig explains:
“There are many diversions for tryptophan away from the brain. It can be metabolized in the intestine itself. It can be metabolized in the platelets. It can be turned into kynurenine, which is a secondary metabolite in the liver. It may not be transported across the blood-brain barrier because of phenylalanine and tyrosine taking up the aromatic amino acid transporter.
In addition, of course, your serotonin neurons must be functional. There are things that will kill off serotonin neurons, including party drugs. For instance, MDMA, or Ecstasy, is a famous dopamine and serotonin killer … Once you’ve lost those serotonin neurons, it’s pretty hard to get any sort of happiness signal.”
So, how do you boost systemic tryptophan? One of the keys is to eat real food, and to make sure you include high-tryptophan foods, the highest of which is egg whites. You also need omega-3 fatty acids, especially DHA, which is a component of every cell in your body. More than 90 percent of the omega-3 fat found in brain tissue is DHA.
“Omega-3s are probably the single most beneficial thing you can put in your body. They are anti-inflammatory. They are anti-Alzheimer’s. They increase membrane fluidity. Therefore, they increase neuronal distensibility, which means it’s less likely that any given neuron will die,” Lustig says.
“The problem, of course, is that when we took the fat out of the food, we took ALL the fat out of the food. It’s been a real chore to get the medical cognoscenti to turn around on this. I do want to do a shoutout to the American Heart Association, because they have now debunked their long-standing cholesterol-fat hypothesis.
They now recognize that saturated fat was not the demon they made it out to be, and that there are seven classes of fats, and that you actually have to consume omega-3s. You have to consume monounsaturated fats. In fact, you do have to consume some saturated fat because it’s a major component of membranes.”
The Corporate Takeover
So, how have food companies contributed to the problems of food and drug addiction? According to Lustig, “If you look at the Supreme Court decisions that took place between the mid-’70s and mid-’80s, they took away individual rights and loaded up corporate rights in a very distinct fashion.” In his book, he describes four specific Supreme Court decisions, one of which basically deregulated corporate speech.
Corporations can say anything they want, whenever they want, regardless of whether it’s actually true. Our current epidemics of opioid and food addiction are outgrowths of corporate dishonesty.
“We are now seeing the advent of the post-truth society because of how the Supreme Court chipped away at our own individual rights,” Lustig says. “By doing so, corporations have affected our ability to experience pleasure and happiness. They’ve actually inserted propaganda into our limbic system, our reward generating system, so that we constantly seek reward at the expense of our own happiness.
This is why we currently live in the world we live in. The late political philosopher from Princeton, Sheldon Wolin, wrote a poignant book called ‘Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism,’ [in which] he envisioned that corporations and government … would become one and the same.
If you look at what’s going on in the White House today, you can see that Wolin’s nightmare scenario has been realized. It’s fascism in the sense that we don’t seem to have a voice of our own. It’s not fascism in the sense that it’s corporations that’s told us what to do. It’s that we’ve basically abdicated our own responsibility for our own health and safety.”
The EatREAL Trust Mark
Speaking of living in a post-truth society, you might not realize there’s no regulation against restaurants blatantly lying about what they’re serving you. Larry Olmsted, in his book “Real Food/Fake Food: Why You Don’t Know What You’re Eating and What You Can Do About It,” addresses this. There are no consequences, no regulatory action, for lying to customers. The deception will only enrich them — until or unless they’re publicly outed and perhaps boycotted.
One way to protect your interests when eating out is to make sure the restaurant is affiliated with Responsible Epicurean and Agricultural Leadership, better known as EatREAL, a nonprofit Lustig helped create. It teaches restaurants what they “should be doing,” and provides a trust mark to the public — a green fork.
The High Cost of Added Sugar
Processed fructose, mostly in the form of corn syrup, has become a major contributor to the $3 trillion health care budget in the United States, and there’s clear data linking sugar consumption to de novo lipogenesis — a disease process associated with fat accumulation in the liver, causing insulin resistance, hyperinsulinemia, metabolic syndrome and associated diseases. That includes Type 2 diabetes, hypertension, lipid problems, cardiovascular disease, cancer and dementia.
