Nutrition and long-term addiction recovery go hand-in-hand.

Why?

Nutrient-Rich Foods Play a significant role in long-term addiction recovery. Nutrition and Recovery also go hand-in-hand with exercise, sleep and mindfulness practices to insure optimum brain health for optimum long-term wellness.

Because nutrition and brain health go hand-in-hand. The brain needs two “things” to function properly – glucose (blood sugar) and oxygen. It gets its glucose from the foods we eat. Unfortunately (or fortunately) it cannot store glucose, so it needs a steady supply and the best supply comes in nutrient-rich foods.

And why is this so important?

Addiction is a chronic, often relapsing brain disease. This brain disease changes the chemical and structural make-up of the brain, meaning it changes the way the brain works — how brain cells (neurons) communicate with one another and with others throughout the body via the nervous system.  The brain does this communicating through neural networks and brain maps, which are changed with the disease of addiction. If you are not familiar with these concepts, check out these two posts: Here’s To Neural Networks and Neural Transmitters: Keys to Brain (and therefore physical and emotional) Health and Understand Brain Maps | Change a Habit | Change Your Life.

Incorporating Nutrition and Addiction Recovery for Long-term Health and Wellness

As you can imagine, when I find a really good article or research paper that explains this connection, I get very excited, because I’ve found it is “The Science of Why” that has made a significant difference for my clients and readers in their journey to embrace addiction treatment and long-term recovery, which applies equally to their family members and friends in their journey to embrace secondhand drinking | secondhand drugging treatment and long-term recovery. I recently found such a piece.

It is titled, Nutrition in Addiction Recovery, and was written by Rebecca Place Miller, Science Writer, in May 2010, whose work was commissioned by Many Hands Organic Farms. As Many Hands Organic Farms explains on their website:

In our work at the farm with individuals who have a history of drug addiction, we noticed how closely such addiction correlates with poor diet – specifically high intake of sugar, processed foods, and legal drugs and stimulants.

Interested in investigating this connection more closely, we commissioned researcher Rebecca Place Miller to search for published studies and reports on the nutrition/addiction connection….

Hypoglycemia and adrenal exhaustion are pandemic in our junk food culture. They also trigger addictive cravings in susceptible individuals. Given the high costs of addiction for individuals and our society, we wonder if fresh, nutritious and chemical-free food is not a cost-effective component of comprehensive addiction therapy.

We hope this report will be useful to individuals struggling with addiction and to organizations that work with addicted persons.

Julie Rawson and Jack Kittredge
Many Hands Sustainability Center

I urge you to read this report and to give you a sense of what you’ll find, I’ve copied the Table of Contents below:

• Bio
• Latest Posts

Lisa Frederiksen

Author | Speaker | Consultant | Founder at BreakingTheCycles.com

Lisa Frederiksen is the author of hundreds of articles and 12 books, including her latest, "10th Anniversary Edition If You Loved Me, You'd Stop! What you really need to know when your loved one drinks too much,” and "Loved One In Treatment? Now What!” She is a national keynote speaker with over 30 years speaking experience, consultant and founder of BreakingTheCycles.com. Lisa has spent the last 19+ years studying and simplifying breakthrough research on the brain, substance use and other mental health disorders, secondhand drinking, toxic stress, trauma/ACEs and related topics.

Latest posts by Lisa Frederiksen (see all)

• Does a Loved One Have to Hit Bottom? - November 20, 2022
• Resources for Parents of Children with Substance Use and Mental Disorders - October 18, 2022
• 4 Things to Support Brain Health and Function for Recovery - August 30, 2022