Food & Mood

I’ve long been fascinated and spent many years studying the connection between food & mood; how our moods affect our eating habits and how the nutrients contained within our diet can influence the way we think and feel. 

Life events, either good or bad, influence the way we feel, we rarely remain feeling neutral during either, but often it’s the way we’re feeling that determines how we react to the event. Fear is endemic in our society, maybe not the Freddy Kruger at the window sort of fear, but the underlying, chronic and pervasive fear of a loss of security; fear that we may lose our jobs, fear that life will change and throw us a curve ball, fear for the future, for our health and for the health of loved ones.  These fears are often unfounded, but built upon wanting everything to be secure and stay the same and when it doesn’t and we feel we’re not in control of what may happen, it’s then that we may turn to food or alcohol to comfort, distract, numb and self-medicate our path to try to achieve peace of mind.  Foods high in fat and sugar make us feel better, if only for a very short while, maybe because they were the foods we were given as children to comfort and reassure or because we feel that the adverse life-event, albeit resolved, has earned us some kind of reward and we deserve a treat.

As Robert E Thayer discusses in his book, Calm Energy, “bad moods are characterised by low energy and good moods with high energy”.  When we’re feeling low, depressed or battered by some adverse life-event we have little energy, but when something positive happens to us, i.e. we win £100 on a scratch card, we’re excited, we have high energy and our mood is positive.  It therefore makes perfect sense that during the low energy, low mood period, in an effort to raise our energy levels as quickly as possible, because we all want quick fixes and don’t like feeling low, we reach for high calorie and energy-dense foods.  It’s a vicious cycle, underlying thoughts and feelings of fear and negativity lead to a bad mood and low energy which encourages us to make dietary choices depleted in nutrients that positively affect our mood; we reach for foods high in fat & sugar which only makes us feel worse long-term, promoting feelings of guilt and inevitably leading to weight gain, dissatisfaction with ourselves, a lack of control and back to a low mood and negative thoughts.

 

There are a spectrum of nutrients that affect mood, even vitamin C deficiency, more commonly associated with scurvy, has demonstrated an increase in fatigue and depression and according to Dr David Benton, a leader in the field of research exploring the impact of diet upon behaviour, vitamin C influences the functioning of dopamine, a neurotransmitter in the brain that plays an important role in controlling mood & motivation.  A diet containing foods rich in vitamin C, is also a diet that is rich in other vitamins, minerals and antioxidants and one which contains a plethora of nutrients which have demonstrated a positive effect on our mood, but during times of low mood, our conditioning unfortunately doesn’t tell us to reach for the fruit bowl it tells us to head for the biscuit tin instead; spiralling levels of obesity provide us with a “weight of evidence” to support this.
 

The reality is that nothing and no-one is secure, everything changes; it’s learning to be in flow, not constantly buffered by the winds of change that’s the key.  It’s not easy to do, I’m my own work in progress, but by not buying into the emotion and not looking for short-term quick fixes to everything we deem to be “bad” in our lives, we can step back and take control of the one thing that only we can – the food we choose to eat, to help heal both body & mind.

 

If more of us valued food & cheer above hoarded gold, it would be a much merrier world - J.R.R Tolkien

Cathy x