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Eating Your Way to Happiness
If long-term health benefits don’t motivate you to eat better, maybe the promise of a near-term mood lift will.
There are more studies linking healthy eating to better physical health than there are calories in a can of cola. But a strong body of work also ties improved diet to reduced risk of depression… and even happiness. Importantly, the research is not about fad diets. It simply shows how good nutrition can boost mood.
Compiling data from 16 separate research projects involving 46,000 people, new research out this week provides some of the most comprehensive evidence yet that any one of three factors—better nutrition, weight loss or fat reduction— is good for mental well-being.
“Adopting a healthier diet can boost peoples’ mood,” said study leader Joseph Firth of the University of Manchester.
A big takeaway from the study, published Feb. 5 in the journal Psychosomatic Medicine:
Don’t lean on specialized diets that force you to eat only this or that (aka “fad diets” or what I prefer to call “stupid diets”). Just eat more fruits, vegetables and whole grains and cut down on the highly processed junk food and other things you know are bad for you.
“The similar effects from any type of dietary improvement suggests that highly-specific or specialized diets are unnecessary for the average individual,” Firth said. “Instead, just making simple changes is equally beneficial for mental health.”
Just One Factor
No one study is going to provide the key to happiness, of course. So before we dig deeper into the connection between diet and happiness (below), let me point out that multiple studies find all sorts of connections among at least four major factors that likely work in concert to promote happiness.
As just one daisy-chain example, exercise can encourage you to eat better, and both of those things can improve your sleep, which is vital to physical health, and improvement in any one of those four factors can improve mood.
I look at it this way:
