Boost Your Mood, Fight Cognitive Decline
Certain nutritional deficiencies can cause or exacerbate mood and mental health issues. Here are the best supplements to stave them off.
Many common mental health issues can be caused or exacerbated by nutritional deficiencies. Just as we can optimize our bodies with the right supplementation, so too can we help optimize our minds with the right supplements. Here are the best supplements to consider.
1. Omega-3 Fatty Acids – Not-Fishy Fish Oil
Do a massive meta-study of all the fish oil research and you’ll notice a trend regarding mental health: fish oils help on various fronts, from depression to cognitive decline.
Progressive mental health professionals are even “prescribing” diets high in fish or fish oil supplements to their patients, either as an adjunct to prescription meds or as a pre-drug intervention. While we can’t say fish oil is the “cure” for anything, we can certainly say it helps minimize existing symptoms and perhaps prevent future problems.
A recent study also looked at omega-3s and the effects of stress. Stress and the associated inflammation and cortisol spike it causes are obviously not good for physical or mental health.
In the study, those taking 2.5 grams of omega-3s were able to suppress the damage caused by a stressful event, decreasing cortisol and a certain pro-inflammatory protein by 19% and 33%, respectively. We can’t stop stress from happening, but fish oil does seem to reduce the negative effects of that stress.
Besides the anti-inflammatory benefits, omega-3 fatty acids may help with cognitive disorders by increasing cell permeability. That’s good news because this permeability allows serotonin – the “feel good” chemical that carries messages around your brain – to more easily pass through brain cell membranes.
Finally, low-T is related to depressive signs, and omega-3 fatty acids can assist optimize your testosterone ranges.
What to Take
Most benefits are seen with a relatively hefty dose of omega-3s, so you need a highly concentrated fish oil supplement. One serving per day (4 softgels) of Flameout® takes care of it. Personally, I take all 4 softgels at night time to tamp down any surplus cortisol earlier than mattress.
2. Creatine – Not Just for Muscles, Bro
Not only has science recently discovered how beneficial it is for heart health (even if you don’t work out), creatine monohydrate may be useful for temper. It would even assist deter Alzheimer’s and different neurodegenerative ailments.
New research present that creatine appears to assist with melancholy or “depressed temper.” Whereas most research have been achieved on these with main depressive issues and even meth dependancy (folks with altered mind bioenergetics), it’s not a leap to say that common creatine utilization may play a job in bettering or preserving mind well being.
Creatine supplementation has even been proven to extend psychological sharpness and mind effectivity when performing strenuous psychological duties, at the least in individuals who initially had low ranges of creatine, like vegans and different meat-deniers.
What to Take
Most studies are using 3 to 10 grams of creatine per day, but 5 grams does the trick for most people. Just be sure to use an ultra-pure, micronized formula like this one.
3. Micellar Curcumin – The Kind You Absorb
Recent research found that curcumin may help with depression, both mild depression and major depressive disorder (MDD).
How does it do that? Well, chronic inflammation has been unequivocally linked to depression and other mental issues. In fancy PhD-speak, inflammation is a critical mediatory in the pathophysiology of mood disorders. Curcumin helps keep excess inflammation at bay by scavenging the free radicals that create it.
Other research is looking into treating schizophrenia with curcumin. And curcumin has even been shown to improve your working memory.
What to Take
You can’t eat enough turmeric from spicy Indian food to get all the varied benefits of curcumin (dammit). In fact, even most curcumin supplements have terrible bioavailability issues. We improved that a little by adding piperine, but now there’s something better: solid lipid curcumin particles.
The end result? A 95-times enhance in free-curcumin blood focus, together with a for much longer exercise. All you want is a single 400-mg capsule each day. It retains working for twenty-four hours. Biotest’s Micellar Curcumin™ is the best choice. Truthfully, if you happen to’re not taking stable lipid curcumin particles, you’re actually not taking curcumin.
4. Sex-Enhancing Formulas – Do It All For The Nookie
This one may seem like a stretch, but the relationship between sex and emotional well-being is pretty clear. Lack of sex or the inability to perform can cause anxiety, stress, depressive symptoms, insecurity, and the desire to post nasty Instagram replies.
Male sexual performance can be hampered by prostate issues and blood flow problems (think: puny erections). A formulation that promotes a healthy prostate size and function – and better blood flow to the penis – can help prevent those issues.
