Nutritional interventions for mental health disorders

By Katherine Shagoury

Nutrition affects mental health in almost any way you can imagine, according to Leslie Korn, PhD, MPH, LMHC, a traumatologist specializing in mental health nutrition and integrative approaches to treating the mind and body.

While nutrition does affect mental health from the prenatal stage of life when one is in utero, it is increasingly significant in the later stages of life, when one is looking to maintain cognitive health and focus.

Nutrition and mental health is a bi-directional effect, Dr. Korn says. “It’s not just that nutrition affects mental health,” she says, “it’s that mental health affects nutrition.”

In the 1950s, research was published examining the role of phospholipid metabolism in the brain and it’s effect on chronic mental diseases. The inquiries went by the wayside in the 60s and 70s, but practitioners today are starting to come back to those original studies, recognizing the signalling dysfunctions in the brain and the genetic and epigenetic contributions to phospholipid disorders, says Dr. Korn.

Nutrition can trigger gene responses that will affect fatty metabolism in the brain, she says, and can have profound affects, not just on depression and anxiety, but on autism spectrum disorders and schizophrenia.

In addition, lack of vitamin B-12 can contribute to cognitive decline both in people who are vegetarian and older people who may not access enough B-12. “We’re beginning to pay much more attention to the role of food and nutrients even in very simple ways that we can see,” said Korn. “Everywhere you look, everywhere that you intersect, you can identify whether it is through neuroendocrine function or any kind of function of the body, and you can see how nutrients and nutritional status is going to affect physical, emotional, and mental function.”

I was trained as a traumatologist. I’ve worked my whole career with individuals who have had adverse life events that contributed to very complex and chronic mind-body problems—post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), complex trauma, chronic pain, addictions. We see how these all go together.

We see very high rates of chronic pain, addictions, depression, anxiety, and insomnia in people who have experienced adverse life events. Those [events] could be either abuse as children, growing up in addictive families, rape, physical abuse, as well as in people who have gone to war, or people who have had car accidents or been exposed to environmental traumas.

I actually began my training in Ayurvedic medicine and was trained in [traditional] Chinese medicine and acupuncture. I studied Eastern traditions of food and nutrition and I taught vegetarian cooking for many years. I also trained as a body worker in the hands-on manipulative therapies of cranial osteopathy, called Polarity therapy. Touching people often leads them to talk about the stories of their lives, and their traumas, and that took me to the study of psychology and psychotherapy. I spent three years at Harvard working in public health and also in the Department of Psychiatry where I was a clinical fellow. I was always very interested in the mind-body connection, as well as in good food and the use of herbal medicine.

“As I worked with people… I found that it often leads them to talk about the stories of their lives, and their traumas”

However, what I found was that—as I worked with individual clients, those who undertook change in their diet, who were able to eliminate addictive substances like alcohol and drugs, and really eat well, engage in self-care activities, and begin to get off the refined foods and sugars—some of the basic things that we take for granted are absolutely necessary for good physical and mental health.

Those who made those changes got better. Those who didn’t, didn’t do quite as well at all; they always stayed kind of stuck.

Through my work of over 25 years running a natural medicine clinic in the jungle in Mexico, I was also exposed to indigenous foods and medicines, and the concept of bio-individuality and how what an Inuit client of mine in Alaska might eat is very different from what an indigenous person in Mexico might eat.

During my travels and work in the jungle and among indigenous communities, I began to see that when people ate according to their traditional and authentic diets they had good physical and mental health, and those who didn’t, did not. It was a pretty clear equation that I have seen over and over again.