before for the first time in years. For breakfast she had had some oatmeal and raisins— carbohydrates and a sweet taste, expansive, and not at all a balance for highly expansive chocolate. Depression is a feeling of losing one’ s ground, losing grasp of reality, being unconnected, uncentered. It could also be classified as expansive. So I suggested to Y. that she go to the kitchen and take a good lick of salty umeboshi plum paste. The effect of umeboshi is instantly tightening and centering because of the salt, waking one up, so to speak.( If she hadn’ t had umeboshi in the house, I would have suggested Greek olives, anchovies, salami, brine pickles, or any other salt-cured food.) I’ ve used umeboshi very successfully to snap my children out of crying jags, for example. By the time Y. came back to the phone, she had already stopped crying. We talked some more, I told her to take a few more licks of the paste, and within a few minutes she sounded almost like her old self.“ I feel much better now,” she said, and I could tell by her voice that it was true. Then I suggested that she have some fish or chicken for lunch and that she stay away from sweets of any kind for a while. By the time we hung up, I was satisfied that she was quite out of the hole. The entire conversation didn’ t take more than fifteen or twenty minutes. I spoke to her again a week later, and she had been perfectly fine. She is also staying away from chocolate. The most common foods to cause mental disturbances are sugar, milk, and milk products. Negative reactions to milk have often been called allergies, implying that these are isolated, abnormal cases. I would like to submit that negative reactions to milk products, including emotional reactions such as depression, weepiness, and feelings of helplessness and inability to cope, are so widespread that they almost could be considered the norm. The reactions are intensified when the diet also includes sugar. Sugar is very closely linked to feelings of alienation, despair, and depression. As we saw in chapter six, sugar strengthens feelings of individuality; when those feelings are taken to an extreme, individuality becomes aloneness and alienation. I hope the day will come when, if we suffer from any of these feelings, we’ ll all know to first stop eating cake, ice cream, candy, pastries, chocolate, sugared cereals, and so on. Then we will wait four days, and only then, if the feelings still persist unabated, accept them as psychologically generated and explore them through therapy. Wheat, once revered as the staff of life, now causes unpleasant allergic reactions in many people, often in the form of moodiness and depression. Obviously, wheat today is not what it once was. Perhaps the agricultural growing methods currently in use, which involve considerable use of pesticides and chemical fertilizers, might be part of the problem. I’ ve not run across any research done on this subject, but you may want to keep this in mind if you consume large quantities of wheat products, such as bread, noodles, and crackers. If wheat is consumed with sugar, as it would be in the case of cakes, cookies, or pastries, it would make sense to eliminate the sugar first— and dairy too, if used— before the wheat is accused and found guilty. For more detailed information and guidelines about the effects of various foods on mood, please turn to chapter six. The chart on the next page, however, will give you a quick and handy overview of what moods may be related to which food excesses or deficiencies. It’ s up to you to decide where the shoe fits, if anywhere. The chart is a map of possibilities, † not of fixed and immutable facts. You must experiment to see where, when, and to what degree the guidelines apply to your personal condition.
FOOD AND MOOD CHART