Food Can Affect Your Mood!

Have you ever felt when you ate a certain foods, your mood either got better or worse because of it? Maybe you’ve never made a connection between what you’ve eaten and what your mood is? The fascinating new field of nutritional psychiatry investigates and answers these questions about how food can affect our mood. 

This new field of nutritional psychiatry has piqued my interest. So what is it about food that is linked to our mood? The main link is serotonin. Serotonin is known as the happiness hormone. It’s a neurotransmitter, and about 90 to 95% of our serotonin is produced in our gut. So, it’s obviously going to be influenced by what we eat. Our production of serotonin is influenced by the health of our microbiome which is influenced by our diet. The microbiome is a collection of different bacteria in our gut. There’s good bacteria, and there’s bad bacteria. You can think of this like the rainforest of your gut. It’s very diverse and has many different functions. Depending on what we eat, we can guide the health of our microbiome. This ultimately guides how well we will absorb nutrients, what our metabolism is, and how much serotonin we are producing. 

When we’re looking at how food can affect our mood, scientists have shown that depression can be linked to what we eat. 25 to 35% of depression can be lowered based on a more healthful diet. The diets studied were the standard American diet (SAD diet) and the Mediterranean diet and traditional Japanese diet. Scientists have linked following a Mediterranean or Japanese diet is linked to the depression rate being lowered. However, this is does not address more serious mental health issues. 

How can you use food to improve your mood? I’ve created a food mood journal for my clients. It’s about tracking not just what you eat, but how you feel before you eat, and how you feel after you eat it. You need to do this for a few weeks to really start to see a pattern. I think you may start to see that processed foods lower your mood and eating cleaner will improve your mood. Just remember, you can’t expect to eat healthy for one or two days, and then wonder why your mood hasn’t improved. You need to stick to this healthful diet for two to three weeks to really start to see the benefits. 

Peace and Love!