“We have the mechanism by which this occurs. In fact, our paper in Gastroenterology1 demonstrates that if you take sugar out of the diet of children with metabolic syndrome and substitute starch — calorie for calorie exchange, glucose for fructose exchange with no change in calories … — in 10 days, you can reverse metabolic syndrome.
You can reverse the insulin resistance. You can reverse the liver fat. You can reverse the burden on the pancreas. Basically, all of the metabolic perturbations go away. This is the smoking gun,” Lustig says. “In addition, we have a paper in BMJ Open2 which models what could happen in terms of health care expenditures and disease rates if we reduced our sugar consumption by 20 percent, which is what taxes would do.
Or if we reduce sugar consumption by 50 percent (which is what the United States Department of Agriculture suggested we do), for nonalcoholic fatty liver disease alone … the United States, over the next 20 years, could save $103 billion, just on that disease alone. Ultimately, this is where the money goes. This is why health care will be defunct. This is why Medicare will be broke by the year 2026 …
We have to deal with health. Health is going down the tubes. There’s no amount of health care that can fix what’s wrong with our diet, unless we fix the diet first … The bottom line is we are in trouble. But you can’t fix a problem until you recognize what the problem is. This book, ‘The Hacking of the American Mind,’ demonstrates how the science, how the biology, ultimately has influenced not just our health, but in fact, our policy.”
More Information
In the past, people had a much better understanding of happiness and pleasure. Lustig’s book describes how these terms have been purposely conflated and confused by businesses and governments because it helped sales. To turn the trends of addiction around, you have to understand the difference between the two.
“So, what’s the difference between pleasure and happiness? There are seven differences: Pleasure is visceral; happiness is ethereal. Pleasure is short-term; happiness is long-term. Pleasure is usually achieved alone; happiness is usually achieved in social groupings. Pleasure is taking; happiness is giving. Pleasure can be achieved with substances; happiness cannot be achieved with substances.
The extremes of pleasure all lead to addiction, whereas there is no such thing as being addicted to happiness. Finally, pleasure is dopamine and happiness is serotonin.
Understanding the difference between the two is something, for some reason, that the American public just never got. We have to make them get it in order to turn this problem around. Academics don’t get it. Businesses don’t get it. The federal government certainly doesn’t get it. We have to make them get it. That’s why this book is so crucial.”
“The bottom line is it’s about the science,” Lustig says. “There will be detractors who will say this is garbage. But the bottom line is there are 600 references to the primary literature to demonstrate that this is not gobbledygook. The science actually predicts the phenomena that we see and the society we’ve become.”
The science is in: Processed food is addictive, can make you extremely unhappy and will prematurely kill you. How did this happen? And how have food manufacturers been able to deceive the world about these facts? Dr. Robert Lustig has written a new book, “The Hacking of the American Mind: The Science Behind the Corporate Takeover of Our Bodies and Brains,” in which he explains how and why this occurred.
He is perhaps most well-known for his brilliant research into sugar and obesity, and his previous book, “Fat Chance: Beating the Odds Against Sugar, Processed Food, Obesity and Disease,” was a New York Times Best Seller. Lustig is an emeritus professor of pediatrics in the division of endocrinology at the University of California, San Francisco, and a member of the Institute for Health Policy Studies. Since the last time I interviewed him, he’s also completed a master’s in public health law.
The Genesis of ‘Hacking of the American Mind’
The motivation for “The Hacking of the American Mind” began some 30 years ago, while still a postdoctoral fellow in neuroscience at Rockefeller University. There, he learned about the interaction between dopamine and serotonin in the brain. At the time, only basic correlational data existed, but there appeared to be a very specific interaction going on between these two neurochemicals.
“As I was researching the data for ‘Fat Chance,’ four years ago, it became very clear that the data had come in on the role of diet and behavioral health,” Lustig says. “In addition, we also now had neuroimaging studies. I realized everything was falling into place — that this issue, dopamine and serotonin, was actually at the core of what had now become our depression and opiate crises.
