I am at a coffee shop in a far away town, and I have things to do.
So I am not going to write about this extensively at the
moment. Still, while looking for something else, I
encountered this abstract. The title was odd enough to get my
attention.
href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=pubmed&cmd=Retrieve&dopt=AbstractPlus&list_uids=16504418&query_hl=2&itool=pubmed_docsum">Psychiatric
agriculture: systemic nutritional modification and mental health in the
developing world.
Med Hypotheses. 2006;66(6):1234-9. Epub 2006 Feb 28.
London DS, Stoll AL, Manning BB.
Modernization of agricultural systems to increase output causes changes
to the nutritional content of food entire populations consume. Human
nutritional needs differ from their "food", thus producing healthy
agricultural products is not equivalent to providing agricultural
products that are healthy for humans. Inclusion of the food production
system as a factor in the increase of neuropsychiatric disorders and
other chronic diseases helps explain negative trends in modern chronic
diseases that remain unchecked despite stunning advances in modern
medicine. Diseases in which our own technology plays a significant role
include obesity and resulting disorders, such as diabetes, heart
disease, hypertension, stroke and arthritis. Modernization's lure leads
to importation of modern agricultural practices into a nutritionally
vulnerable, malnourished and sometimes starving developing world.
Wealthier nations hedge their food portfolio by having access to a
wider variety of foods. The developing world's reliance on staple foods
means even a minor widespread nutritional modification of one key food
can have profound effects. New agricultural techniques may improve or
exacerbate neuropsychiatric disorders through nutritional modification
in regions where populations walk a nutritional tightrope with little
margin for error. In most of the developing world western psychiatric
interventions have failed to make inroads. People's consumption of fish
has a demonstrated beneficial effect on their mental health and the
omega-3 fatty acid content is a significant factor. Epidemiological,
biological and agricultural studies implicate a lack of dietary
omega-3s as a factor in certain mental disorders. Replenishing omega-3s
has improved mental illnesses in controlled clinical trials. This
article's detailed tilapia fish-farming model demonstrates how
aquaculture/agriculture techniques can function as a public health
intervention by increasing dietary omega-3s through creation of
sustainable, economical and culturally appropriate food sources for the
developing world.
One odd thing about this is the way the authors focus on psychiatric
problems. I consider the evidence of benefit to be
a bit short of conclusive, although it is highly suggestive.
The evidence is better for cardiovascular disease, so it
would seem to make more sense to focus on that, instead.
Still, the basic concept is an important one. We do have to
wonder how our agricultural practices are affecting health.
Given the costs associated with health care and health
insurance, it might not be wise to save money with industrial-scale
food production, if it leads to worse health and greater health care
expenditures.
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Have you read 'Omnivore's Dilemma'?
Haven't read it, but I am familiar with some of the ideas. I am fairly sure that, as a society, we are going to have to shift away from animal food sources, and eat a lot more plants.
There are two fairly serious problems with that paper:
1. Notice how he mentions a string of diseases which are known to be affected by diet. Now notice that with the exception of stroke, none of them could be considered neuropsychiatric. The only link given is that the author considers them all to be chronic diseases.
2. Note the mention of Omega-3s. There are numerous problems with this one. Firstly, there are a number of closely related chemicals that are often referred to under that name. Secondly, note that he doesn't actually cite a specific study on the effect of Omega-3s on specific neuropsychiatric disorders. Thirdly, note that he doesn't mention which specific neuropsychiatric disorders he is discussing. There is a huge difference between, say, someone with OCD and someone suffering from schizophrenia. It is doubtful that Omega-3 would be a panacea that cures all neuropsychiatric disorders, especially considering that treatments for one neuropsychiatric disorder are often contraindicated for others, which is why you wouldn't give ADHD meds to a bipolar patient, or L-DOPA to someone with schizophrenia.
3. If diet plays such a large role in neuropsychiatric disorders, wouldn't we expect to see huge variation of diagnosis rates (several orders of magnitude) between different geographical regions, even within the same country, which couldn't be explained by sociocultural reasons alone? After all, diet is one of the largest variables in the human experience, every culture has its own distinct diet, even within the US we can think of certain regions as having distinct diets, much less comparing diets in the US with those of Japan or Mexico or Latvia.
Finally, I don't know about the third-world, but haven't life expectancies, ummmm, increased dramatically since we industrialized our food supply? Now we have a steady supply of inspected, clean, unspoiled disease-free food. Considering the rates of famine and food-borne illnesses in the developing world, the author's concerns just don't pan out.