Archives: Books

Exploring the connection between nutrition and mental wellness so therapists can provide more effective, integrated treatment.

Diet is an essential component of a client’s clinical profile. Few therapists, however, have any nutritional training, and many don’t know where to begin. In Nutrition Essentials for Mental Health, Leslie Korn provides clinicians with a practical guide to the complex relationship between what we eat and the way we think, feel, and interact with the world.

Where there is mental illness there is frequently a history of digestive and nutritional problems. Digestive problems in turn exacerbate mental distress, all of which can be improved by nutritional changes. It’s not unusual for a deficit or excess of certain nutrients to disguise itself as a mood disorder. Indeed, nutritional deficiencies factor into most mental illness―from anxiety and depression to schizophrenia and PTSD―and dietary changes can work alongside or even replace medications to alleviate symptoms and support mental wellness.

Nutrition Essentials for Mental Health offers the mental health clinician the principles and practices necessary to provide clients with nutritional counseling to improve mood and mental health. Integrating clinical evidence with the author’s extensive clinical experience, it takes clinicians step-by-step through
the essentials for integrating nutritional therapies into mental health treatment. Throughout, brief clinical vignettes illustrate commonly encountered obstacles and how to overcome them.

Readers will learn:
• Why nutrition matters in mental health
• The role of various nutrients in nourishing both the brain and the gut, the “second brain”
• Typical nutritional culprits that underlie or exacerbate specific mental disorders
• Assessment techniques for evaluating a client’s unique nutritional needs, and counseling methods for the challenging but rewarding process of nutritional change.
• Leading-edge protocols for the use of various macro- and micronutrients, vitamins, and supplements to improve mental health
• Considerations for food allergies, sensitivities, and other special diets
• The effects of foods and nutrients on DSM-5 categories of illness, and alternatives to pharmaceuticals for treatment
• Comprehensive, stage-based approaches to coaching clients about dietary plans, nutritional supplements, and other resources
• Ideas for practical, affordable, and individualized diets, along with optimal cooking methods and recipes
• Nutritional strategies to help with withdrawal from drugs, alcohol and pharmaceuticals

And much more. With this resource in hand, clinicians can enhance the efficacy of all their methods and be prepared to support clients’ mental health with more effective, integrated treatment.

This guide will show families, patients, and doctors how to change their behavior and improve their health through new skills that will last when psychiatric drugs are no longer used.

Over the past 50 years, psychiatry has made some significantly large strides, but it needs a new direction. The current emphasis on psychiatric drugs works for now, but it is a temporary solution. Studies involving nurses, nursing, interventions and clinical work have led to a new type of treatment.

Recent advances in the molecular biology of the brain and epigenetics have illuminated a new plan. The result? A treatment path for the creation of natural, drug-free, and effective therapies that do not produce severe side effects. Chapters include:

• Brain Chemistry 101
• Epigenetics and mental health
• Schizophrenia
• depression
• autism
• Behavioral disorders and ADHD
• Alzheimer’s Disease
• And more!

The need-based treatments outlined in Dr. William J. Walsh’s Nutrient Power show a research-based nutrient therapy system that can help people with a variety of mental disorders. The guide explains that nutrient imbalance can cause mental disorders by disrupting gene expression of proteins and enzymes, crippling the body’s protection against environmental toxins, and changing brain levels of key neurotransmitters. Walsh’s database has connected nutrient imbalances in patients diagnosed with a variety of disorders found in the DSM.

For the first time in history, too much food is making us sick. The Modern American Diet (MAD) is expanding our waistlines while starving and shrinking our brains. Rates of obesity and depression have recently doubled, and though these epidemics are closely linked, few experts are connecting the dots for the average American.

Using data from the rapidly changing fields of neuroscience and nutrition, The Happiness Diet shows that over the past several generations, small, seemingly insignificant changes to our diet have stripped it of nutrients—like magnesium, vitamin B12, iron, and vitamin D, as well as some very special fats—that are essential for happy, well-balanced brains. These shifts also explain the overabundance of mood-destroying foods in the average American’s diet and why they predispose most of us to excessive weight gain.

After a clear explanation of how we’ve all been led so far astray, The Happiness Diet empowers the reader to steer clear of this MAD way of life with simple, straightforward solutions, including:
• A list of foods to swear off
• Shopping tips and kitchen organization tricks
• A compact healthy cookbook full of brain-building recipes
• Practical advice, meal plans, and more!

