Depression - Food - Life - Faith

In a brief report Dr. Blaylock, a medical doctor with a long established neurosurgical and nutritional practice, shares how Fats Affect Depression. The article is worthy of reading.

What we eat undoubtedly affects our health. The old saying: “You are what you eat,” continues to be proven to be true. Most people are clueless regarding what they are eating. People go to the grocery store and the restaurant and imagine that because the government has approved a processed product that it is therefore safe. People also are unaware that the government is deliberately preventing many healthy foods from being marketed commercially.

But what we eat is only part of the problem. It is a BIG part of the problem, but still only a portion. Ultimately depression is a spiritual issue. What we eat does have an impact upon our spiritual condition. This is especially true regarding what we eat that is spiritual, but also what we eat that is physical. I suppose that my awareness of this is why I appreciate a mealtime prayer passed down by my father, a prayer that he always called “Uncle John’s Prayer.”

Lord bless these gifts for their intended use, that they nourish and strengthen us both physically and spiritually. Amen.

Those things of which we partake we bind to ourselves. This includes our many daily activities. Our thoughts, words, and deeds shape us. Our choices in lifestyle shape us. This is why God has given us the Decalog or the Ten Commandments. These Ten Words or Sayings of God teach us who He says that we are according to whom He created us to be and recreates us to be. These Ten Sayings teach us what we are not according to our own sinful lusts and nature, and what we should be and will be by His gracious intervention.

These Ten Sayings of God teach us why we experience the troubles that we have in our lives. Depression is most certainly caused by our unwillingness to be bound by God to His ways. If we start at the end of the Ten Sayings and work our way back to the First, we easily identify the many ills that we bring upon ourselves. At the end of the Sayings or Commandments, we encounter our covetousness. Lusting after what we do not have robs us of contentment and true satisfaction of heart and soul and mind and finally even of body. Working our way back to the First Declaration, we find that all of the things that trouble us arise from our stubborn refusal to fear, love, and trust in God above all things.

Our choices in foods stem from this. Oh how busy we are trying to provide for ourselves and to fulfill our needs for income and whatever else that we believe that we must acquire. Then we don’t have time to prepare our own meals. We don’t have time to sit and talk quietly and to pray and to commune with God as a family. We even grasp after the worship services of the Church and recreate them after the lusts of our wayward hearts and minds.

Then, rather than hearing God’s call to be turned from these things back to Him, when our ways fail us, we imagine even more anthropopathic and anthropomorphic answers, remedies, and cures. But these all ultimately produce even more problems, often called “side effects.” It is not uncommon for these side effects to be even more of a problem than the original ill that is being treated.

The farther that we move from what God has designed and declared, the farther we move toward disorder, confusion, and trouble. The more that we rely upon ourselves and other people and worldly answers, the more disappointment that we encounter. What we eat, how we live, how we treat others, even how others respond to us, these all are dependent upon how we hear God. Do we even hear Him at all?