Eating for Happiness: The Impact of Diet on Mental Health

-Sofia S

Intern, Mind Splatters, Jan - April, 2024

Of the scores of things that impact how we feel, food makes it to the top of the list for quite a few people!

Whether it is a good protein shake to kickstart your day or a warm slice of chocolate cake to end it, food has the ability to nourish us while controlling how we feel.

As a race, we began consuming food for survival- anything that would nourish us enough to have energy that lasted each day. Now, we choose what we eat, when we eat, and how much we eat. Because food is also abundantly available and easier to acquire, the human race is at liberty to study how it links to our emotions.

Healthy eating habits provide a range of benefits like improved energy levels, swift movement, positive attachment to food, and a better body image.

More often than not, building these impactful eating habits is dependent on our culture and the availability of certain kinds of food.

But enough about food itself. What does this food do for our Brain?

Brain, Body, Bran

Let’s consider a growing plant- it requires ample sunlight, water, and air to thrive. However, it is able to flower and fruit abundantly when nourished with the right kind of fuel fertiliser.

Similarly, when our systems are supplied with good-quality fuel, it makes all the difference to the way our minds function. Consuming antioxidants, vitamins, and minerals protects the brain from “oxidative stress”- the damaging effect of free radicals on cells when the body uses oxygen.

Consuming food that is not of the best quality, like diets that include refined sugars, processed foods, etc- can worsen the body’s insulin regulation, promote inflammation, and cause oxidative stress!

Not just that, various studies have established a link between such diets and impaired brain function which also bring about worsening mood disorder symptoms like depression.

If you’ve heard of serotonin- the happy hormone- you would know that most of it is produced in your gut! Considering your gut is lined with over 100 million nerve cells, the digestive system that handles your food is also responsible for guiding your emotions.

What happens if you don’t have the best relationship with food?

The Emergence of Eating Disorders

By definition - these are severe, persistent disturbances in eating behaviours, associated with distressing thoughts and emotions.

They have the tendency to impair physical, social, and sociological function and can be of three main types:

1. Anorexia Nervosa: Results in debilitatingly low body weight for height and age, brought about by self-starvation with an exhibition of emotions including an intense fear of gaining weight or being fat.

2. Bulimia Nervosa: Characterised by an alternation between dieting with healthy foods and binge eating with forbidden foods, where bingeing means eating large amounts with a lack of control. Binges are followed by compensatory behaviours stemming from guilt, which include fasting, vomiting, or misusing laxatives to “lose weight”.

3. Binge Eating Disorder: This ranks close to Bulimia in the similarity of eating behaviours where large quantities of food are consumed in small periods of time accompanied by significant distress. However, there is either no compensatory behaviour seen or is seen less frequently. While prevention of eating disorders may be difficult, providing support for forming healthy eating habits is the first step to take!

Encouraging conversations around eating well and reinforcing a healthy body image goes a long way in creating a good relationship with food and acceptance of oneself.

Here’s to our incr(edible) mind which possesses the power to eat up negative thoughts we may have about our body- which after all, does so much for us!

If you or someone you know needs help, please do not hesitate to contact a professional and until then, address the situation with compassion.

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