Graham and Ramsey guide you through these steps and then remake your diet by doubling down on feel-good foods—even the all-American burger.

With the scientific expertise of Dr. Lilian Cheung in nutrition and Thich Nhat Hanh’s experience in teaching mindfulness the world over, Savor not only helps us achieve the healthy weight and well-being we seek, but also brings to the surface the rich abundance of life available to us in every moment.

An internationally renowned neuroscientist, Dr. Wenk has been educating college and medical students about the brain and lecturing around the world for more than forty years. He has published over three hundred publications on the effects of drugs upon the brain. This essential book vividly
demonstrates how a little knowledge about the foods and drugs we eat can teach us a lot about how our brain functions. The information is presented in an irreverent and non-judgmental manner that makes it highly accessible to high school teenagers, inquisitive college students and worried parents.
Dr. Wenk has skillfully blended the highest scholarly standards with illuminating insights, gentle humor and welcome simplicity. The intersection between brain science, drugs, food and our cultural and religious traditions is plainly illustrated in an entirely new light. Wenk tackles fundamental
questions, including:

· Why do you wake up tired from a good long sleep and why does your sleepy brain crave coffee and donuts?
· How can understanding a voodoo curse explain why it is so hard to stop smoking?
· Why is a vegetarian or gluten-free diet not always the healthier option for the brain?
· How can liposuction improve brain function?
· What is the connection between nature’s hallucinogens and religiosity?
· Why does marijuana impair your memory now but protect your memory later in life?
· Why do some foods produce nightmares?
· What are the effects of diet and obesity upon the brains of infants and children?
· Are some foods better to eat after traumatic brain injury?

A thoroughly up-to-date reference for researchers who specialize in obesity and clinicians who specialize in working with clients with problem eating behaviors, Handbook of Assessment Methods for Eating Disorders and Weight-Related Problems, Second Edition, offers the field’s most comprehensive collection of measures and assessment tools related to eating behaviors.

In addition to obesity (an issue that has reached epidemic proportions in the United States), the Handbook deals with problem eating behaviors, eating disorders, and the associated psychological issues that underlie these problems. This Second Edition provides the latest research and theory, along with empirically validated assessment tools for measuring attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors with regard to food, including:

• General personality assessment and psychopathology of persons with eating and weight-related concerns
• Quality of life assessments
• Measuring attitudes and beliefs about obese people
• Assessment of body image
• Measures of restrained eating
• Measures of physical activity
• Measuring food intake
• Binge eating and purging
• Eating and weight-related problems with children
• Identification of psychological problems of patients with eating disorders

New and Continuing Features:

• No other resource offers such a comprehensive collection of assessment methods for eating disorders and weight-related problems in one volume.
• Contributions from highly regarded scholars and researchers in the field offer up-to-date, academically rigorous, and research-based information.
• The volume’s Introduction emphasizes the importance of research in this area and highlights the changes in the field over the past decade.

Believing that drugs and psychoanalysis were not always the best course of treatment for a variety of mental illnesses, Dr. Carl Pfeiffer began an extensive program of research into the causes and treatment of mental illness, and in 1973 opened the Brain Bio Center in Princeton, New Jersey. Here, with a team of scientists, I have found that many psychological problems can be traced to biochemical imbalances in the body. With these patients, I have achieved unprecedented success in treating a wide range of mental problems by adjusting diet and providing specific nutritional supplements for those conditions where deficiencies exist. This book documents his approach to him.
Each year, thousands of people are diagnosed as schizophrenic; many more suffer from depression, anxiety, and phobias.

Dr. Pfeiffer’s methods of treatment presented in Nutrition and Mental Illness are a valuable adjunct to traditional therapies, and can bring hope of real wellness to many of those who suffer.

Combining cutting-edge neuroscience with the latest discoveries on the human microbiome, a practical guide in the tradition of Wheat Belly and Grain Brain that conclusively demonstrates the inextricable biological link between mind and body.

A provocative expose of the dieting industry from one of the nation’s leading researchers in self-control and the psychology of weight loss that offers proven strategies for sustainable weight loss.

From her office in the University of Minnesota’s Health and Eating Lab, professor Traci Mann researches self-control and dieting. And what she has discovered is groundbreaking. Not only do diets not work; they often result in weight gain. Americans are losing the battle of the bulge because our bodies and brains are not hardwired to resist food—the very idea of it works against our biological imperative to survive.