Food for happier thought? This is a nice, to-the-point article, with some good dietary recommendations. Noticing the lack of sources listed (despite the article being published in Harvard Health Blog) gave me a little knee-jerk of skepticism. I get that reaction sometimes, which makes sense after all of the biomedical courses at AAAOM, though I am very much trained in two ways of thinking thanks to that same education--that is, having gone to Chinese medicine school for four years. This two-brained thought process has very much affected my day-to-day life.
What brings us health after all? What about wellness? If we are born with ideal genes and live a perfect Edenic life, eating only whole foods, never carousing or overworking ourselves, and we live to old age without ever even having to take an aspirin, then more than likely our body-mind will have lived and died like Schrodinger's cat, never examined or analysed, and we will be none the worse, health-wise, for the lack of any such meddling. But we don't get that luck, none of us. Eventually we have to figure out how to fix whatever might have gone wrong, or weakened or broken, and then we have choices.
Here's where the two brains come in. Classic right and left brain differentiation is familiar to most people: the right brain is intuitive, creative and subjective, while the left brain is analytical, number-driven, and always objective and needing proof. Reading the article, both sides of my noodle were active. The left was partially satisfied, but only when the writer's point was something already familiar to me. If the writer's point was both familiar and unsubstantiated, my Left Noodle was flummoxed. It wanted more. On the other hand, the free and easy, intuitive Right Brain saw everything (at least potentially) as promising, inspiring, and, yes, even appetizing! What could be wrong, after all, with telling people to eat asparagus and antisqoxidant-rich foods?
But I think of this discrepancy of method, this disagreement of opinion, between the two halves of a mind not as a conflict ultimately. It is a great built-in tool for the human animal. With many ways to think about things, we have a reservoir of solutions to all sorts of questions and problems. As valuable as quantifiable, science-based medicine can be, there will be occasions when the best bio-medicine will not provide us with a solution. It's times like that when we should embrace the intuitive answers. Finding wellness is finding our healthy selves, which exist alongside, or even sometimes within, the elements of dis-ease which the vast majority of us must contend with. Wellness is, I believe, driven by the Right Brain, and is energized by it, and so to exercise our intuitive side will necessarily exercise our sense of wellness. It's a kind of faith, really, the only kind of faith my beliefs let me get behind.
My impression of the right-left dichotomy (a potentially strong model that often instead becomes a vector for dis-ease in unbalanced living) was reinforced as I read the comments at the bottom of the article. Many people reflected the absolute need for the author's sources, studies, proofs. Others compared the article to something that ought to be in a tabloid. But some saw it for what is is, a simple and artlessly inspiring treatise on eating well. And, honestly, if you can eat right (a choice so often confounded or obscured in this millennium) nine time out of ten you will be healthier and happier than if you feed yourself without intention and care.
Not that anyone can prove that. . . .
To read the article, go to: https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/nutritional-strategies-to-ease-anxiety-201604139441
