How food and food production are implicated in mental health (by Mental Health Foundation, UK)

Info source: http://www.mentalhealth.org.uk/content/assets/PDF/publications/Feeding-Minds.pdf

How food and food production are implicated in mental health

Most of the brain is derived directly from food. The last fifty years have witnessed remarkable alterations to what we eat, how we process and refine it, food additives, use of pesticides and the alteration of animal fats through intensive farming.

Changes to our diet in recent years mean that what we consume daily is very diff erent in its nutritional content from that of even our closest ancestors.

It has been estimated that the average person in the UK and other industrialised countries will eat more than
4 kilogrammes of additives every year. The impact of this situation is still controversial as Governments have
appeared reluctant to fund, conduct or publish rigorously controlled studies examining the eff ects of additives.

Changing methods of farming have also introduced higher levels and different types of fat into our diet.

For example, chickens now reach their slaughter weight twice as fast as they did thirty years ago, which has
changed the nutritional profile of the meat. Whereas a chicken carcass used to be 2% fat, it is now 22%.

Also, the diet fed to chickens has changed dramatically, which has reduced omega-3 fatty acids and increased omega-6 fatty acids in chicken meat. Similarly, the diet fed to farmed fi sh is changing the ratio of fatty acids in the fish we eat.

Info source: http://www.mentalhealth.org.uk/content/assets/PDF/publications/Feeding-Minds.pdf