04.20.2018

How Does Food Affect your Mood?

Contributor Article By Trevor McDonald

 

author bio: Trevor is a freelance content writer and a recovering addict & alcoholic who’s been clean and sober for over 5 years. Since his recovery began, he has enjoyed using his talent for words to help spread treatment resources, addiction awareness, and general health knowledge. In his free time, you can find him working with recovering addicts or outside enjoying any type of fitness activity imaginable.

How Food Affects Your Mood

Most people know what it’s like to be “hangry” but there’s a lot more to food and mood than getting irritable when you have a growling stomach and your blood sugar levels are low. We live in a time of an addiction epidemic when more people than ever are being treated with anti-depressants and painkillers like opioids, when some of them may be able to treat their symptoms and diseases with proper nutrition.

It’s tough, especially considering the fact that organic doesn’t really mean much and it’s nearly impossible to access genuinely whole, good food that isn’t somehow infected with pesticides or other dangerous chemicals. Even getting good from a local farm doesn’t guarantee that the soil hasn’t somehow been impacted by chemical run-off. However, the vast majority of people don’t eat exclusively from local farms, anyway. The first step is a lot simpler and starts with addressing individual worst habits.

You Are What You Eat

The chemicals and preservatives in many of our foods are making us depressed, making us overweight, and leaving us unsatisfied. The answer, of course, is to eat more whole foods. Choose foods that don’t come with a label for starters, but there’s more to it than that. How can we use food not just as sustenance, but as alternative medicines?

Consider anti-inflammatory foods that have been used for thousands of years to boost immune systems. Instead of reaching for a prescription or over the counter man-made drug for an anti-inflammatory boost, consider adding 800mg of turmeric to your diet every day. This popular spice in India can be added to almost any savory food, or taken as a capsule. (Just keep in mind that another important link in the food-mood chain is our dependence on animal products. The majority of capsules are made with gelatin, which is a cocktail of animals bones and organs. It’s usually better and more affordable to infuse spices and supplements directly into foods rather than take a pill).

The Kind Diet

Our dependence on animals has also been linked to depression. This doesn’t mean you have to adopt a vegetarian or vegan lifestyle. However, numerous studies have shown a link between the poor treatment of slaughterhouse animals and our holistic health (including physical, mental, and emotional). Limit animal product intakes to consider it a “treat” rather than a must for every meal. Seek out humanely raised meats, and game meat if and when possible.

On the other end of the spectrum, we’ve become very adept at utilizing some foods to manipulate our mood, especially when it comes to dopamine release in the pleasure center. Sweets like chocolate and pastries have been shown to replicate results very similar to a drug high. Humans are hardwired to crave sweets from our ancestral days because sweet things have high caloric values. This was important for our ancestors who were often close to starving and worked hard. However, we don’t need those calorie bombs today.

Sweet Endings

Having a sweet tooth isn’t inherently a bad thing. How you satisfy it is what makes all the difference. Steer clear of added sugars, perhaps with a sweet cleanse. Re-training your palate can be frustrating, but after one or two weeks of less than ten milligrams of any sugars each day, your tongue will re-learn what sweet really means. Fruits and very dark chocolates will suddenly seem decadent, and they properly activate the dopamine in the body at non-dangerous levels.