Critical Brain Nutrients: Evidence that Current Dietary Advice Harms Mental Health – and Potential Solutions
FAB Research
This Event has now taken place - but the full recording, and handouts, will be available from 1st June
BOOK HERE to get permanent, on-demand access to this unique webinar - providing key insights from one of the world's leading experts in nutrition and mental health
Healthy brain development and function – and therefore mental health, wellbeing and performance – depends upon adequate supplies of certain
critical nutrients that must come from dietary sources.
The richest source of these brain-essential nutrients is seafood - consumed for millions of years during the evolution of the nervous system. However, both changing dietary preferences and important sustainability issues mean that fish and seafood are now lacking from many people's diets.
Typical modern diets are now deficient in vital omega-3 fats, provide an excess of pro-inflammatory omega-6 fats, and lack other key brain nutrients found in fish and seafood. Decades of converging evidence now shows that this is making a major contribution to the current worldwide mental health epidemic.
Early life is a critical period, as deficiencies of key nutrients during pregnancy and infancy have lifelong effects on brain development, which increase the risks for a wide range of neurodevelopmental and mental health problems.
However,
current dietary advice for pregnant women - together with changing dietary preferences and environmental concerns - deters many of them from eating fish and seafood.
Official dietary advice in the US and UK for pregnant women to limit seafood intake is based on purely hypothetical risks - for which there is simply NO evidence (and never was). By contrast, there IS now good evidence that avoiding or limiting fish and seafood intake significantly impairs children's cognitive, behavioural and social development.
In addition, more general dietary advice still promotes 'low-fat' foods and diets as 'healthy' choices - while failing to emphasise the critical importance to brain and body health of
1.
the balance of omega-3 / omega-6 fats in the diet 2.
the unique importance of the long-chain omega-3 fats found in fish and seafood, and that
3.
seafood is also a rich source of other key brain-essential nutrients that few other foods provide, and which are often lacking from modern western-type diets.
As this webinar will explain, the combination of these factors has created a 'perfect storm' - because
- diets deficient in key brain nutrients increase vulnerability to mental health, behaviour and learning problems of all kinds (as well as raising risks for obesity, allergies and immune disorders, and other chronic health problems).
Compelling evidence also indicates that diets lacking the critical brain nutrients found in fish and seafood can contribute to many wider social problems - including addictive behaviours, aggression and violence, child neglect, and self-harm.
Attendees will learn what controlled clinical trials have shown about how interventions to improve nutrition can help to address these and related mental health problems.
Importantly, this webinar will also summarise:
- the most practical alternative ways that adequate intakes of brain-essential nutrients can be ensured for the many people who are unable or unwilling to eat fish and seafood.
All FAB Associate members receive FREE ATTENDANCE at FAB’s Webinars
as well as unlimited access afterwards to the video recording and handouts, via our online Associates Library.
Find out more about the benefits of FAB Associate Membership here