Learn about conventional, complementary, and integrative therapies.
Dealing with treatment side effects? Learn about evidence-based therapies to alleviate your symptoms.
Click the orange button to the right to learn more.
Diet as Mind-Body Therapy? Or diet to help heart health, reduce your risk of chronic disease and your risk of cancer. Eating nutritiously helps calm me as I stress out about myriad side effects, fear of relapse, fear of therapy-induced secondary cancer and on and on.
I am a long-term cancer survivor. Believe me when I say that struggling with a
can do a number on your mental health.
And mental health is often overlooked by conventional oncology but essential none-the-less. The Mediterranean Diet comes up in study after study as being the best all-around nutritional therapy.
I will confess that I do cheat on occasion. Meaning, I stray from the what the link above says. But day-in, day-out, it is the Mediteranean Diet that I follow.
The one thing I add to my nutrition is nutritional supplementation. I do so because I cannot eat, for example, enough fish to ingest the amount of fish oil that I think helps my mind-body, heart, blood etc,. etc. health.
Are you a cancer survivor struggling with mind-body health? PTSD? Anxiety from a fear of recurrence?
Email me at David.PeopleBeatingCancer@gmail.com
“Abstract- Diet quality may be an important modifiable risk factor for mental health disorders. However, these findings have been inconsistent, particularly in older adults. We explored the independent associations between adherence to a Mediterranean diet (MedDiet) and severity of symptoms related to
in older adults from Australia. This was a cross-sectional analysis of older Australians ≥ 60 years. MedDiet adherence was assessed using the Mediterranean Diet Adherence Screener (MEDAS), and the Depression, Anxiety and Stress Scale (DASS−21) was used to assess the severity of negative emotional symptoms.
A total of n = 294 participants were included in the final analyses (70.4 ± 6.2 years). Adherence to a MedDiet was inversely associated with the severity of anxiety symptoms (β = −0.118; CI: −0.761, −0.012; p = 0.043) independent of age, gender, BMI, physical activity, sleep, cognitive risk and ability to perform activities of daily living. Furthermore, MedDiet adherence was inversely associated with symptoms of stress (β = −0.151; CI: −0.680, −0.073; p = 0.015) independent of age, gender, BMI, physical activity and sleep.
However, no relationship between MedDiet adherence and depressive symptoms was observed. We showed that adherence to a MedDiet is inversely associated with the severity of symptoms related to anxiety and stress but not depression. Exploring these findings with the use of longitudinal analyses and robust clinical trials are needed to better elucidate these findings in older adults…
Conclusions- We report that adherence to a MedDiet was inversely associated with severity of symptoms related to anxiety and stress in community-dwelling older Australians. However, this relationship was not observed for depressive symptoms.
We also observed that specific dietary components of a MedDiet, including a low consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages as well as increased fruit, nut and legume consumption were all independently and inversely associated with symptoms of anxiety.
Our results therefore contribute to the wider literature in support of adherence to a healthy dietary pattern to mitigate mental health disorders (diet as mind-body therapy). Nevertheless, these findings should be investigated further using well-controlled longitudinal analyses and robust clinical trials to better elucidate these findings in older adults…”