At the same time, I was giving Psychiatry Grand Rounds at a U.S. medical school in 2014. The woman who ran their outpatient treatment program took me on a tour of their facility. She was a recovered addict herself. She said something to me that was so jarring. She said, ‘When I was shooting up, I was happy. What my new life has brought me is pleasure.’
I thought to myself, ‘That’s wrong. That’s exactly turned around.’ But I didn’t say anything to her. I went home and talked to some psychiatry friends. They said, ‘Oh yeah, a lot of people seem to get addicted with this concept in mind.’ I said, ‘Well, there’s a book there.’ That was the genesis of this book.”
Why Processed Food Diets Fuel Depression
Tryptophan, which is the precursor for serotonin, is one of the rarest amino acids in our diet. But it’s a mistake to think the answer to depression is as simple as taking tryptophan to boost serotonin. The reason for this is because most of the tryptophan is converted to serotonin in your gut, and it does not freely travel into your brain. Lustig explains:
“Tryptophan is the only amino acid that can be converted into serotonin. Tryptophan is the rarest amino acid in our diet. Eggs have the most. Certain poultry and other avian species have some [tryptophan]. There’s very little in vegetables. Obviously, carbohydrates have virtually no tryptophan whatsoever.
It’s actually pretty hard to get tryptophan into your body to start with. Take processed food on top of that, then it’s even harder because it tends to be tryptophan-depleted. [Moreover], 99.9 percent of the tryptophan you ingest either gets turned into serotonin in the gut for your gut’s purposes, or it goes into your platelets to help your platelets help you clot. [So] very little tryptophan actually gets to the brain.
Top that off with the fact that tryptophan has to share an amino acid transporter with two relatively common amino acids: phenylalanine and tyrosine, which, by the way, are the precursors for dopamine. You can see that the more processed food you eat, the more dopamine you will make because you will have the precursors for that.
They will actually crowd out the ability to get tryptophan across the blood-brain barrier … Yet, serotonin is the nidus of contentment, of happiness. It explains why diet is so problematic … “
Face-to-Face Interaction Has Neurochemical Effects
Many try to bolster their happiness through certain food choices, but this actually does not work, and Lustig provides compelling arguments that the foods you crave drive up dopamine and drive down serotonin. Rather, it’s experiences that make you happy. People can make you happy. You can make yourself happy. In his book, Lustig outlines a number of different strategies to become happier.
“Ultimately, the goal is [to increase] your serotonin,” he says. There are four ways to boost your serotonin, and they’re all free. They’re also things your grandmother likely told you to do. First and foremost is making human connections.
“Turns out that Facebook does not count as connection. When we’re talking about interpersonal connection, we’re talking about eye-to-eye,” Lustig says. “The facial emotions of the person you’re talking with activate a set of neurons in your brain called ‘mirror neurons,’ which are the drivers of empathy and specifically linked to serotonin.
To be able to generate a feeling of empathy, which ultimately turns into contentment/happiness, you actually have to connect. You can’t do it over the internet. You can’t have a connection with ‘anonymous.’ It just doesn’t work.”
On the contrary, social media generate dopamine, associated with pleasure, and hence can drive addiction. The main problem is that when dopamine goes up, serotonin goes down. So, online communication is actually a major causative factor of unhappiness.
Lustig also elaborates on how companies — both food manufacturers and electronics companies — capitalize on the biology of dopamine versus serotonin to get us addicted to their products. There’s even a book on this topic written by Nir Eyal, called, “Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products.”
Dopamine Versus Serotonin
It’s important to realize that the dopamine (or reward-generating) pathway is the same no matter what your source of pleasure is. It can be a substance, such as nicotine, alcohol, heroin or junk food; or it can be behavior, such as internet surfing, shopping or pornography. The problem, in a nutshell, is that dopamine is an excitatory neurotransmitter, and in excess is neurotoxic.
When dopamine is released, and the neuron on the other side accepts the signal, it can damage that neuron. Over time, excitatory neurotransmitters can cause cell death. To protect itself from damage, the postsynaptic neuron employs a self-protective mechanism — it downregulates its receptors.
