If you’re like many people, staying home leads to eating more packaged foods and take out fast food loaded with refined carbohydrates and sugar. This so-called Quarantine Diet is full of high carbs, sugar, and junk. Just what your aging brain doesn’t handle well. If the pandemic lock down isn’t enough to cause sadness, a high carb diet is a major cause of depression.
I can’t get through a news broadcast without tears these days. When I start crying during a sappy commercial, however, I recognize symptoms of my old pal depression. We’re friends from way back. I’ve had enough cognitive-behavioral therapy to know what to do. But I didn’t realize how diet itself can trigger depression.
Can Sugar Make You Depressed?
Here’s something I hadn’t considered: all this stay-at-home eating means more take-out. More refined carbs. Unhealthy fats. And a high carb diet is linked to depression. Sugar makes you fat, which is bad enough. But can it really make you depressed? Here’s what nutritionist Maria Cross from Feed Your Brain writes in an excellent article on Medium titled Does Sugar Cause Depression?
“Observational evidence” suggests a relationship between food with a high glycemic index and the development of depression. Clinical trials in both children and adults exploring this relationship have also found that high GI diets result in a deterioration in mood.
Each time your blood sugar spikes, insulin rushes in. Blood sugar drops. Eat and repeat.
And this is where it can all start to go more horribly wrong.
Insulin is released by the pancreas when food enters the stomach, and nothing stimulates this hormone quite like carbohydrate. Carbohydrates include biscuits, cakes, cereals and other starchy grains, bread, pasta, pastries, potatoes, and sweet and savory snacks.
The body can only take so much of this sugar saturation. It wasn’t designed to manage endless peaks and troughs, and they eventually take their toll.
Insulin resistance arises when insulin starts to lose its effect—the body’s cells no longer respond as they should, and glucose remains in the blood. Sensing this, the pancreas continues to pump out more insulin, but to little or no effect.
In the brain, it becomes brain insulin resistance.
Insulin Resistance: the Path to Metabolic Syndrome
Insulin resistance means the body’s ability to handle glucose is thrown out of balance. Given repeated challenges by too much glucose, it leads to metabolic syndrome, a precursor to type 2 diabetes. There is a greater incidence of depression and other mental illnesses with people who are diabetic.
Studies have consistently shown a relationship between depression and metabolic syndrome, even if the exact mechanism has not been established. One link is clear: both conditions induce a “low grade chronic inflammatory state.”
Scientists increasingly acknowledge that depression is an inflammatory disorder of the brain. It is already established that both metabolic syndrome and its successor, type 2 diabetes, are the product of “chronic, low-grade inflammation”.
Glucose is the common denominator. “Glucose is pro-inflammatory… A total of 75 g glucose intake causes acute oxidative and inflammatory stress” (Sun et al 2014).
When we talk about glucose, it’s not just from sugary desserts. Breads, pasta, starchy vegetables all create high glucose in the blood.
If you’ve had a glucose tolerance test done with a reading over 100, you may have been told you’re in the prediabetic range. If so, it’s time to get a handle on stabilizing your blood sugar through exercise and diet before it gets worse.
High Carbs Can Cause Depression
Many seniors struggle with this because with age our blood sugar levels become unstable. The problem is even more important when it leads to depression and other symptoms of mental disorders. (As if we don’t have enough to contend with!)
If you have depressive symptoms, get a checkup with your health provider and check your blood sugar lab tests. This virus pandemic is enough reason to cause sad feelings. Don’t make it worse by succumbing to a high carb diet. Seniors are susceptible to illness but also mood disorders.
Let’s take better care of ourselves with diet and exercise.
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