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Deli meats such as salami or dung may aggravate the symptoms of some people with mental illness, researchers reported Wednesday
that people hospitalized for mania were three times more likely to say that They ate pork-butchery.
Researchers hasten to say that they have not proved that eating cold cuts caused a mental illness, or even that a little jerky was hurting a person with it, say, of a bipolar disorder. But they have conducted other experiments suggesting that nitrates in processed meats could affect the mental state of someone. "We are not trying to scare people," said Dr. Robert Yolken of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
"We discovered that the history of eating dried meat nitrate, but not other meat or fish products, was strongly and independently associated with the current craze," writes Yolken and his colleagues in the Molecular Psychiatry Journal.
"Deli products were generally in the form of meat sticks, dried beef and turkey, which are deli products generally prepared with added nitrates."
The team was actually looking for a possible link with mania, which is a common symptom of some mental illnesses, such as bipolar disorder, and which includes excited and sometimes delusional behavior, as well as the l? insomnia and irritability [196]. 59008] They interviewed approximately 1,100 people, including patients with psychiatric disorders treated at the Sheppard Pratt Health System in Baltimore from 2007 to 2017.
They were asked about what they had eaten because Yolken had a theory about viruses or other microorganisms "We have looked at a number of different dietary shows and the salty meat is really distinguished," Yolken told NBC News
Olken said that they took into account the possibility that people with mental illness could eat differently. "It was not only that people with mania have an abnormal diet," he said.
And he has a theory for what could happen. "We think the key is probably inflammation," Yolken said.
Nitrates in food are linked to cancer, which is in turn related to inflammation. And Yolken says that other studies have shown that people who have manic episodes show signs of inflammation in their bodies.
"We want to ask the question of whether inflammatory processes are important in psychiatric disorders". how to test the potential effects of nitrates or other food ingredients in humans? "It's very difficult to show the cause and effect of the diet in humans," he says.
The researchers therefore tried to test rats by giving them dried beef loaded with nitrates every other day
Rats that ate nitrates seemed more hyperactive, the team reports. "Animals do not have the mania in the sense that people do," Yolken said. But some aspects of rat biology and human biology are similar and it seems that nitrates have altered the microbiome – intestinal bacteria – of rats.
Yolken and other researchers have shown that altering the microbiome can affect the symptoms of psychiatric disorders, including schizophrenia. We do not really know why, but more and more research shows that bacteria living in and on our bodies profoundly affect health.
Yolken believes that the balance of bacteria can play a role in inflammation, which can the symptoms of mania in people genetically predisposed to psychiatric illness.
"I think that for people with mania, and perhaps other disorders, there may be environmental triggers that you can control."
External experts noted that the work is very preliminary
"We would need much more evidence of a link before making recommendations to patients or the public regarding the risk of eating meat and develop the mania ". said Dr. Anthony Cleare, a professor of psychiatry at King's College London who was not involved in the study.
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