I am reading a book right now about using nutrients to balance out brain chemistry. The amount of research is impressive with over 30,000 patients treated and over a million lab tests performed to assess these patients. This kind of research volume only happens when we are either dealing with somebody’s life work or when some National Health Service, like in Sweden, runs a study. This situation is the former, and its’ results are very impressive. The researcher is William Walsh PhD, and he has been developing nutritional remedies for behavior disorders, ADHD, autism, depression, anxiety, bipolar disorders, schizophrenia, and Alzheimer’s for 30 years. His teachers were Abram Hoffer, Roger Williams, and Carl Pfeiffer – the pioneers of nutrition and mental health.
My first introduction to the impact of nutrition and mental health was 40 years ago when I first learned about the devastating effects of unbalanced blood sugar on the brain. At that time it was estimated that half the mental hospitals could be emptied just by balancing blood sugar in those patients. I still use those protocols today with patients as the impact of poorly regulated blood sugar hits every body system as well as the brain. Every cell depends second by second on chemical energy made from oxygen and either blood sugar or ketones to function.
This book acknowledges the importance of blood sugar balance as one of the basic keys to good mental health. It then goes into the intricate details of the gene transcription factors for the production of neurotransmitters and inflammatory agents that destroy brain cells.
For the last hundred plus years we have been taught that mental health issues were due to some sort of thinking problem, usually caused by early life trauma and bad parenting. Recently a more chemical view has gained popularity as the years of talk therapy has shown itself to be ineffective. As drugs are invented to intervene chemically in patient’s brains, the push has come from marketing these drugs to see mental health issues as some sort of psych drug deficiency disease. The new motto is “better thinking through chemistry.”
While this is obviously silly – we don’t have diseases caused by name brand drug deficiencies – brain chemistry is the new frontier that is producing actual results with patients. Think about that a moment… what if your anxiety at work is not really about work at all, but the result of inflammation and disturbed chemistry somewhere in your brain? What if your shyness or resistant personality patterns are also just chemistry? I know from years of experience working with patients that we are obsessed with having a reason for every feeling we experience. We make up stories to explain our aches and pains that typically have nothing to do with the actual cause for the pain. I also see we do the same thing for feelings. We attach external events as the cause for how and why we feel what we feel when the reality is we feel what we feel and then find the external story to attach to the feeling.
How often have you or a loved one felt irritable for no reason, but in no time they or we find a reason to justify why we feel bad – like pick a fight with someone we love so we can blame them for our irritability? How would life play differently if we knew that most of the time our bad feelings were actually coming from brain inflammation and not life situations. Yes life can get really ugly, but what if it was brain chemistry that was causing us to have a bad attitude and make bad choices and that was the real cause behind how our life got ugly? What if correcting that brain chemistry was the vital step to turning all that ugliness around and creating instead the life we really want?
Every person’s reality is uniquely theirs, but based on the results demonstrated in this research book, upwards of 90% of people’s life problems begin in messed up brain chemistry, and correcting that enables these people to change their lives for the better. Things like zinc and copper imbalances, under and over methylation, pyrrole disorders, toxic metals, and of course blood sugar balance are the factors that Dr. Walsh found that when corrected made huge differences in the functioning of his patients.
Why would I, as a Chiropractor, care about such a subject? The fundamental principle of Chiropractic is “Top down” – the brain/nervous system controls everything. So if my patient’s brain is misfiring or inflamed, it is going to massively affect their body and what I have to do to rebuild balance. I can do a nice job bringing the spine, joints, and muscles all back into balance, but if there is a central nervous system problem, the body problem is just going to come back. We work on things like ergonomics, muscle coordination and stress of course. We work on fundamental nutrition and how to reduce inflammation. We even work on hormonal imbalances. This new information is giving me a whole new level to consider when looking for the underlying causes of dis-ease.
I found a lab back East that will do the types of testing I would need for this work. I will experiment on myself first of course. Hopefully at some point I will have another tool for my tool belt to use when working with you.
For right now the useful takeaway is to consider that the stories you have running in your head that feel like they are stressing you completely out, may not actually be the source of the stress feeling. How we see things and how we feel about things is first dependent on the thinking and feeling parts of our brain working properly. The feeling of stress we experience might actually be chemical stress due to chemical imbalances that just need dietary changes to bring things back to ease… just a consideration.