By having fewer receptors, the dopamine cannot do as much damage. So, each time you get a “hit” or rush of dopamine, the number of receptors decrease. As a result, you need increasingly larger doses or “hits” to get the same rush. Eventually, you end up with tolerance, a state where even a large dose produces no effect. Once the neurons start to actually die off, you’re a full-blown addict.
“The point that you need to know is that it takes three weeks for the receptors to repopulate. The cravings can go on for upwards of a year when you’re addicted. This is a long-term process that sometimes requires medical intervention and medical management by physicians who understand addiction medicine,” Lustig says.
Serotonin, on the other hand, is not an excitatory neurotransmitter. When it acts on the serotonin-1a receptor (the “contentment” receptor), no damage occurs. Hence, happiness does not lead to addictive behavior. Keep in mind that dopamine downregulates serotonin, so it’s basically impossible to achieve happiness (related to serotonin) through pleasure-seeking behavior (related to dopamine).
One of the cheapest pleasures that stimulates dopamine is sugar. Many reach for sweet junk food when they feel down, thinking it’ll help them feel better, but neurochemical science reveals this simply cannot happen. Add the stress hormone cortisol to the mix, which downregulates the serotonin-1a receptor, and you have a recipe for both addiction and depression. “That’s what we’re seeing throughout all of civilized society, not just in America, but around the world,” Lustig says.
Other Serotonin Boosters
There are three other ways, besides connecting, that boost serotonin and happiness. The remaining three of the four Cs are:
1.Contribute: Meaning the act of contributing to something greater than yourself; making a contribution to society. “You can get happiness and contentment from your job, but there are certain criteria that have to be met,” Lustig says. “Most people, unfortunately, have a boss who is not contributing to their happiness. The workplace is not usually the best place to achieve meaningful contentment.”
2.Cope: Lack of sleep, insufficient exercise and multitasking are all causes of unhappiness. Sleep is extremely important for healthy serotonin production. Here, avoiding exposure to electronic screens is important, as blue light inhibits melatonin production, thereby making sleep more elusive. Electronics will also disrupt your sleep and deteriorate your health by exposing you to unnecessary microwaves, discussed in this recent article on depression.
3.Cook: If you cook, you’re likely going to increase your tryptophan, reduce your refined sugar intake and increase your omega-3 fats (anti-inflammatory) and fiber. Overall, this will result in improved gut health, which has tremendous impact on your mood and mental health.
“Numerous investigators … have shown that your gastrointestinal flora tell your brain what they want through signals that go through the bloodstream, and potentially even neural ones as well. If you do not feed your bacteria, you cannot get happy. Eating real food you prepare yourself is super important,” Lustig says.
Eating Real Food Helps Optimize Tryptophan and Other Vital Brain Nutrients
As mentioned, a big part of the happiness equation is to increase serotonin by optimizing tryptophan. However, the dilemma is that most of the serotonin produced in the gut is used there locally. It does not enter your brain. Lustig explains:
“There are many diversions for tryptophan away from the brain. It can be metabolized in the intestine itself. It can be metabolized in the platelets. It can be turned into kynurenine, which is a secondary metabolite in the liver. It may not be transported across the blood-brain barrier because of phenylalanine and tyrosine taking up the aromatic amino acid transporter.
In addition, of course, your serotonin neurons must be functional. There are things that will kill off serotonin neurons, including party drugs. For instance, MDMA, or Ecstasy, is a famous dopamine and serotonin killer … Once you’ve lost those serotonin neurons, it’s pretty hard to get any sort of happiness signal.”
So, how do you boost systemic tryptophan? One of the keys is to eat real food, and to make sure you include high-tryptophan foods, the highest of which is egg whites. You also need omega-3 fatty acids, especially DHA, which is a component of every cell in your body. More than 90 percent of the omega-3 fat found in brain tissue is DHA.
“Omega-3s are probably the single most beneficial thing you can put in your body. They are anti-inflammatory. They are anti-Alzheimer’s. They increase membrane fluidity. Therefore, they increase neuronal distensibility, which means it’s less likely that any given neuron will die,” Lustig says.
