Dietary Factors and Schizophrenia

Excerpt

At the beginning of this century a substantial fraction of patients in mental hospitals were suffering from pellagrous dementia. With the discoveries that this disorder resulted from a specific dietary deficiency, correctable by means of nicotinic acid, it practically disappeared. Where it still exists, it exists because of failure to apply the knowledge we have. Following that example, there have been numerous attempts to implicate dietary factors in other mental illnesses. In the past decade, two hypotheses have been proposed relating schizophrenia to diet. In 1968, Pauling (1) pointed out the likelihood that there is a much wider variance in