What you eat -- or drink -- can affect your mood, says psychiatrist Sudeepta Varma, MD. In this WisePatient video, she explains how omega-3 fatty acids may help prevent depression, while alcohol trigger it.
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Certain foods that can help are those that are rich in omega-3 fatty acids. We know that salmon is high in them, and there has been a lot of studies to suggest that omega-3 or deficiencies of it can also lead to depression. Eating foods that are rich in folic acid and vitamin B12 and vitamin D so either in the form of supplements, all of these can help try and maintain one from being depression free and a more milder situation.
One of the things that you would want to avoid is alcohol and a lot of us drink in moderation but don't realize that binge shrinking having sort of other for more than three drinks in one sitting for a woman and four for a man, over time can lead to depression. That alcohol is a depressant, it's a central nervous system depressant and also affects every other organ in the body.
So I find that a lot of people particularly dealing with depression or anxiety or trauma, when I was working at the 9/11 mental health program, a lot of people were self medicating, and this is a term that I use when you are using some substance, food, it could be sex, gambling as a way to kind of escape or to treat what you're going through.
But we don't realize that these forms of self medication that independently cause problems. I had a patient who was gambling as way to get out the house he was having a lot of marital stress and would go to the casino and then ended up developing $100, 000 debt, and this was somebody who never had any kind of gambling problem.
So sometimes we're trying to treat one problem we end up creating another.
Sudeepta Varma, MD, is a board certified psychiatrist at the NYU Langone Medical Center. She was also the founding medical director and attending psychiatrist to a prestigious mental health program at NYU Langone.
