Cooking to Cure: A nutritional approach to anxiety and depression by Angela Dailey

Author:Angela Dailey [Dailey, Angela]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2015-02-11T22:00:00+00:00

Vitamin C

A deficiency in vitamin C, also called ascorbic acid, can cause neurological damage and the addition of vitamin C to the diet can improve or reverse symptoms of anxiety, depression and bipolar disorder.

A recent study at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Department of Neuroscience in Nashville, Tennessee and published in the Journal of Neurochemistry (Ward, et al., 2013) deprived mice of vitamin C. The deprivation caused depressive and submissive behaviors as well as an increased preference for sugar. More importantly, there were decreases in dopamine and serotonin in the brain.

Another interesting study with mice was recently conducted in Brazil and published in the Journal of Psychiatric Research (Moretti et al., 2012). The mice were subjected to “chronic unpredictable stress” (CUS) for 14 days. This CUS produced depressive behaviors and neurochemical alterations. From the 8th to the 14th day, half of the mice were treated with fluoxetine (Prozac) and half were treated with vitamin C. The results were as powerful with the vitamin C as with the fluoxetine. In other words, the vitamin C reversed the detrimental effects and helped the mice cope with the ongoing stress as well as the Prozac did. The researchers concluded, “These findings indicate a rapid and robust effect of ascorbic acid in reversing behavioral and biochemical alterations induced by CUS in mice, suggesting that this vitamin may be an alternative approach for the management of depressive symptoms.”

Researchers at the Global Neuroscience Initiative Foundation in Los Angeles, California (Amr et al., 2013), studied the effects of fluoxetine (Prozac) alone and in combination with vitamin C in depressed children. Their results showed a significantly more positive effect in the group treated with both fluoxetine and vitamin C as compared to the group given fluoxetine and a placebo. The results suggest that vitamin C may be an effective adjunctive treatment in depressed children treated with Prozac.

Eighty psychiatric patients at a private hospital in India, 40 suffering from depression and 40 suffering from anxiety, were found to have much lower levels of vitamins A, C, and E than a healthy population. Half of each group was given 600 mg/day of vitamin A, 1000 mg/day of vitamin C, and 800 mg/day of vitamin E in addition to their regular anti-depressant or antianxiety medication. After 6 weeks of treatment with vitamins A, C, and E, a significant reduction in both depression and anxiety was observed in those treated with the vitamins than in those treated with medication alone. It’s hard to say in a study that combines nutrients whether the improvement was due to one or more of the vitamins but in another study done with rats in New Zealand, groups of stressed rats were treated with vitamin C and vitamin E separately and one group was treated with both vitamins C and E together. There were no significant differences between the groups. Vitamins C and E were effective in reducing anxiety whether given separately or together (Hughes et. al., 2010).

In a double-blind study by Naylor and Smith (1981), both

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