Food and Mood

Your brain never stops working. It’s even furiously working away while you sleep. It never gets a break. Because it’s always working, it requires a constant supply of nutrition.

So, it only makes sense that the quality of the nutrition you’re providing impacts the functioning of your brain. The food you eat affects your brain and your mood.

Just as a car runs best on clean, high-quality fuel, your brain runs best when it’s fed properly. A low-quality diet doesn’t just create physical issues, such as heart disease, obesity, and diabetes. It can also create brain-related issues that influence your mood.

There is a field of medicine called nutritional psychiatry. This area of medicine addresses the impact of food on mood and behavior.

See how food can have a major impact on your mood:

1. Serotonin is produced primarily in the gut. Serotonin is a neurotransmitter that’s involved in regulating appetite, sleep, pain inhibition, and the mediation of moods.

• The hundreds of millions of neurons in the intestinal tract are influenced by the serotonin produced in the gut. It’s believed that 95% of serotonin is produced in the gut.

2. The bacteria in your gut are an important influencer of your mood. The good bacteria in your gut help to protect you from the bad bacteria. They help to properly seal the interior of your intestinal tract from the rest of your body.

• They also help to control inflammation throughout the body.

• They even affect the neural pathways between your brain and your gut.

3. A diet high in processed food increases the likelihood of depression by as much as 35%. Areas of the world that eat minimal amounts of processed foods have a far lower incidence of depression. It’s likely that there are other psychological issues that are influenced by diet.

What you put into your body affects your brain and your mood. Mindful eating can reduce the likelihood of suffering from depression and help to stabilize your mood. The food for your body is akin to the gas for your car. Using the proper fuel has a lot of benefits.



“Man seeks to change the foods available in nature to suit his tastes, thereby putting an end to the very essence of life contained in them.”
- Sai Baba



Applying the Ideas of Nutritional Psychiatry to Yourself

You might not be a nutritional psychiatrist, but you don’t need to be. You don’t have to be a certified personal trainer to do some pushups and go for a run. You can gain a tremendous amount of insight and progress from doing some simple experimenting on yourself.


Use these strategies to experiment with how various foods affect your body:

1. Rate yourself. Make a list of qualities you consider to be important that could be food related. Rate yourself for each quality on a 1-10 scale. Here are a few ideas:

• Ease of falling asleep
• Quality of sleep
• Body weight
• Ability to focus and concentrate
• Overall mood
• Anxiety
• Energy
• Memory
• Mental sharpness
• Physical comfort or pain levels
• Blood sugar, blood pressure, or other symptoms current ailments

• Give yourself a rating for all of these characteristics before you begin your two-week experiment.

2. Eliminate all potentially unhealthy foods for two weeks. For two weeks eliminate all processed foods, nuts, dairy, alcohol, and added sugar. A processed food is anything that doesn’t occur in nature. So, no pasta, bread, crackers, soda, flour, sugar, and so on.

• While olive oil is considered to be acceptable, eliminate other oils for two weeks.

• So, what does that leave than you can eat? Eat these foods:

o Meat in its natural form. So, no sausage, hotdogs, bratwurst, or any meat that has things added to it.

o Beans. Rice and potatoes are okay but provide little nutrition and significant calories.

o Fish

o Vegetables

o Fruit. Watch your sugar intake. Treat fruit as a dessert.

o Water

3. After two weeks, rate yourself again. You’ll probably find that you feel fantastic compared to how you normally feel after just a few days. You’ll feel even better after two weeks.


• It’s time to rate yourself again. Go back through your list and give yourself a new rating. Unless you already ate extremely well to begin with, you’re going to see some positive changes.

4. Consider adding back in certain foods. You’ve eliminated foods that were causing you issues, but you also eliminated foods that weren’t a problem. It’s time to find out which foods are problematic, and which are not.

• Stay away from junk food These are foods like chips, ice cream, candy, and fried chicken.

• However, if you love nuts, dairy, bread, or pasta, you might be able to eat these without a significant penalty. In fact, dairy and nuts can be healthy, but many people have issues with them.

• Here’s the plan: Add back one food at a time. After three days, rate yourself again. If your numbers don’t get worse, feel free to continue eating it. Of course, a lower score means you should skip that food.

• Only add back one food at a time! Otherwise, your results won’t give you any useful information. You won’t know if only one food is bothering you, two of them, or all of them.

• Keep in mind that if one gluten-containing food bothers you, it’s likely that all of them will.

With some simple and patient experimentation, you can find the foods that work best in your body. In just a few weeks, you can feel considerably better physically and psychologically. This information is invaluable when applied to your mindful eating practice.



“Science and mindfulness complement each other in helping people to eat well and maintain their health and well-being.”
- Thich Nhat Hanh


Did you find this post fun, informative and useful? If so, please share it with others!

If you have a comment, question or suggestion, please leave a comment below!

Cheers, Helene Malmsio


Related Reading: Healthy Eating Plan

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