“The problem, of course, is that when we took the fat out of the food, we took ALL the fat out of the food. It’s been a real chore to get the medical cognoscenti to turn around on this. I do want to do a shoutout to the American Heart Association, because they have now debunked their long-standing cholesterol-fat hypothesis.
They now recognize that saturated fat was not the demon they made it out to be, and that there are seven classes of fats, and that you actually have to consume omega-3s. You have to consume monounsaturated fats. In fact, you do have to consume some saturated fat because it’s a major component of membranes.”
The Corporate Takeover
So, how have food companies contributed to the problems of food and drug addiction? According to Lustig, “If you look at the Supreme Court decisions that took place between the mid-’70s and mid-’80s, they took away individual rights and loaded up corporate rights in a very distinct fashion.” In his book, he describes four specific Supreme Court decisions, one of which basically deregulated corporate speech.
Corporations can say anything they want, whenever they want, regardless of whether it’s actually true. Our current epidemics of opioid and food addiction are outgrowths of corporate dishonesty.
“We are now seeing the advent of the post-truth society because of how the Supreme Court chipped away at our own individual rights,” Lustig says. “By doing so, corporations have affected our ability to experience pleasure and happiness. They’ve actually inserted propaganda into our limbic system, our reward generating system, so that we constantly seek reward at the expense of our own happiness.
This is why we currently live in the world we live in. The late political philosopher from Princeton, Sheldon Wolin, wrote a poignant book called ‘Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism,’ [in which] he envisioned that corporations and government … would become one and the same.
If you look at what’s going on in the White House today, you can see that Wolin’s nightmare scenario has been realized. It’s fascism in the sense that we don’t seem to have a voice of our own. It’s not fascism in the sense that it’s corporations that’s told us what to do. It’s that we’ve basically abdicated our own responsibility for our own health and safety.”
The EatREAL Trust Mark
Speaking of living in a post-truth society, you might not realize there’s no regulation against restaurants blatantly lying about what they’re serving you. Larry Olmsted, in his book “Real Food/Fake Food: Why You Don’t Know What You’re Eating and What You Can Do About It,” addresses this. There are no consequences, no regulatory action, for lying to customers. The deception will only enrich them — until or unless they’re publicly outed and perhaps boycotted.
One way to protect your interests when eating out is to make sure the restaurant is affiliated with Responsible Epicurean and Agricultural Leadership, better known as EatREAL, a nonprofit Lustig helped create. It teaches restaurants what they “should be doing,” and provides a trust mark to the public — a green fork.
The High Cost of Added Sugar
Processed fructose, mostly in the form of corn syrup, has become a major contributor to the $3 trillion health care budget in the United States, and there’s clear data linking sugar consumption to de novo lipogenesis — a disease process associated with fat accumulation in the liver, causing insulin resistance, hyperinsulinemia, metabolic syndrome and associated diseases. That includes Type 2 diabetes, hypertension, lipid problems, cardiovascular disease, cancer and dementia.
“We have the mechanism by which this occurs. In fact, our paper in Gastroenterology1 demonstrates that if you take sugar out of the diet of children with metabolic syndrome and substitute starch — calorie for calorie exchange, glucose for fructose exchange with no change in calories … — in 10 days, you can reverse metabolic syndrome.
You can reverse the insulin resistance. You can reverse the liver fat. You can reverse the burden on the pancreas. Basically, all of the metabolic perturbations go away. This is the smoking gun,” Lustig says. “In addition, we have a paper in BMJ Open2 which models what could happen in terms of health care expenditures and disease rates if we reduced our sugar consumption by 20 percent, which is what taxes would do.
Or if we reduce sugar consumption by 50 percent (which is what the United States Department of Agriculture suggested we do), for nonalcoholic fatty liver disease alone … the United States, over the next 20 years, could save $103 billion, just on that disease alone. Ultimately, this is where the money goes. This is why health care will be defunct. This is why Medicare will be broke by the year 2026 …
We have to deal with health. Health is going down the tubes. There’s no amount of health care that can fix what’s wrong with our diet, unless we fix the diet first … The bottom line is we are in trouble. But you can’t fix a problem until you recognize what the problem is. This book, ‘The Hacking of the American Mind,’ demonstrates how the science, how the biology, ultimately has influenced not just our health, but in fact, our policy.”
