You know how they say you are what you eat? Well, this expression isn’t just used in relation to body shape but also to emphasize the connection between food and mood, specifically the fact that foods affect mood and mental wellbeing.
The concept that what we eat has an effect on our state of being and state of mind, whether positive or negative isn’t new at all. Hippocrates said “Let food be thy medicine,” the quote dating back to before the Common Era, precisely 431 BC.
Advertisement:
So there you have it, even without all the progress in medicine and the technology that today allows us to understand things more thoroughly, people have always been aware of the connection between food and health in all its forms.
How food affects mood
Cooking is submitting food to certain chemical reactions, and just like cooking is related to chemistry, so is our diet. This means that our eating habits, respectively what we eat on a daily basis can bring about certain chemical and physiological changes in the brain, thus affecting behavior.
There is a whole science behind food’s effect on mood, although researchers are only just beginning to tap into this interesting relation.
Actually, you don’t even need scientists to tell you that food makes or breaks the mood. Weren’t there times when you felt tired minutes after eating, and then times when you felt energetic and possibly happy? That’s the first evidence right there.
But let’s get a bit scientific about it.
We have two brains
This may come as a surprise to some, but yes, we develop two brains during fetus development. One is the brain in the head with the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere. The second is a little brain in the gut that scientists call ENS, short for the enteric nervous system, except that ENS is as little as over 100 million nerve cells, so not so little after all.
The brain in the head and ENS are connected through the vagus nerve, the longest of the cranial nerves and the most complex, said to “rule the body and govern the mind.” It is essentially the channel of communication between our big brain and the enteric nervous system.
People with gut health issues develop depression
It is very interesting the conclusion that researchers have reached, that people with irritable bowel syndrome form depression and anxiety. IBS is a condition that a high percentage of people develop at some point in their life and a condition that affects up to 40% of the population, so the studies conducted so far took on a different approach than before.
Whereas before researchers focused on how mental disorders trigger physical health issues, nowadays they are also focusing on the way gut health interferes with mental states.
Advertisement:
Doctors refrain from making any certain recommendations just yet, as the link between mind and gut is still to be explored further, but they do recommend people to listen to their gut and to observe its reaction to foods because this is the first indicator that certain foods should be avoided.