‘Unspoken area’
The clinician guide contains not only an overview and a suggested agenda to steer discussion, but also a sample visual representation of the recommended relative proportions of different food categories in an ideal meal as well as sample meals, a budgeting discussion, and a list of goals.
A closing statement encourages the clinician to “keep the messaging positive, celebrate small victories, and provide encouragement.”
Specific dietary recommendations include choosing complex carbohydrates and healthy fats, reducing highly processed foods and sugar, adding vegetables and fruits to meals and snacks, and eating protein-rich foods throughout the day.
A “noteworthy theme” that emerged in discussions with psychiatrists as well as participants with SSD was “the lack of nutrition training in medical education and psychiatric residency and the general absence of nutritional counseling in this field of medicine.”
One participant described nutrition as “definitely an unspoken area” in schizophrenia – especially in institutional settings, where “you are overloaded with sugars, not healthy grain, not complex grain. You get white bread sandwiches, shitty juice.”
Powerful tool
Commenting on the paper for this news organization, Uma Naidoo, MD, director of nutritional and lifestyle psychiatry, Massachusetts General Hospital, and a nutrition educator at Harvard Medical School, both in Boston, said she appreciates that this paper “is seeking methods to expand treatment options for those with SSD and improve provider understanding/knowledge of therapeutic foods.”
She called the pilot evaluation “notably small,” but added that it “provides results to suggest that scaling this worksheet/guide may hold promise to better provide nutritional counseling to those with psychiatric illness.”
Dr. Naidoo, also a chef and the author of “This Is Your Brain on Food,” who was not involved in the study said, “I’ve seen the power of food as medicine in my own hospital practice and do believe that food is one of the most powerful tools we have in supporting mental fitness and emotional well-being.”
The project was funded by the Canadian CAM Research Fund. Dr. LaChance and Dr. Naidoo have disclosed no relevant financial relationships.
A version of this article first appeared on Medscape.com.