Vitamin E and Asthma, Vitamin B and Depression
September 2, 2006 by kate baggott
Filed under Mental Health
Further to Thursday’s post about a study the recommends all pre-natal vitamins, a Scottish study reported in the Scotsman this morning suggests that rising rates of childhood asthma may be linked to a diet low in vitamin E.
- Dr Graham Devereux, who led the research at Aberdeen University, told the Scotsman that a drop in people’s intake of vitamin E in the past 50 years was perhaps linked to the rising number of children with asthma. But he said more work was needed before specific advice could be given to women in order to reduce the risks to their children.
Sources of vitamin E include vegetable oils like olive oil, canola and sunflower oil, margarine, wheat germ, nuts, sunflower seeds, leafy green vegetables, meat and fish. So eating salad before one meal every day is a habit to strive for not just for pregnant women, but for everyone.
Vitamin depletion is not just about vitamine E. Yesterday, I was discussing post partum depression with a friend who recently recovered from the condition to become a depression activist. Her cure, she says, came from ensuring she got enough of the B vitamins.
Folic acid is one of the B vitamins. This made me wonder if women who stop taking their prenatal vitamins after the birth, instead of after they finish lactating, are at a greater risk of postpartum depression? I thought
I would ask about your experiences. Did you keep taking the vitamins and have PPD anyway, or did you stop taking them before you were diagnosed?
I kept taking them. I definitely felt major fluctuation in my ‘hormones’, or at least my emotional levels every day for the first few weeks which left me feeling very unstable.
However I will never know if that was all just from having a baby and knowing exactly how much worse all the things what went wrong could have been – or from knowing that my mother was so ill and I could not be there to help her. Actually I should have had PPD with all that stress!!
The fact that you avoided PPD is a major accomplishment. I hope the vitamins helped you get through that.
I agree that good nutrition and vitamins are important to fighting Asthma and being healthy, but do we have any good information on just what actually helps, and how much? I mean, you should be taking your vitamins anyway, but it would be nice to know how much of what has what effect.
Cheers.