chemical is one of the major anti-anxiety neurotransmitters we make. Are you someone who needs a higher and higher dosage of the medication? Is your doctor changing medications because the first one isn’t working? Are you on multiple anti-depressants, because one isn’t enough? Step out of the box and look at the problem from the other side of the brain. If your body isn’t making brain chemicals, what are these drugs holding on to?
Nutritional Emotions Remember our equation, proteins + vi-
tamin = brain chemicals. We’ll start with the proteins. Why do you get tired when you eat turkey at Thanksgiving? Tryptophan! But the longer part of the equation is that tryptophan is the protein that makes serotonin and mela- tonin. The more tryptophan we eat, the more serotonin we make, and the happier we feel. The more tryptophan, the more melatonin we make, which makes us sleepy. Now things are starting to make sense: Our diet affects our mood! You need to eat enough protein, and eat protein at every meal of the day (don’t forget breakfast). You also have to digest the protein. This means chewing your food, which our fast-paced culture often forgets, and having the stom- ach juices to digest the protein. Many of my patients on reflux drugs, called PPI (proton pump inhibitors), have poor protein levels because protein digestion is delayed. We also need our vitamins to create serotonin and friends. The most important vi-
tamins are B vitamins, and minerals, such as copper, zinc, and iron. We get these mostly from fruits and vegetables, but again in our fast-paced society, who is really eating the 6-8 daily servings of fruits and vegetables? As you know, most of our grain products are fortified with B vitamins, but only with some of them! The most important B vitamins for brain chemical production are B6, folate, and B12. Our grain products are not forti- fied with B6 and B12. So if you don’t eat your vegetables, you can’t make your brain chemicals in sufficient amounts!
Genetics
You’re probably asking, how do genet- ics fit into our picture? Well, they are the ‘+’ sign of the equation. In order to create many brain chemicals, we have to activate our vitamins into their ‘bioactive’ form. This term ‘bioactive’ is thrown around a lot, so let me explain, some vitamins must be methylated or phosphorylated in the body in order to function. Our body adds a carbon molecule or phosphorus molecule to the vitamins, which turns them on, or makes them active in the body (bioactive). So when we eat folic acid or folinic acid, the body needs to convert it to its active form, methylfolate, or 5-MTHF. Only the active form, 5-MTHF, can be used to create brain chemicals. The formation of 5-MTHF needs an en- zyme called MTHFR. Your genetics control the activity of this enzyme. If you inherit an enzyme that doesn’t work effectively, you won’t effectively make health levels of
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