You are what you eat. This is a sentence most of us have heard during our lifetime. This is said because the diet you intake can have a huge impact on your body and the way you function in daily life. Not only does your diet impact your physical health like better skin and maintained weight, but it also has a huge impact on your mental health.
In this article, we will be talking about the different ways nutrition and food can impact your body as well as your mental health and the issues that can come forth with having a bad or unhealthy diet. If you do feel like you have an eating disorder, then know more about treatment for eating disorders here.
- Brain development
All through our lives, our body keeps growing and our brain keeps developing. At first, it develops in the form of growth as with age it becomes stronger and grows exponentially. However, there comes a time where development is reversed and it begins to weaken especially once you become a mother or father. In both these phases of the brain’s development, diet plays a key role. If you were to have food full of fats and cholesterol, it would impact your brain growth and quicken the process of weakening the brain. When you have too many fatty foods and gain weight, you can impact hormones and neurotransmitters hence leading to diseases such as depression, anxiety, and even at times schizophrenia.
- Growth mode
When your brain is growing and different parts of your brain begin to materialize like your memory, your language processing, verbal and perceptual reasoning, and more, having a healthy diet strengthens your brain further. Having greens and vegetables provides the brain with the nutrients it needs to grow well and go into growth mode. However, if you do not have a healthy diet, your brain does not receive the nutrients it needs and this could lead to health problems as well as various mental issues like eating disorders, self-esteem issues, depression, anxiety, and other related disorders. You diet can either put your brain into growth mode or can stunt its growth.
- Healthy bacteria
When you have a healthy diet, your gut will be filled with healthy bacteria. Now many must be wondering what this has to do with mental health, however, these bacteria create vitamins that are essential for your brain to survive and become stronger. If you intake a good and healthy diet, then you enable yourself to make your brain stronger. It is said that these bacteria also reduce inflammation in your body. This can in return have an impact on your mood and your cognition. So if you want to maintain a good cognition and a good mood, we suggest you take a healthy diet. If your diet is full of sugary substances, then it could worsen symptoms of various mental health issues including schizophrenia. Hence, a low sugar diet is best.
