Nutrition and Mental Health: The Power You Hold

Your mental health is tied to electrolyte balance, blood sugar, and metabolism. Learn simple tests and fixes—plus, stay tuned for more on nutrition!

It’s such a relief to see everyone talking about mental health finally. While many aspects of it are still being unpacked, like what is mental health and what does it mean when mental health is suffering? The bottom line is, if you feel off what can you do about it? There are some easy holistic home tests and inexpensive self-care interventions you can do to improve your mental health. It can make a huge difference in your day, level up your other healing modalities, and it may just change the trajectory of your life. Let’s look.

Mental health covers such a broad spectrum of experiences. It spans everything from your emotional stability to how you view the world, the strength of your motivation, and how you self-regulate under stress.

Three foundational factors of your holistic health fingerprint can strongly impact mental health. If these aren’t addressed, then other therapies may not work as well or may take longer to show an effect. For example, your tapping or Emotional Freedom Technique methods may pull you from an anxiety or depression severity level of 10 down to 6. But if you resolve these holistic health factors, then you may be able to get yourself down to a 2, and your severity may get up to only a 6 instead of going all the way to 10. These are as follows:

Electrolyte balance
Blood sugar balance
Anabolic/Catabolic balance (i.e., whether the body is primarily breaking down or building up tissue)

Electrolyte Balance: A Foundation for Mental Well-Being

Electrolyte balance is about the minerals available for use in your system. Minerals are key regulators in the body. If you don’t have enough minerals, then a lot of regulation can’t happen. You don’t have enough resources to pull off important tasks like transmitting regulatory signals and digestion. This affects your outlook on life, how easy going or obsessed/compulsive you feel, your ability to pay attention and focus, and it can cause major mood swings severe enough to be categorized as depression or bipolar disorder.

You can measure your electrolyte balance by testing your blood pressure and pulse. The lower the mineral content in the blood, the less electrically conductive it it becomes, meaning nerve impulses can't travel as efficiently. Veins have valves that open and close based on the presence of electrolytes. When electrolytes are deficient, there’s poor electrical conductivity, leading to low blood pressure.

For this purpose, blood pressure is measured at least 2 hours after eating or exercising. Lie down for 10 minutes and rest quietly to bring your blood pressure down to its resting level. Take your blood pressure with an automatic arm cuff machine that also measures pulse. Note your results. Then press the button again and stand up while the cuff is inflating. Stand very still once you arrive at a standing position. Note your results. Electrolyte deficiency is evident when the resting blood pressure is less than 112/73. If the resting pulse is also less than 70 that is another indicator. And if the difference between the standing pulse and the resting pulse (i.e. the standing pulse minus the resting pulse) is greater than 12, that is an additional indicator of electrolyte deficiency.

What to do if you have electrolyte deficiency? One place to start is adding unrefined Celtic sea salt to every meal. Digestion is the next thing to think about as we need adequate digestion to obtain minerals, and we need adequate minerals to properly run digestion. Salting with unrefined sea salt is a great place to start in any case.

Managing Blood Sugar for Emotional Stability

Blood sugar crashing too low or hypoglycemic-type issues can cause mental health to deteriorate as well. Again, it’s a lack of resources. Glucose is the primary fuel for the brain. Unstable blood sugar is very common in bipolar disorder, for example. When blood sugar is robust you might feel on top of the world, but when your blood sugar gets too low you may experience depression, feeling more emotional, OCD, having trouble with focus, or a short temper.

The first way to measure blood sugar is with a fasting glucose measurement. This may be done with a fasting blood test at a lab or it may be measured at home with a glucose monitor. Ideally, fasting glucose is measured first thing in the morning before coffee, after at least 10 hours of fasting, with no fluid intake but water during the fasting time. The result you are looking for is in the 80’s mg/dL (4.4-4.9 mmol/L). If the level is lower, you may be in trouble with low blood sugar ruts.

You can also measure your blood sugar 2 hours after eating. The level at that time should be 110-125 mg/dL (6.11-6.94 mmol/L). If your level is lower than this or higher than this, it could be negatively impacting your mental health.

What to do if you have unstable blood sugar? You can start by changing your carbohydrate intake.

Removing high glycemic foods, with a net carb level of greater than 10, after 3pm can be a tremendous help.
Restricting the time you consume low and medium carb foods, with net carb levels of 20 or less, to before 3pm can help you to process the carbs more evenly.
Avoiding sugar, including honey and maple syrup, completely is necessary for healing this imbalance.

By keeping blood sugar stable, you can avoid fluctuations and maintain more consistent mental and emotional well-being.

Anabolic/Catabolic Balance in Mental Health

In an overly anabolic state, the body retains cell fluid in a gel-like form called structured water, which supports growth and repair. However, this state also limits the availability of oxygen within the cells, leading the body to rely more on fermentation to generate energy. Unlike oxygen-based energy production, fermentation creates excess lactic acid, which can build up faster than the body can clear. This accumulation disrupts brain function, triggering anxiety, panic attacks, or possibly OCD. The key to relief is shifting the body out of anabolic dominance and restoring balance.

Anabolic/catabolic balance is measured with urine and saliva pHs. The pH measures the amount of acidity or alkalinity in the fluid in the fluid in our tissues. The saliva pH is a measure of what the body is holding onto, and the urine pH is a measure of what the body is getting rid of. They are not a measure of blood pH. As with blood pressure, these are measured at least 2 hours after eating or exercising. And they are not measured with the first morning’s urine. The saliva pH should be higher than the urine pH. And the urine pH and saliva pH should be no less than one point apart from each other. If the pHs are too close together, that is indicative of an anabolic imbalance.

What to do if you have an anabolic imbalance? Two easy responses to balance out an anabolic imbalance are to pay attention to the types of fats consumed and the way your eggs are cooked. Fatty acids such as those found in olive oil, avocados, and fish support the body to move away from the anabolic imbalance. Other fats push the system in the opposite direction. Similarly, cooking eggs with a soft yolk such as over easy, soft boiled, or poached with a soft yolk move the body away from an anabolic imbalance.

Having one of these imbalances strongly out of whack is dysregulating enough. Having more than one factor out of balance at the same time can be truly emotionally and mentally debilitating. Imagine the power of reversing the imbalances. Simple home tests and nutritional adjustments have the potential make a huge difference in your life if you’ve been suffering with mental health issues. In an upcoming post, we’ll dive deeper into how nutrition can support mental health. Stay tuned for more insights on how to take control of your well-being through simple, effective strategies!