Britain: Changes in diet over the past 50 years appear to be an important factor behind a significant rise in mental ill-health in the UK, say two reports published today.
The Mental Health Foundation says scientific studies have clearly linked attention-deficit disorder, depression, Alzheimer's disease and schizophrenia to junk food and the absence of essential fats, vitamins and minerals in industrialised diets.
A further report, Changing Diets, Changing Minds, is also published today by Sustain, the organisation that campaigns for better food. It warns that the National Health Service bill for mental illness in the UK, at almost £100 billion (€146 billion) a year, will continue to rise unless the British government focuses on diet and the brain in its food, farming, education and environment policies.
"Food can have an immediate and lasting effect on mental health and behaviour because of the way it affects the structure and function of the brain," Sustain's report says.
Its chairman, Tim Lang, said: "Mental health has been completely neglected by those working on food policy. If we don't address it and change the way we farm and fish, we may lose the means to prevent much diet-related ill-health."
Both reports, which have been produced collaboratively, outline the growing scientific evidence linking poor diet to problems of behaviour and mood.
Rates of depression have been shown to be higher in countries with low intakes of fish, for example.
Lack of folic acid, omega-3 fatty acids, selenium and the amino acid tryptophan are thought to play an important role in the illness.
A pioneering nutrition and mental health programme, thought to be the only one of its kind in Britain, was carried out at Rotherham in the north of England. According to Caroline Stokes, its research nutritionist, the mental-health patients she saw generally had the poorest diets she had ever come across.
"They are eating lots of convenience foods, snacks, takeaways, chocolate bars, crisps. It's very common for clients to be drinking a litre or two of cola a day. They get lots of sugar but a lot of them are eating only one portion of fruit or vegetable a day, if that." - (Guardian service)