Last month, EMPowerplus researchers Bonnie Kaplan and Julia Rucklidge published an article on the website Mad in America regarding the use of nutrition to decrease the onset of psychosis.
They point out that it’s generally accepted (even recommended) that adults supplement their diet with multivitamins to improve their physical health and “reduce their risk of cardiovascular disease, cancer, and osteoporosis”.
Kaplan and Rucklidge note, however, that despite the brain being “the most metabolically important organ of the body, using up vast amounts of nutrients compared to other organs,” very few mental health researchers claim that nutrient supplementation is the key to preventing mental disorders.
One of the reasons they propose for this discrepancy is something called knowledge translation. Basically, this is the lag seen between when scientific findings are published and when that new knowledge disseminates into clinical practise.
As an example, they cite a study published in 2010 that discovered fish oil could have 5-fold positive effect on the prevention of psychosis onset compared to a placebo. Several other studies by these same researchers further confirm this positive effect.
Despite these encouraging findings, Kaplan and Rucklidge have yet to find mental health care professionals who regularly use fish oil in their clinical practise.
Research exploring links between nutrition and mental health is relatively new, so it’s not surprising that knowledge translation is still an obstacle in seeing such research practised in real life.
Our hope, however, is that as more of this research comes to light, more professionals will embrace it. Hopefully soon, we can start seeing a greater acceptance of nutrition as valid tool for mental health management.