I am not the first person to make the claim, now well-supported by research-that eating healthfully will help ease your depression. Eating a diet rich in whole foods, fish, nuts, vegetables and fruits even has preventative measures against depression, as opposed to diets high in processed foods. But even before such research was carried out, the hypothesis that eating 'junk food' could cause regression in depression was made famous-or infamous-by the Twinkie Defense.
A former fire-fighter elected to the San Francisco city Board of Supervisors, Dan White was a man whose resignation and had been accepted as final, even when he wanted to return to the Board--and had returned to plow bullets into Mayor George Moscone and his own supervisor, Harvey Milk. And how he got away with, well, murder.
To make a complex story somewhat less so, White definitely did not see eye-to-eye with Milk, his boss, who was a happy man when White resigned. But White reversed his resignation and tried to garner support from Moscone to go over the head of Milk. Ultimately Moscone refused, under Milk's persuasion, and in November of 1978 Dan White headed to San Francisco City Hill with the express intention of killing Milk and Moscone, which he did most handily, by shooting both men in their bodies, and then, when they had already fallen, twice more in their heads.
Anyway, the interesting part comes next. White, who had premeditated that assassination as much anyone guilty of murder, pleaded not guilty by reason of reduced capacity. What reduced the aforesaid capacity? His recurrent depression.
But that wasn't really enough. I mean, many people are depressed--and by far the vast majority of them don't go out and kill their bosses [tempting as that may sound to some of us].
So psychiatrist Martin Blinder bolstered this argument with what later become known as the Twinkie Defense. White's episodes of depression, claimed Dr. Blinder, were made worse by the fact that "whenever he felt things were not going right, he would abandon his usual program of exercise and good nutrition and start gorging himself on junk foods: Twinkies, [pop]" [see the "Trial Testimony of Dr. Martin Blinder (defense psychiatrist)"].
(In case you missed it, it was this last quote that led to the wonderful title of "The Twinkie Defense" for Blinder's argument.)
White had been in a funk--a junk-food infested funk--the entire time his job was at issue, but when he definitively found out that he was not getting his job back, he sat up the entire night, "Drinking copious quantities of soda pop and eating high-sugar cupcakes and candy bars" (See Trials of an Expert Witness by Dr. Harold L. Klawans, p. 165).
Thus, White was not just depressed--rather he was depressed and "intoxicated" on junk food, yielding diminished capacity.
And that, thought the jury, was good enough reason to find extenuating circumstances to White's crime, due to his diminished capacity.
Now, if replacing a healthy diet with one of junk food is so damaging to a man's depression it could lead him to murder--mightn't it just possibly be bad for you, too?
As Hippocrates said--and shouldn't he know?-- "Let food be thy medicine, thy medicine shall be thy food."
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