How to use food to help your mood
Discover the profound connection between what you eat and how you feel. Unearth the power of food in influencing your mood, and learn how to harness this relationship to cultivate a healthier, happier life.
Depression and low mood are not separate from the rest of your bodily health: the right diet can help reduce your risk
Emerging and accumulating evidence indicates that modifiable features of our lifestyles that influence our immune systems – including nutrition – are important factors in our vulnerability to, severity of, and recovery from depression.
- Can food improve your mood in a significant or lasting way and if so, how? Might we eventually be able to prescribe nutritional interventions to help people feel better?
How much do supplements help?
In the context of an overall healthy diet, there are limits to the health benefits of supplementation.
- Therefore, it would be best to try to increase our consumption of plant foods, wholegrains and oily fish.
- There might be a role for the targeted use of supplements to help protect brain health and support mood.
Links & Books
Brain Changer by Felice Jacka, professor of nutritional psychiatry at Deakin University in Australia, outlines the research on brain health and food, and provides recipes to help readers introduce more whole foods into their diets.
- The Better Brain (2021), co-written by Rucklidge with the research psychologist Bonnie Kaplan, provides a comprehensive review of the use of supplemental micronutrients in conditions such as ADHD, anxiety and depression.
- The Psychobiotic Revolution (2017) by John Cryan and Ted Dinan explains how and why microbes improve common mental health conditions.
What to do
Approach changes to your eating with openness and patience
- We tend to eat habitually, choosing foods and flavour profiles that are familiar
- It’s best to try new foods when you are in a good mood and to approach them with a sense of curiosity
- Prepare to form some new, manageable habits
- The most important factor when it comes to building new eating habits is repetition
- To make repetition achievable, your new behaviours should be small enough that they are manageable even at your most tired
- Integrate them into something you already do to make them easier to remember
How to use food to help your mood
A whole-food, plant-heavy, fibre-rich diet might reduce depression risk through its anti-inflammatory qualities, through its effects on gut microbes and via other pathways.
- Approach changes to your eating with openness and patience. Give healthy new additions to your diet a few chances if needed, and experiment with different ways of preparing the food. Prepare to form some new, manageable habits.
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