Does Food Affect Your Mood?

Ever been in kind of a down mood, then ate something that gave you in instant mood boost. For many, it tends to be sugary foods and beverages or coffee that can provide a temporary boost in your brain chemistry to provide that little spike in energy and mood. Unfortunately, with things like that, it tends to lead to a crash once that sugar or caffeine get’s out of the system.

What you really want to pay attention to when it comes to boosting your mood with food, is maintaining a diet rich in the nutrients your body needs to maximize the levels of chemicals in the brain that effect mood. Many times, mood disorders are simply a lack of proper nutrients.

In this recent article from NewsTartget, they talk about how food affects your mod from both a chemical viewpoint as well as an environmental point of view:

“How food affects your mood

Monday, March 14, 2016 by Chris Draper

Mental illness is one of the greatest epidemics of modern times and is on par with cancer, diabetes and heart disease. Instead of seeking a cure, however, Big Pharma treats mental illness as just another disease, which can be mitigated by mind altering drugs. Meanwhile, effective nutritional and environmental therapies for mental illness are ignored.

Fortunately, people with mental health disorders aren’t doomed to a life of prescription drugs. In many cases, mental illness isn’t rooted in biology but is a product of nutrition and environmental factors. The below extract is taken from Gary Null and Amy McDonald’s book The Food-Mood Connection: Nutrition-based and Environmental Approaches to Mental Health and Physical Wellbeing, which – as the title suggests – illustrates how food affects your mood.

Chemicals and Other Environmental Factors

In 2006, scientists from the Harvard School of Public Health sounded a long overdue warning: industrial chemicals are responsible for a “silent pandemic” of brain impairment in millions of children around the world. By analyzing publicly available data, they determined that at least 202 chemicals are known to have the capacity to damage the brain. However, only a few [such] as lead and mercury are regulated with regard to children. Because developing brains are significantly more vulnerable to toxicity than adult brains, children are at great risk from common chemicals used in plastics, adhesives, aluminum, paint, nylon, nail polish remover, and more. In recent years, chemical exposure has increasingly been linked to a variety of “subclinical” mental health symptoms (behavior changes, cognitive decline) as well as neurodevelopmental disorders, such as autism, attention deficit disorder (ADD), and mental retardation.”

So, if you think diet may be affecting your mood, a good starting point for determining this is simple blood tests for various nutrient and micro nutrients. If you have a practitioner in your area, a specialist in functional medicine may be the best way to get the right tests ordered base on your mood symptoms.

To finish reading about the environmental and nutritional influences, food has on your mental state, finish reading the article over on NewsTarget.com