Month: July 2015

Serotonin is a very important brain chemical. One of the ways that we see serotonin in use is in our moods and especially in the way that we think. Depression is often caused by low levels of this hormone so to raise serotonin levels is a very critical thing for many.

Think of serotonin in your brain as a funnel that just slowly drains goodness, if you have stress, don’t get our enough, get sick, then your serotonin production in your body will drop until that funnel has nothing to give your brain. This is bad. This is what causes depression in many people and there are ways to stop depression causing low serotonin levels.

The important thing to remember is that stress in our life, although sometimes important and good, increases the output of cortisol. Cortisol is the anti-happy hormone if there ever was one.

So it is important to keep your life free of extra stresses and especially when you are feeling down take all stresses possible out of your life

How to Raise Serotonin Levels

Basically what you need to increase the creation of serotonin in your body is diet change, exercise, exposure to bright sunlight and if all else fails then SSRI antidepressent drugs.

1. The dietary supplement 5-hydroxy-L-tryptophan (5-HTP) is promoted as a treatment for insomnia, depression, migraine, obesity and attention deficit disorder in children. It is a derivative of the amino acid tryptophan and, in fact, the body makes it from the tryptophan present in foods such as beef, chicken, fish, dairy products and other high protein foods.

I have found a lot of evidence that people swear by supplementing their diet with 5-HTP so this is something that you can try.

2. Exercise increases serotonin. We all know how important exercise is for improving our physical health and concentration as well as mood and it is the endorphin creation that fuels higher serotonin levels. Get exercise everyday.

3. Bright light increases serotonin and in winter a lack of serotonin may be one of the reasons behind Seasonal Affective disorder. Getting out in bright sunlight, especially in Winter when it is much tougher often to find is important.

4. Taking a walk on a cold sunny day in the Winter is great but even in Summer some people just do not get out enough to help raise those levels of serotonin.

A few more tips from Chatelaine Magazine

5. Take B Complex Vitamins. High total intakes of vitamins B6 and B12 are associated with a lower risk of depressive symptoms over time in community-residing older adults, according to the results of a cohort study reported in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

Vitamin B6 in particular supports the production and function of serotonin, melatonin and dopamine in the brain.

6. St. John’s Wort. This herb has been proven effective for easing mild to moderate depression. It appears to work as a natural SSRI (selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitor) by preventing the breakdown of serotonin in the brain.

7. Add inositol to your smoothies. Naturally present in many foods, inositol improves the activity of serotonin in the brain. As a supplement, it’s an excellent choice for alleviating anxiety and depression and supporting nervous system health.

And a couple more from a great article on the Bodyecology website

8. Include fermented foods and drinks in your diet – Fermented foods and drinks greatly assist in digestion and assimilation of all the important nutrients you need for serotonin. Additionally, they boost the nutrients in your food by at least a hundred fold. As mentioned above they manufacture those essential B vitamins that help with boosting your mood.

Microflora rich Dong Quai is an excellent fermented drink that supports your energy and mood AND decreases cravings for sugar.

9. Get massages and other forms of body work – We’ve heard about the healing power of touch, but now research backs it up! A study conducted by the Touch Research Institutes at the University of Miami School of Medicine shows that massage increases serotonin by 28% and decreases cortisol (the stress hormone) by 31%.

10. Consider purchasing a BioMat. This is a wonderful pad that you lie on — ideally with headphones and beautiful relaxing music that increases brain cells. The BioMat combines far infrared negative ions and amethyst crystals and produces negative ions that increase the flow of oxygen to your brain having a positive effect on how serotonin is oxidized in your blood stream.

Like a large, chamber-size and more expensive sauna the Bio Mat also helps with removal of toxins that interfere with brain health. I recommend the smaller size because it is more affordable and yet you can still do a “sauna-level” sweat on it.

