My personal experience, continued

[Guest guest]

(This is the next installment of my story of dealing with my bipolar

disorder, after years of " conventional " drug treatment. I've posted

this whole story on several bipolar/depression specific

forums...which are not as open to alternative approaches as this

forum obviously is, so please keep in mind while reading, that my

approach is intended to reach those who are resistant to

unconventional approaches. In this forum, I'm preaching to the

converted!)

 

I should not talk so much about myself

if there were anybody else whom I knew as well.

-Thoreau

 

I'm a mechanic, among other things, and I've always fixed my own

cars. When you trouble shoot a car, you go from " least expensive and

easiest to fix " to " most expensive and hardest to fix " . If your car

doesn't start, the first thing you might look at is the gas. You

don't figure, " I need to rebuild the engine " . In medicine, the

equivalent thinking is " from least invasive treatment to most

invasive treatment " . With a car, after you check the basics, you

would tune the engine. Tuning is just returning the engine to its

original specifications. Nothing is added that wasn't there in the

first place. I figured if it was good enough for the Chevy, it was

good enough for me. And besides...I really had nothing to lose.

I looked at the diet that humanity had evolved from. This is the diet

that made our brains grow like they did, and made us a success. I saw

that recently (within the last 100 years) we had made many

fundamental changes. These changes were not made in the interest of

good health. They were made so food producers could make more money.

It made sense to me that before I " rebuilt my engine " with drugs, I

should " tune it up " ...return it to its original specifications. Then,

if it still didn't run right, I would look at that " rebuild " .

Oh I know, plenty of folks are saying right now " C'mon Dan, you can't

compare people and cars...they are totally different! " I think that's

fair...people are much more complicated, we know exactly how cars

work and we don't know exactly how people work, but a more important

difference is this: A human is a machine that constantly fixes

itself, while a car does not. Under the right conditions, the human

constantly fights infections and cancer, and wins much more often

than not. If you scratch your cars' fender, it stays scratched until

someone fixes it. If you scratch your human " fender " , the body

automatically fixes it for you. The human body is a whole lot smarter

and capable than a car is.

So I looked at this new diet we are on, and the old diet. What are

the differences, and are they important? Back to the car: if it's

designed to run on premium, and you put in unleaded, it won't run

right. Some mechanic might be able to re-tune it so it would limp

along, but nothing would fix it as well as putting the right gas in

it. It's the same with diet. The human body is pretty resilient...it

can handle quite a lot of different foods, taking them apart,

absorbing the good stuff and either using it directly or making

something else out of it that it needs. Some stuff, it can't make, so

we have to eat it, or the body goes without.

 

What does this have to do with bipolar or depression?

Let me make a link here, with an example: Tryptophan is an amino

acid. It's in lots of different foods. It's an essential amino acid,

so we have to eat it. Tryptophan is what makes serotonin and

melotonin, which are important brain chemicals. Anti-depressants of

many kinds basically block the mechanism that reabsorbs the

serotonin, making more serotonin available for the brain to use. They

don't make any serotonin at all. So think about this...a person is

clinically depressed, and is given one of these antidepressants. Is

it because the person's reabsorbtion mechanism is broken? Or is it

because serotonin is in short supply in the first place, and the

drugs help hold on to what little it has? In either case, what makes

more sense...shutting down the " drains " , or making more serotonin?

On an assembly line, if at the end of the line, a car is coming

through with a scratch on it, over and over.... they don't settle for

fixing the scratch at the end of the line. They march back up the

line until they find where the scratch is coming from. With humans,

doesn't it make sense to give the body what it needs to produce as

much serotonin as it wants and needs, and let the body figure it out?

Here is another example, which is very important to bipolars. The

brain is 60% fat by dry weight, mostly omega-3 essential fatty acids.

They are " essential " because we have to eat them, because the body

can't make them from anything else. For most of our history on

earth, we ate a good amount of Omega-3 essential fatty acids. The

best form of omega-3 is in fish, with whole grains, wild game and

some greens having another kind that can be converted by the body to

the same omega's in fish. What does the body do if we don't give it

enough of this stuff to build a good brain?

 

Once I decided that there was a possibility that modern health

problems might be related to those diet changes we made recently. I

started looking harder for information that related to those changes.

I'd see a study that said the Niacin was needed to produce serotonin,

or a study that showed low levels of Omega-3's in ADHD kids, or one

about Vitamin B1 deficiency causing the brain disorder " Wernicke-

Korsakoff syndrome " , or how partially hydrogenated fats compete with

essential fatty acids and I thought: What do so many of these things

have in common? What I found is that when I compared our " old " diet

to our " new " diet that virtually all of these " problems " were

directly related to what we were eating or not eating.

I decided to try to eat what I was designed to eat, and see what

would happen. I decided to give my body the raw material it was

designed to run on, and trust my body to do the rest.

 

More later,

Dan