What to Take
The cheekily named P-Well™ complement is filled with all of the potent pure substances a person must pump up his vascular sexual well being.
On the flip, sexual well being and need may also be affected by testosterone manufacturing, as you’d count on. Eurycoma longifolia, aka tongkat ali, can assist direct the testes to crank out extra testosterone. However there’s a much less apparent profit: it inhibits rho kinases, which may result in greater, firmer boners. (Right here’s all of the sexy science.)
A complement like Alpha Male® accommodates every little thing wanted to naturally pump up T ranges and pump up… different issues. Take 1-2 capsules within the morning on an empty abdomen and repeat within the night.
5. Magnesium – Big Pharm Hates It
Storytime! Once upon a time, 126 people diagnosed with mild to moderate depression were each given a bottle of pills. They were told to take one tablet per day as a depression treatment.
Two weeks later, half of those people reported feeling a little better. Four weeks after that, those same people reported feeling significantly better. The symptoms of their depression had lessened. Anxiety had decreased too. The other half of the group? No improvements at all.
So what’s going on here? Well, these folks were part of a study looking at the role magnesium performs in melancholy. Half of them took low cost magnesium and the opposite half, the management group, took a placebo. The magnesium customers felt a complete lot higher.
So is melancholy a magnesium deficiency? Effectively, it’s not so simple as “magnesium cures melancholy” – though some medical professionals have been making that declare since at the least 1967 – but it surely’s fairly clear {that a} magnesium deficiency at the least exacerbates the issue.
We’ve recognized for some time that magnesium deficiency is linked to melancholy, anxiousness, and irritation. However that is the primary randomized medical trial to actually check out magnesium’s skill to scale back or management the signs of melancholy.
Maybe not coincidentally, most individuals today are at the least just a little poor in magnesium, and it’s estimated that 15 million American adults endure from melancholy. That’s virtually 7% of the inhabitants. Is that this merely the results of widespread magnesium deficiency? For now, we are able to at the least say that the 2 are associated.
Sarcastically, prescription antidepressants may be terribly miserable, with unwanted effects like sexual issues, emotional numbness, and suicidal ideas being reported by about half of all customers.
If these with delicate signs can get off the prescription meds, and if these with reasonable signs may scale back the quantity they use (or keep away from the necessity for a second med), that may be an excellent factor. For the remainder of us, magnesium supplementation may at the least be a hedge towards growing a case of the sads.
What to Take
This study used magnesium chloride at 248 mg per day. But for best results, choose fully chelated magnesium (glyceniate chelate) for better absorption. Those who train hard might want to use a slightly higher serving size, about 400 mg.
If you’re already using a product like ElitePro™ Minerals for its different advantages, you’re coated.
ZMA® would additionally do the trick, and it’s cheap.
The Obligatory Note
Mental health issues are complex and varied. Obviously, seek counsel and treatment from qualified mental health professionals.
They’ll likely ignore the role of nutrition and quickly prescribe drugs that may or may not help – and may or may not cause other problems that require more drugs – all while Big Pharm turns you into a drooling lifetime customer. But, yeah, you should definitely consult with them. Trust the experts.
References
References
- Burhani MD et al. **Fish oil and depression: The skinny on fats.**J Integr Neurosci. 2017;16(s1):S115-S124. PubMed.
- Madison AA et al. **Omega-3 supplementation and stress reactivity of mobile growing old biomarkers: an ancillary substudy of a randomized, managed trial in midlife adults.**Mol Psychiatry. 2021 Jul;26(7):3034–3042. PMC.
- Jensen TK et al. Associations of Fish Oil Complement Use With Testicular Perform in Younger Males. JAMA Netw Open. 2020 Jan 3;3(1):e1919462. PubMed.
- Spira AP et al. Influence of sleep on the chance of cognitive decline and dementia. Curr Opin Psychiatry. 2014 Nov;27(6):478–483. PMC.
- Kious BM et al. Creatine for the Therapy of Melancholy. Biomolecules. 2019 Sep;9(9):406. PMC.
- Ng QX et al. Medical Use of Curcumin in Melancholy: A Meta-Evaluation. J Am Med Dir Assoc. 2017 Jun 1;18(6):503-508. PubMed.
- Tarleton EK et al. Position of magnesium supplementation within the therapy of melancholy: A randomized medical trial. PLoS One. 2017 Jun 27;12(6):e0180067. PubMed.
