Did you know that one of the reasons it’s difficult to perform research on products like Truehope’s EMPowerplus is that because granting agencies across the board don’t fund multinutrient research?
Mental health researchers Dr. Bonnie Kaplan and Julia Rucklidge recently wrote about the current mental health research environment.
What we have not talked about at all yet is the fact that the major federal granting agencies in every country are behind the times in one very important way: they pour millions of dollars into single-nutrient research, but so far have refused to fund research on multinutrient formulas. In fact, it is currently almost impossible to obtain competitive grants to study multinutrient formulas.
They go on to discuss how grant application reviewers, upon receiving multinutrient grand applications, ask “What’s the important ingredient in the multinutrient formula?”
The very basis of asking ‘which is the important ingredient’ reflects an outdated way of thinking — it reflects the expectation that a single nutrient is somehow going to have magical abilities to restore normal gut and brain function.
What’s worse is that this backwards attitude toward nutrition and mental health research encourages young scientists to leave the field of mental health and nutrition to study in fields that are more readily funded.
So in the last couple of years, we have watched some excellent young scientists as they have taken other jobs and studied other topics out of necessity, even though they are passionate about studying the potential to treat ADHD, bipolar disorder, and substance abuse with multinutrient formulas.
As noted by Drs. Kaplan and Rucklidge, tomorrow is Giving Tuesday, a direct response to the commercialization and consumerism of Black Friday and Cyber Monday in the United States. To learn more about Giving Tuesday, visit this American website or this Canadian one.
If you’re planning to participate in Giving Tuesday this year, we echo the request of Drs. Kaplan and Rucklidge for you to consider donating to a charity focused on improving mental health wellness. Dr. Kalpan established such a charity (Foundation for Excellence in Mental Health Care) last summer as a response to the lack of available funding for research in the field.
And if you come across this post after Giving Tuesday, please remember that mental health researchers need funding all year round. Feel free to donate whenever you can, no matter the time of year.
You can help make research in mental health and nutrition a reality.