Sad, Anxious Vegetarians

CBS Philly provides a link to a Women's Health article reporting research showing an association between vegetarian diets and mental disorders. See what has been found:

Australian researchers revealed that vegetarians reported being less optimistic about the future than meat eaters. What's more, they were 18 percent more likely to report depression and 28 percent more likely to suffer panic attacks and anxiety. A separate German study backs this up, finding that vegetarians were 15 percent more prone to depressive conditions and twice as likely to suffer anxiety disorders.

"We don't know if a vegetarian diet causes depression and anxiety, or if people who are predisposed to those mental conditions gravitate toward vegetarianism," says Emily Deans, M.D., a Boston psychiatrist who studies the link between food and mood. Most likely, says Deans, there's truth to both theories. People with anxious, obsessive, or neurotic tendencies might be more inclined to micromanage their plates (in one study, vegetarians had triple the risk of developing an eating disorder compared with meat lovers).

Anthropological evidence shows that, long before we could choose to subsist on cashew cheese and tofu, animal flesh provided the energy-dense calories necessary to fuel evolving cerebellums. Without meat, we'd never have matured beyond the mental capacity of herbivores like gorillas.

Today, stronger brains are still powered by beef—or at least, by many of the nutrients commonly found in animal proteins. At the top of the list are B vitamins, which your noggin needs to pump out neurotransmitters such as glutamate; low levels of it have been linked to depression, anxiety, and OCD (sound familiar?). Similarly, meager levels of zinc and iron, two nutrients far more prevalent in meats than veggies, may manifest as moodiness—or worse. (snip) Then there's tryptophan, an essential amino acid found almost exclusively in poultry. Your body can't make it on its own and needs it to produce serotonin, a hormone that acts as the brain's natural antidepressant.