Of course mindfulness lessons failed! It’s time to feed their brains and guts instead.

A recent study looked at the outcome of a mindfulness programme in 85 secondary schools and found that it hadn’t been at all useful. With many of the students finding the lessons ‘boring’, it also found that hardly any of the participants put it into practice at all.

What is mindfulness? It is tools to enable someone to live and focus on the present. The thinking behind it is that if you dwell on thoughts of the past, you create depression, or if you fear future outcomes, you create anxiety, so living for today and focussing on the present alleviates that anxiety and depression.

With rising numbers of mental health issues in our young people's minds, it is to be commended that something is being done about it. But I suggest mindfulness, or any other behavioural technique employed, will all fail unless the correct foundation is put in place, not only in our schoolchildren but across society in general.

Of course, I’m talking about the food. Time and again the chemical environment of the brain and the gut is overlooked in favour of cognitive therapies and medication.

Shockingly, the number of teenagers aged 12-17 prescribed antidepressants doubled between 2005 and 2017. Why is this age group suffering so much? As a parent, I have become aware of just how prevalent anxiety disorders have become among my children’s peers. People point to all sorts of reasons; social media, media pressure, Covid restrictions, world issues, but never at the fact that the food landscape has changed out of all recognition and our kids are being fed a nutrient deficient diet. They are also a generation that have parents that have also been brought up on an increasingly industrialised and chemically enhanced foods, my generation born in the 70's and 80's.

Depression and anxiety are linked to vitamin deficiencies D3 and B12. With the advice to stay out of the sun and wearing high factor sun creams, our children are missing out on the best source of D3. And with the promotion of eating less meat and the scaremongering stories about red meat (the most nutrient dense food on the planet) they are missing out on the most bioavailable source of B12.

On top of that, with the chemicals in foods and rise of fast food and takeaways, is it any wonder that their brains are chemically imbalanced to default to negative thinking? 95% of the happy hormone serotonin, is produced in the gut, but only if the gut is healthy. Too much sugar, which is what most teenagers and the rest of the UK population are ingesting daily, leads to an upset in the natural balance of the microbiome, the gut flora. Therefore, serotonin production is reduced and mood impaired.

You can literally eat yourself happy, by consuming what your body requires to produce all the feel-good hormones. By eating good quality meat, fish, eggs, dairy and vegetables you will create a brain and gut environment that will support any other activity to help fight mental health issues.

Mindfulness is a brilliant set of tools when used in the right way. But it must be recognised that it can only work properly if the physical self is completely balanced, and that can only happen with correct nutrition.

Boy, would I like to get hold of health education in schools and change it for the better!?