The Mood Cure: Take Charge of Your Emotions in 24 Hours Using Food and Supplements. Julia Ross

       Foreword

      We certainly need a Mood Cure in the United States, but do you need one in the United Kingdom? Let’s compare the emotional facts of life in the U.S. with those in the U.K. They’re similar, but there are some interesting differences.

      U.S. rates of depression and anxiety have tripled in the past ten years, with more than one in five adults now affected. The use of antidepressants is increasing so rapidly among both adults and children that Prozac (Fluoxetine) has become one of the ten top-selling drugs in the country.

      How does the mood climate in the U.K. compare? According to the World Health Organization, depression is the second most common disability, after heart disease, throughout Europe, including the U.K., just as it is in the U.S. Within the U.K. itself, more than one in six adults were found to be either depressed, anxious, or both, in a large government survey published in 2001. As a result, Britons are also using antidepressants routinely, but not at quite the U.S. rate. In 2000, Fluoxetine became the seventeenth largest selling drug in the country and Efexor the eighteenth.

      What accounts for the British having a serious, but somewhat less alarming, incidence of mood malaise than we have in the U.S.? There are three major factors at work here: food quality, exercise frequency, and access to bright sunlight. The food quality in the U.K. is slightly superior to that in the U.S., with more fresh food and less packaged food eaten, though that quality is steadily declining as it follows U.S. trends. On the other hand, British weather is much worse and Britons are almost as sedentary as Americans. This means that the dietary advantage that you in Britain still have is partly counterbalanced by lack of sunlight and lack of exercise, so you must vigilantly safe-guard it.

      The Mood Cure is intended to help you discover mood-healthy foods and avoid mood-toxic foods by learning from our Yankee mistakes. For example,