There’s more than one way to lose your mind.

In last week’s column, this common refrain meant the cognitive decline that accompanies advanced age and too often leads to dementia, including the type that should send chills up your spine: Alzheimer’s disease. To avoid such a fate, you were advised to minimize your consumption of junk food since a short-term study with hundreds of aging mice and a long-term study with thousands of older humans show a clear link between bad diet and that worst type of dementia.

But “losing your mind” doesn’t have to mean permanent cognitive decline. It can be overly emotional and quite temporary, strikingly similar to the aftermath of a mental illness like bipolar disorder or schizophrenia.

This type of losing your mind is called mania and is characterized by an unhealthy excess of energy, activity, and usually elation that leads to odd notions and often dangerous behavior.

In an attempt to discover what triggers mania, researchers at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore collected data over a 10-year period on more than 1,100 people from ages 18 to 65. The most thought-provoking pattern uncovered: When behavior was so bad that the subjects needed to be hospitalized, it was three-and-a-half times more likely than not that the subjects had recently eaten a cured meat product, like hot dogs, beef jerky, salami, and bacon.

Talk about thought provoking. These two very different ways to lose your mind may very well have the same source.

A bad diet.

But bettering that bad diet — any diet, really — betters brain function. One way to do that is to eat more fruits and vegetables.

A study of over 45,000 Canadian adults performed by researchers at York University in Toronto and published in Journal of Public Health in 2016 found that all but the most obese adults who ate 10 servings or more of fruits and vegetables a day had better brain function than those who did not.

This was true for the youngest as well as the oldest participants.

A 2017 study published in the International Journal of Epidemiology that reviewed 95 prior ones, determined that eating 10 servings of fruits and vegetables provided numerous health benefits when compared to eating none. The risk of cancer dropped 13 percent; the risk of heart disease, 24 percent; the risk of cardiovascular disease, 28 percent; and the risk of stroke, 33 percent.

Moreover, it was estimated that 7.8 million premature deaths worldwide would not occur if everyone ate 10 servings of fruits and veggies a day.

Additionally, research released through PLOS Medicine analyzing data compiled over 24 years on more than 130,000 men and women reported a positive correlation between fruit and vegetable consumption and weight control.

Unfortunately, most Americans fall so far fall of the suggested 10 servings per day that they not only miss out on the health benefits, but they also place themselves at a higher risk for chronic diseases like diabetes and heart disease, according to Seung Hee Lee Kwan, PhD, of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Division of Nutrition, Physical Activity and Obesity. Kwan led the 2017 CDC study that found only 1 out of every 10 adults in America eat 10 servings of fruits and vegetables per day, the federal government’s suggested amount.

While that’s a disappointingly low ratio, it strikes me as being accurate.

I know dozens upon dozens of adults who make eating healthy a priority. Just about all of them eat the suggested 4 or more servings of fruits daily.

After all, it’s easy to eat a piece of fruit while working around the house or driving the kids to practice or taking a break on the job.

But only a few regularly eat the suggested 6 servings of vegetables a day — and the reason why is understandable. Unless you snack on carrots and celery, eating veggies takes planning and preparation — which the horse-race pace to our lives makes so easy to overlook.

That’s why it works so well to designate a time each week — Sunday afternoon works well for many people — to plan your meals for the upcoming week and prepare as much as you can then.

Besides being a failsafe way of getting those 6 or more servings of veggies a day, preparing as much as you can at once is a great time saver.

For instance, I eat 600 grams of broccoli as part of three suppers a week. I buy it all at once and chop and weigh the individual servings on a Sunday.

(Please note: You do not need to eat nearly this much at once. The federal guidelines considers one serving of raw broccoli a chopped half cup, which totals 36 grams.)

While I’m making other foods to eat throughout the week, I microwave the broccoli I plan to eat Monday night.

Not only does that save time, (since I normally stay rather late at school on a Monday), but the microwaving, refrigerating, and reheating of the broccoli also gives it a drier and sweeter quality that I prefer.