• Tag Archives depression

  • Inflamed Depression

    Posted on by beno Comment

    Could inflammation cause depression?

    Researchers: Depression May Be a Physical Illness Linked to Inflammation

    Although current treatments for depression mostly focus on brain chemicals such as serotonin, scientists now think inflammation throughout the entire body (triggered by an overactive immune system) may be the root cause of the problem. Widespread inflammation, they posit, could be producing feelings of unhappiness, hopelessness, and fatigue.

    No studies have been done as yet, so it’s all up in the air at the moment, but at least someone is asking questions… so why am I interested?
    I have consistently found that if I have too much sugar or carbohydrates, the next day I wake up feeling like I have been hit by a truck.
    My torso feels like it has a boa constrictor wrapped around it, and my joints are very stiff and sore, this will persist for hours, if not all day.
    In short, I feel like parts of me are very inflamed.
    I’m not yet to the point of keeping a food diary, but pasta, scotch (whiskey), stout, beer and any sort of cake or cookies are known triggers.

    Food for thought.


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  • Depression Diet

    Posted on by beno Comment

    I think we eat pretty well. Roughly based around the Paleo diet, I am the fittest I have ever been. I don’t think it’s any surprise to any of you that I struggle with a bit of depression, so it was that I was led to read this article.

    Clinical Trial Finds Diet Works for Depression

    Felice Jacka PhD is a trailblazing researcher at Deakin University in Australia who is calling the world’s attention to the powerful impact of food on mood.

    Worth a read, there are lots of bits I would like to quote, but its a quick read, so take a moment if you are so inclined and take a look.
    Bottom line, Freddy and I are thinking of taking a step back from the roughly Paleo diet we currently follow and just see if it could use some tweaking in light of this information.


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  • Crowdsourced depression treatments

    Posted on by beno Comment

    I never knew about this website;

    http://curetogether.com/

    About CureTogether

    Imagine patients around the world coming together to share quantitative information on over 500 medical conditions. They talk about sensitive symptoms and compare which treatments work best for them. They track their health. New research discoveries are made based on the patient-contributed data. This is happening at CureTogether, and we believe it can have a massive global impact.

    First I saw of it was this graphic popped up in one of my feeds as a side image to the main article.

    depression solutions

    This is what got my attention.
    You can read a bit more about it on their website;
    http://curetogether.com/blog/2011/05/03/23-surprisingly-effective-treatments-for-depression-one-year-later/

    Given that it is all done by crowdsourcing is both interesting and a caution note worthy.
    It would be people from all walks of life, the only one thing to be sure about is that they surf the web. And that’s the caution, you could be reading anything by anyone.
    But, that said, my thought is that since that chart is built from pretty close to 5000 people, it would (should) sorta average out.

    Here is my take away.
    I blogged about how this year I want to focus on my physical health to improve my mental health.
    Well, it would seem that according to a whole bunch of people I am on the right track with that approach.

    Have not blogged about it yet, but I am also making an effort to do Yoga each morning, and yup, yoga is on the graph. (Middle left)…. Pretty happy to see it up there.
    Of course, exercise is front and center, well, top right… which means it’s very effective and used by a lot of people to manage their depression.
    We will do another blog in a few weeks how my quantified year is going (it’s only been around 6 weeks at this stage, I want to get at least 8 week under my belt before we even start to draw conclusions) in this regard.

    I guess what I am trying to say is that I was really really encouraged to see that I am not totally off my rocker to think that by managing my physical health, I can impact (in a positive way) my mental health.

    As for the ‘Adequate Sleep’ thing….. lets just say that is a work in progress and we will blog more about that specific topic once we have a little more data.


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