Health: Can jerky affect mental illness? /Story: Monster & Mouse go camping

Can jerky affect mental illness? Study suggests it can The study found that people hospitalized for mania were more likely to say they had eaten jerky or meat sticks. Cured meats such as salami or jerky may worsen the symptoms of some people with mental illness, researchers reported Wednesday. They found that people hospitalized for mania were three times as likely to say they had eaten cured meats compared with people who did not have a psychiatric disorder. The researchers are quick to say that they have not proven that eating cured meats causes mental illness, or even that a little jerky hurts someone with, say, bipolar disease. But they ran some other experiments suggesting that the nitrates in processed meats might affect someone’s mental state. “We are not trying to scare people,” said Dr. Robert Yolken of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, who led the study team. “We found that a history of eating nitrated dry cured meat but not other meat or fish products was strongly and independently associated with current mania,” Yolken and colleagues wrote in their report, published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry. “The cured meat products were generally in the form of meat sticks, beef jerky and turkey jerky, which are cured meat products generally prepared with added nitrates.” by Maggie Fox / Jul.18.2018 / 5:35 PM ET https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/can-jerky-affect-mental-illness-study-suggests-it-can-n892541 Story: Monster & Mouse go camping. By Deborah Underwood