11. Eat foods that are high in Serotonin or raise serotonin levels. There are a few foods like Turkey or bananas with their Tryptophan, buckwheat and Flax which are high in B Vitamins and Omegas. And when speaking of Omega vitamins don’t forget Wild Salmon or eggs.

Nuts like walnuts are especially beneficial for serotonin production. Sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, sesame seeds, peanuts, almonds and cashews can increase serotonin in the body

12. If all of these things fail then it is a good idea to talk to your doctor. Antidepressant drugs like Lexapro, Prozac, Zoloft, and Paxil work to raise serotonin levels in the brain by stopping one part of your brain synapses from absorbing all serotonin and instead making it available for the parts that do need it. This will help you to be able to pop out of that depression in as little as a few days to a couple of weeks.

The key to using these drugs to raise serotonin levels to me though is that you need to do all of the right things. Do not rely on the drugs when you can instead rely on outdoor exercise and a better diet.

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I have been doing a bit of a whole self experiment to see how I could do more tracking. It feels a little like Biohacking but it is much more subtle.

I have been tracking my calories in using the app and website My Fitness Pal and at the same time I have gotten myself a FitBit Charge HR so that I can track my calories expended as well as my heart rate, sleep, and number of steps and floors done on a daily basis.

First My Fitness Pal

You have likely heard of My Fitness Pal before. It is a site that not only offers articles and other blog like infomration but also, I think more importantly, tracks your food with calories and nutrition.

To me it is interesting to see the number of calories eaten but it is also great to break down my protein, carbs, and fats. Also I track sodium and vitamin and mineral levels with the app and it has worked really well for seeing a lot of interesting food choices that I make.

This is what My Fitness Pal looks like on the Desktop

One of the early things that I found was that my eating was actually lower protein than I thought and that for many of my meals I was still overeating while other meals were a lot lower calories than I thought.

I can probably stand to eat less. I am a big snacker, but My Fitness Pal was also telling me that all those fruits and vegetables that I snack on throughout the day are very low in calories even when eaten in pretty big amounts.

I find that adding the foods is really easy in My Fitness Pal and I can either search through the online database and add a food easily or even scan a barcode with my phone and have it show up.

Also you get to break down breakfast, lunch, and dinner, as well as all your snacks so that it is easy to see what parts of your day are higher calorie than others.

Be aware of the serving size though. Just like anywhere else the serving size that you see in the app and the serving size the you actually eat may be different.

Add in A Fitbit Charge HR

Around the same time that I started using My Fitness Pal I also finally got myself a FitBit Charge HR.

The difference with this fitbit is that although it is still tracking steps like all of these different trackers do, this Fitbit Charge HR also tracks my heart rate, my sleep amount and patterns, and also links up my exercise level (doing some interpolation) right over to My Fitness Pal

This is what the sleep tracking as well as the exercise tracking looks in Fitbit

I have been using the Fitbit Charge HR for a few weeks now and it is great for letting me know exactly how much exercise I am getting so late in the day regardless of whether I have worked out of not I can at least see if I have had enough walking done.

Be aware though that the number of steps and calories burned may not be exact but over time you will be much more aware of how much exercise you are getting and what difference that exercise is doing for you.

Finally there is also a very vibrant Fitbit community online on both Reddit and on Facebook and these spots are great for tips, training ideas, and motivation.

There is a very social gamification with Fitbit where you can join in with others for a kind of challenge where you can compare yourself to your online friends to see how they are doing compared to you.

Fitness and exercise can often be lonely so having a little bit of extra motivation from others, even strangers, if a great thing to help you improve and keep going.

Putting My Fitness Pal and Fitbit Together

Now is where the magic sauce is for me. If you tracking your eating you are going to do great. If you track your exercise you are also going to do great.

Here you can see the addition of the calories added from Fitbit to My Fitness Pal

But the real advantage of both of these tools together is that you can track the food you are eating, those calories, and overlay your calories burned to give you a daily in and out total.

The knowledge of knowing what you eat and what you burned means that if you eat a banana you will know how much it took to burn that banana.