More Information
In the past, people had a much better understanding of happiness and pleasure. Lustig’s book describes how these terms have been purposely conflated and confused by businesses and governments because it helped sales. To turn the trends of addiction around, you have to understand the difference between the two.
“So, what’s the difference between pleasure and happiness? There are seven differences: Pleasure is visceral; happiness is ethereal. Pleasure is short-term; happiness is long-term. Pleasure is usually achieved alone; happiness is usually achieved in social groupings. Pleasure is taking; happiness is giving. Pleasure can be achieved with substances; happiness cannot be achieved with substances.
The extremes of pleasure all lead to addiction, whereas there is no such thing as being addicted to happiness. Finally, pleasure is dopamine and happiness is serotonin.
Understanding the difference between the two is something, for some reason, that the American public just never got. We have to make them get it in order to turn this problem around. Academics don’t get it. Businesses don’t get it. The federal government certainly doesn’t get it. We have to make them get it. That’s why this book is so crucial.”
“The bottom line is it’s about the science,” Lustig says. “There will be detractors who will say this is garbage. But the bottom line is there are 600 references to the primary literature to demonstrate that this is not gobbledygook. The science actually predicts the phenomena that we see and the society we’ve become.”
Sadly, depression is a common mental health condition that affects millions of people in Australia and around the world. However, there are many natural therapies for depression that give you back your power, as they are more preventive in nature and help your body to heal itself. One of these natural solutions for depression may be magnesium, as pointed out in recent research.
This study involved 126 men and women who suffered from mild to moderate depression. Sixty-two were given a supplement containing 248mg of magnesium (as magnesium chloride, not the best supplemental form) for 6 weeks, and then spent 6 weeks with no supplementation. The others first spent 6 weeks taking no magnesium, and then swapped with the first group for the second half.
All volunteers were given questionnaires to evaluate their depression and anxiety at the start of the study and every 2 weeks during treatment.
During supplementation, depression and anxiety scores improved significantly, and participants were less likely to suffer from headaches. During the control period, however, depression scores did not change and anxiety worsened.
As their symptoms showed improvement in 2 weeks, magnesium could be a rapid-acting remedy for mild and moderate depression, while offering a wide range of side benefits. And if you are worried about negative social attitudes towards depression, magnesium is indicated for so many health complaints that a supplement implies nothing.
So, Why? What Does Magnesium Do?
From energy production to the synthesis of neurotransmitters that control mood, magnesium is involved in over 300 biochemical reactions in the body. If you are deficient, and many people are, then these chemical reactions are limited.
Of course, magnesium is not the only nutrient that we need to make neurotransmitters. B vitamins, particularly B12, folate (B9), B6, and niacin (B3), are essential co-factors in neurotransmitter production.
Deficiencies do not just affect mood, but overall brain function and memory.
A balance of omega-3 and -6 essential fatty acids is also important, as they are a part of nerve cell membranes and play a role in communication between cells. Impaired communication affects things like mood, memory and function in general.
Vitamin D deficiency is another common problem, which can contribute to depression by altering gene expression and the ability to control inflammation.
Overall, the ‘chemical imbalance’ is more complex than conventional medicine tells you, and we have far more control over it too.
(TMU) — A new study, published in Clinical Psychological Science, has discovered a class of words that can accurately assess whether someone is suffering from depression. Utilizing a technologically advanced set of linguistics algorithms, computerized models cull through massive data banks of spoken or written text in minutes to determine if someone shows signs of being depressed. What […]
A new study published this month in the American Journal of Psychiatry showed that during in-hospital trials, Ketamine relieved suicidal thoughts almost immediately.
The mainstream media is now warning parents that their children as young as 3 years old, could develop depression and should be checked by doctors.
