If you are what you eat… can Cheerios make you happy? ®
Good food always makes me feel happy. There is nothing I love more than sitting around a table with family and friends and enjoying a deliciously healthy meal. Desiree Nielsen desireerd.com @desireerd Desiree Nielsen, R.D. Desiree Nielsen is a registered dietitian, whose particular interests include digestive health, anti-inflammatory nutrition and vegan diets. She's a frequent guest on CBC News Now, CTV, Global, and Breakfast Television. Desiree's first book, Un-junk your diet, is
available at Chapter's Indigo across Canada.
Just what is it about food that lights us up? Around this time of year, you might look no further than the classic realm of the comfort food. Each one of us has foods that we reach for when feeling down or trying to boost ourselves on a dark and dreary day. Often, our choices might be driven by the memories evoked by the food, which is why someone might reach for a grilled cheese sandwich when blue—because their mother used to make them grilled cheese sandwich to cheer them up. Maybe tiramisu puts a smile on your face because it was a treasured family dessert. Most of us would suspect that food can make us happy in the short term… but is there any scientific basis to explain how foods affect your mood?
the physiological effects of food on mood? Here, serotonin usually gets all of the attention. Serotonin is a neurotransmitter that relaxes the nervous system and even plays a role in suppressing appetite. This is where food plays a crucial, but no less complex role.
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The comfort cure The study of comfort food itself has some pretty complex results. One recent study subjected individuals to mood-altering videos, and then fed them their desired comfort food and found little lasting effect. However, one might argue that testing a bit of comfort food in an uncomfortable lab setting might be doomed from the start. Other evidence has shown that stress does actually drive people to eat more ‘highly palatable’ foods — A.K.A. those high in fat, sugar and salt. From a neurological perspective, eating these kinds of foods can light up the reward and hedonism centres in the brain, helping us ‘self-medicate’; and over time, we may learn to reach for these comfort foods in response to stress and lowered mood. Of course, the comfort food strategy can backfire if the effect of the indulgence leaves you feeling lethargic and unwell. So what about
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