How your diet can affect your mood? Is it really possible something that you eat can change your behaviors? Probably, most of the people won’t be supporting the idea of “we are what we eat”. It’s widely known that nutrition plays a vital role in physical health, also directly affects your mental health as well.
The correlation between diet and mentality is about the connection between your brain and your “second brain” which is also called as gut. That all starts with your second brain is a host to billions of bacterias that helps the production of neurotransmitters which are kind of chemical substances that carry messages from the gut to the brain to regulate sleep, emotions, appetite, mood, pain… Most common examples for it are dopamine and serotonin. Eating healthy food will advance the growth of these bacterias positively, on the other hand a diet relies on junk food will inhibit the production of them. With the bacterias that are in a better shape, your brain will receive the positive messages accordingly it will reflect to your moods as well. The bad bacterias will affect the level of inflammation throughout your body as well as your mood swings and energy level.
Refined sugars are the biggest alerts in your diet in my point of view. You can think like “But donuts putting me in my happiest mood?”. The fallacy of it is they are giving you “the peak satisfaction” at one you eat them, like dopamine, then you feel even worse when you lose the effect of it. This is the point how an addiction starts.
Studies have shown that a healthy diet can help with the symptoms of depression and anxiety. Also, there’s a treatment called “nutritional psychiatry” which emphasizes how diet and nutrition affect the people mentally and supports a treatment with changing the lifestyle and diet. There are several substances in particular might exacerbate your stress and anxiety level: caffeine, alcohol, added sugars… Especially, traditional diets like ,The Mediterranean Diet, are most recommended option to reduce the risk of depression compared to the Western diets. Scientists explain this difference with traditional ones are more likely to be high in vegetables, fruits, seafood and adequate amounts of meat. They are also devoid of processed and refined foods which act like natural probiotics, unlike the Western dietary. Also there are some misunderstandings about the diet that you should follow like skipping meals or cutting out some food groups. Instead of those you should add these ones to your diet as a must: include protein at each meal, drinking adequate amount of water, eating from all nutrient groups, eating at set intervals, less refined sugar, preferring more grain, including omega-3 rich foods…
“We tend to separate our brain from the rest of our body, but good health means good health from a holistic perspective from head to toe.” Says Dr. Gabriela Cora, a psychiatrist, so why wouldn’t we think eating well would also impact our mental health until now. On the whole, you if you’re making a change in your life you must be patient about to reach and maintain your optimum weight. Even it takes a long time to see the improvements of your mood, at the end you also will be awarded in long term as you’re being mentally stable.