If this isn't a good reason for eating locally-grown food, I'd like to know what is! We have to have food brought back into municipal planning for "Full Human Habitat"!
Ann
The report can be downloaded here:
http://www.mentalhealth.org.uk/page.cfm?pagecode=PRFM#reports
(This article is from the Sydney Morning Herald)
Junk food link to mental illness
January 17, 2006
CHANGES in diet over the past 50 years appear to be an important factor
behind a significant rise in mental ill health, say two new British reports.
The Mental Health Foundation said yesterday that studies had clearly linked
attention deficit disorder, depression, Alzheimer's disease and
schizophrenia to junk food and the absence of essential fats, vitamins and
minerals in industrialised diets.
Another report, Changing Diets, Changing Minds, was also published yesterday
by Sustain, an organisation that campaigns for better food. It warns that
the British National Health Service's bill for mental illness will keep
rising unless the Government focuses on diet and the brain in its food,
farming, education and environment policies.
"Food can have an immediate and lasting effect on mental health and
behaviour because of the way it affects the structure and function of the
brain," the Sustain report says.
The chairman of Sustain, Tim Lang, said: "Mental health has been completely
neglected by those working on food policy. If we don't address it and change
the way we farm and fish, we may lose the means to prevent much diet-related
ill health."
Both reports outline the growing evidence linking poor diet to behavioural
problems. For example, the depression rate is higher in countries with low
intakes of fish, which contains several types of acids that are thought to
play an important role in the illness.
The Guardian
