Food and Your Moods - Raising Serotonin, Our Natural Prozac

Written by Julia Ross

Raising Serotonin, Our Natural Prozac

Low serotonin can be the easiest deficiency of all to develop. Very few foods are high in the amino acid tryptophan, which is the only nutrient that the body can use to make serotonin. According to a 1997 Lancet study, tryptophan is one of the first nutrients to be depleted by weight-loss dieting. If, in addition to dieting, you inherited low serotonin levels and experience a lot of stress, your levels can fall low enough to set off a major eating disorder or serious emotional disturbances.

Restoring your serotonin levels can be a life-or-death matter. Suicides and violent crimes are closely associated with deficiencies of serotonin. The sometimes fatal obsessions and self-hate of bulimics and anorectics are clearly linked to low serotonin levels as well.

Do you have any obsessions that might be caused by low serotonin levels? The women I have worked with who report obsessive behavior tend to be "neat-niks" and suffer from negative obsessing about their physical appearance, while the men are often "neat-freaks," although they also complain about troubling sexual fantasies they can't stop. As we all know, anorectics (who are low in serotonin) are driven to obsessive control of their food intake. Obsessive fears and phobias are common among people with low serotonin levels.

It may be a difficult adjustment for you to begin to see symptoms like control, fear, and low self-esteem as biochemical problems, not just psychological ones. But the success of drugs like Prozac has already alerted us to the biochemical nature of many symptoms that don't respond to psychological help alone.

Drugs like Prozac are called serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) because they keep whatever serotonin we have active. But they do not actually provide additional serotonin. For this reason, most people using SSRIs often continue to have some low-serotonin symptoms. Before there were SSRIs, the pharmaceutical compound L-tryptophan was commonly used to increase serotonin levels. For more than twenty years, psychiatrists and health food stores enthusiastically recommended it for relieving depression and food cravings and normalizing sleep without side effects. Many people found that their symptoms were eliminated permanently after only a few months of L-tryptophan use.

In 1989, a series of bad batches of L-tryptophan, which filled forty people and made many more very sick, prompted the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to stop all U.S. sales. One Japanese company, Showa Denko, had produced all of these batches, which, it was found, were contaminated because they had eliminated three filter systems that they'd been using for years - just why they chose to take away these safety filters is a question that remains unanswered. Showa Denko has never made tryptophan again. Despite evidence that no other manufacturer has ever made a problem batch, the FDA recommended for years that L-tryptophan not be used as a supplement. (Interestingly, they have made no effort to stop the sale of infant formulas, most of which contain added L-tryptophan.)

With L-tryptophan unavailable, drugs like Prozac, Zoloft, and Redux have become our primary tools for combating the crippling symptoms of low serotonin. Unfortunately, these drugs provide only temporary and incomplete benefits, and often have uncomfortable or dangerous side effects. Fortunately, in 1996, many compounding pharmacies began providing L-tryptophan again, by physician prescription, and a new version of tryptophan called 5HTP (5-hydroxytryptophan) became available over the counter in 1998 without FDA opposition. In 2000, Lidtke Technologies Corporation of Phoenix, Arizona, made L-tryptophan available through health professionals without prescription. Look for other supplement suppliers to follow suit, as the FDA has never formally banned the sale of this essential amino acid.

Whatever mood-enhancing brain chemicals you have in short supply, they can be replenished quickly, easily, and safely.

Tryptophan Depletion: The Path to Depression, Low Self-esteem, Obsession and Eating Disorders

Serotonin, perhaps the most well known of the brain's four key mood regulators, is made from the amino acid L-tryptophan. Because few foods contain high amounts of tryptophan, it is one of the first nutrients that you can lose when you start dieting. A new study shows that serotonin levels can drop too low within seven hours of tryptophan depletion. Let's follow this single essential protein (there are nine altogether) as it becomes more and more deeply depleted by dieting. To see how decreased levels of even one brain nutrient might turn you toward depression, compulsive eating, bulimia, or anorexia.

In his best seller, Listening to Prozac, Peter Kramer, M.D., explains that when our serotonin levels drop, so do our feelings of self-esteem, regardless of our actual circumstances or accomplishments. These feelings can easily be the result of not eating the protein foods that keep serotonin levels high. As their serotonin-dependent self-esteem drops, girls tend to diet even more vigorously. "If I get thin enough, I'll feel good about myself again!" Tragically, they don't know that they will never be thin enough to satisfy their starving minds. Extreme dieting is actually the worst way to try to raise self-esteem because the brain can only deteriorate further and become more self-critical as it starves. More and more dieters worldwide are experiencing this miserable side effect of weight reduction on the brain.

When tryptophan deficiency causes serotonin levels to drop, you may become obsessed by thoughts you can't turn off or behaviors you can't stop. Once this rigid behavior pattern emerges in the course of dieting, the predisposition to eating disorders is complete. Just as some low-serotonin obsessive-compulsives wash their hands fifty times a day, some young dieters may begin to practice a constant, involuntary vigilance regarding food and the perfect body. They become obsessed with calorie counting, with how ugly they are, and on how to eat less and less. As they eat less, their serotonin levels fall farther, increasing dieters' obsession with undereating. As their zinc and B vitamin levels drop low as well, their appetite is lost. This can be the perfect biochemical setup for anorexia.

What so many therapists and others have observed as the central issue of "control" in anorexia often comes down to this: just as vitamin C deficiency (scurvy) results in an outbreak of red spots, do does tryptophan (and serotonin) deficiency result in an outbreak of the obsessive-compulsive behavior that we call "control." There may be psychological elements in the picture, too, but a low-serotonin brain is ill equipped to resolve them.

Source: excerpted with permission from The Diet Cure: The 8-Step Program to Rebalance Your Body Chemistry and End Food Cravings, Weight Problems, and Mood Swings-Now, by Julia Ross.

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