If you eat a meal at Wendys it will also give you an idea of what that decision is doing to you healthwise.

I hate to ever be the guy scolding people and judging their diet but I find that when people are eating fast food they will think, as I have on occasion, that it is a cheat meal and it will just take a bit of exercise to recover. Well that is not exactly true.

It will take a lot to recover from a burger, fries and a giant pop!

So when you are going through your day and syncing your Fitbit either automatically or on demand like I do what Fitbit does if you link correctly is to push the calories burned from your walking over to My Fitness Pal.

When those calories show up you will get more calories to eat for the day and be able to see how many calories you have burned and how much that burger and fries affected your total calories for the day.

One of the great things I find between these two apps is that Fitbit and My Fitness Pal are both available on iPhone as well as Android for mobile and each also has a website full of tips as well.

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On the weekend my daughter and I saw a great food documentary called Fed Up.

I tend to get a bit nervous about food documentaries as they tend to either tell you some stuff is bad, “oh and this otther stuff is really good” or they just scare you into not wanting to eat anything that you did not grow in your backyard.

Fed Up was kind of a different food documentary.

The beginning of the movie was all about the problems with sugar. Following some kids that were overweight and not sure how to stop it.

Fed Up tries hard to break the refrain that we hear always, “Eat well and exercise”. The kids that they show are exercising a lot, but it does not seems to help.

What Do We Learn in Fed Up?

The problem with the Great American Diet is the amount of sugar in it. The idea shown by this movie is sound and scientifically accurate, so it should be a bigger new story than it is.

The important fact early in the movie Fed Up is that refined sugar overloads the pancreas and in turn the pancreas dumps a lot of insulin into the body that helps turn the sugar into fat.

There is a lot of sugar in our diet and the amount of sugar in soda is terrible

This is not new news for any diabetic but for some reason we non-diabetics always think that this does not apply to us. But in fact it does.

So after showing us that sugar is the culprit we learn that most people are just pushing the idea of exercise as fixing the obesity epidemic when in fact the people that are eating the terrible food just have no idea that their issue is food itself and not the amount of exercise.

You can’t outrun your fork

Another problem brought up in the Fed Up Documentary is the demonization of natural fats (We won’t talk trans fats) when in fact the real diet changes in the 70s and 80s to diets that were low fat and higher carb really did not seem to help many people.

Here is the Fed Up Trailer

this stretches into the school system and the kinds of foods that are being fed to children. According to Fed Up 80% of schools are being supplied with food by fast food companies and of course the kids won’t complain as a slice of pizza and chips seems to them to be a lot better tasting than brocolli and salad (I disagree, but that is beside the point).

The amount of money that is sloshing around school systems and the government by the very people making people sick is stunning. When the McGovern Report on food was issued, or attempted to be issued the fast food and sugar based companies protested.

Also whenever there is pressure on the food industury to cur out sugar we see a pushback and claims that they are doing their part, when in fact this is not true at all.

So What Are We Supposed To Do To Stop Obesity?

The message that Fed Up gives us is that there are a lot of refined carbohydrates in our diets and not enough real food.

Even when we think we are eating well with a cereal bar or natural style crackers and breads what we are really doing is pumping carbohydrates into our body that will turn to fat.

What we should be eating instead are more whole foods. Fruits, vegetables, steak, meat. And no soda, crackers, fast food, or items with a lot ingredients in them.

This is not news to me and should not be to you as well.

If you ever try to count calories and look at an apple, celery, or other fruits and vegetables you find they are loaded with nutrients and short on calories.

The other real message of the movie is that we must stop looking at what is marketed to us as a good food in commercials and other ads and instead educate ourselves and eat food that we know the real value of for our nutrition and health.

My daughter and I loved Fed Up and though it brought up a lot of great stories of real people and not only brought out issues with food but also offered solutions that anyone can and should follow.

If you have NetFlix you can see Fed Up on there. Otherwise you can buy the DVD on the Fed Up site

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