To Fight Addiction, Feed Your Brain

Diet was an extremely important aspect of my recovery, one that I only addressed after many unsuccessful attempts. I personally chose a vegitarian diet - well, actually I first eliminated red meat, then poultry, then most seafood, and finally try to avoid animal products whenever possible (though I still sometimes eat some seafood and cheese). While I am sure that my diet adjustment had a physiological (and bio-psychological) impact on my early recovery, one aspect was more purely psychological. I felt I was treating my body better, was treating myself better, and my dietary choices reflected an actionable reflection of the new care I was showing myself. I also began to exercise. These actionable steps, while also being something I could control in an otherwise out of control life, were a manifestation of personal care. I didn't want to drink or use, when I was taking such good care of myself. I also did my best to reduce my sugar intake early in recovery. My understanding, is that in some over-simplified sense alcohol turns to sugar in your body, and reintroducing large amounts of sugar in recovery can actually trigger cravings. So I simply tried to eliminate it as much as possible. Another nutritional aspect I implemented, which I feel has helped quite a bit, is taking high doses of vitamin B-12. It is my understanding this can be depleted, as you mentioned, and also that this can cause depressive symptoms (which for me often led to relapse).

Hi Claire, I completely agree - there are many underlying factors in addiction. I'm quite interested in the way that the brain is effected by our food choices. Addiction certainly is a "brain problem and chemical problem". Since the the brian and all its chemicals are made from food, when people make a plan for recovery, I hope they think about nutrition too.

It adds a lot more than yours did.

yes our diets can effect many areas of our lives.. but the real means to effective recovery lies in the idea of the person who in in rehab of any sort wants this more than anything else in their life. it must become their life, love and a new life.. Yes a good diet is apart of this, but it is not always the underlying factor in addiction. It is a brain and chemical problem in the brain.

Thank you, Dr. Ramsey. Very informative and progressive.

I'm not being judgmental about her. I'm being judgmental about the article that focuses only on one person with one dietary practice and saying that her diet was not able to contribute to her recovery even when we don't know what she was eating--only what she wasn't. I have known plenty of people--vegetarians and not--with anemia, some severe. They were not told to eat red meat, so there are ways to counter deficiencies without relying on a particular food source.

I am a vegetarian and have been for almost thirty years. However, like the woman in the article I suffered a severe iron deficiency anemia in my younger years. There is really no way to get enough iron without eating red meat if you suffer from a deficiency as I did. Iron supplements are not absorbed in the same way, and the pills have nasty side effects. There is some iron in vegetables like spinach, but not enough and not the right kind. Let us not be judgmental. Vegetarianism is not for everyone.

It's one thing to note that people with addictions need to focus on nourishing foods and another to suggest that they need to eat meat, which can be laden with hormones, antibiotics, and so on, and vary in degree of nutritional value. The alcohol and drugs were depleting her stores of nutrients. In the absence of any other information regarding her previous diet--all we're told is she drank soy milk and avoided dairy and meat and didn't consume enough calories--it's problematic to assume that a healthy, nutrient-rich vegetarian diet would not have aided in her recovery.