January 30th is Bell's Let's Talk day and we know what's coming...

Many people in our lives will share both excruciatingly painful and incredibly inspiring stories about their previous struggles and triumphs over their mental health challenges.

It's always surprising who posts because you would have 'never expected that person to have a mental health problem,' and that's exactly the point - there is not one person that's not affected by mental health challenges whether directly or indirectly.

The Canadian Mental Health Association reports that 1/5 people every year will have a mental health episode, almost 10% of the population will experience a major depressive state in their lifetime, and suicide is the leading cause of death from adolescence to middle age for both men and women.

These mental health struggles and challenges also include us. We have both had more than our fair share of problems, triumphs, successes, and misfires, and we believe sharing those with you could be of tremendous benefit.

The purpose of this episode is to share what, in our experience, we have found helpful in positively affecting our mental states and how we've managed to overcome our own, personal mental health challenges.

What we covered:

• Our own person mental health challenges and what that meant growing up and in adult life.
• How we've managed, and the tips and tactics that we have personally found the most helpful day to day in dealing with our own mental health struggles.
• A review of books that we've read, courses we've taken, or people we've found that have been valuable in helping create and maintain our personal mental health.

The FDA has announced that in 2021 there are changes coming to the way food is labeled in America.

Some of the changes include changing the serving size (they say nobody eats just 1/2 cup of ice cream), larger, bolded font for calories and a category of 'added sugars' helping people know the difference between sugars that naturally occur within the food vs. the ones that are added in.

The original idea of forcing food manufacturers to use food labels was transparency. It was assumed the more people that knew about what was in their food, the more they would be aware of what they were putting in their bodies and the better the decisions they would make.

But has that been the case?

The planned action and change has started a conversation and a debate about the whether food labeling has caused more harm than good with some research stating that food labeling, because of it's abstract terms, lack of public education and lack of over diet context, have done more harm than good.

What I Covered:

• How to read labels using Eat By Design as a starting point and context. I'm not saying this applies to you, but this is how I do it.
• The pros and cons of having labels and why reading them, even with a good amount of nutritional knowledge can be very difficult.
• Why I don't believe changing the labels, even to more 'realistic' measures, will have a positive impact on people's health.
• Some basics that, if you're going to read labels, you might want to watch out for.