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Food and good well being

Willowz
Wilson wants a smile.

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Posted 10/13/09 - 04:56 AM: Subject: Food and good well being	#1
I wanted to ask about what kind of food or daily routine will make me feel great. Today I ate a hand full of walnuts and after an hour I felt like when I was a child. The feeling you get when everything looks really nice and interesting. I looked up at a window and was so happy the sun was shining and that I had some white light(it's a cloudy day) to eat my lunch. I think you get the point. What is your strategy for achieving this king of well-being?
This song will prepare you for a good smile.

Capillarian
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Posted 10/13/09 - 06:42 AM:	#2
I know the feeling. I noticed the effect of food when I was incredibly depressed and my vegan then-girlfriend used to be bouncy all the time. I was eating less and less and feeling lethargic all the time so I went to see a dietician. After a few changes I felt a hell of a lot better, was eating more periodically, and generally being responsible with food. I then moved to Brighton where for about a week I struggled to keep up my good eating habits -- it wasn't easy since I was living in a bed-and-breakfast for a while -- and noticed a huge change in mood and motivation when I couldn't. I am the kind of person who can eat anything he wants and never gain an ounce (with or without exercise), and I am also the kind of person who can go a day without substantial nutrition and not really notice. So food has always been a difficult issue for me. It really takes dedication and single-mindedness to change any aspect of my diet. I'm slowly working towards eating healthily again but it's difficult when you've got lots of commitments. One just does not have the time nor always the inclination to change these things. That said, it is true that it helps. My top suggestion for changing your mood and outlook would be: Avoid all refined carbs and sugars. You would *not believe* how much difference this makes. I was dumbfounded by how much lighter, optimistic and more stable I felt when I did this. It's to do with glycaemic changes I think. When you're eating loads of refined sugar your body's glucose levels go way up and way down. It's no good to be a rollercoaster. As the great coach Phil Jackson has said, 'it's the middle path that counts'. The meaning of that phrase really comes out when your mood doesn't fluctuate so much over the course of a day. You're more productive, determined, and way more likely to stick to a schedule -- something I'm usually bad at. Just so you know, this includes all pastries, cakes, chocolate, cookies, biscuits, white bread, white rice and candy/sweets/jelly. I myself usually find the white rice restriction difficult to stick to. So that I don't get cravings, my dietician recommended I allow myself 20g of organic dark chocolate a day. This is not very much, and purely because I am a chocoholic. So I'd suggest something similar if you think you will get sugar cravings. Apart from that, eat regularly and establish a routine for doing so.

Hamandcheese
Ham of state

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Posted 10/13/09 - 02:16 PM:	#3
I'm very skeptical of the claims of foods on moods and feelings (besides full vs. hungry). This is simply because of how suggestible humans are. It's hard enough to convince people that the placebo they took didn't really do anything to cure their head ache, or that the crystal helmet they wear only makes you think you feel happier as there is no actual physical mechanism for it to, but food is even harder. Its full of unscientific nutritional speculation and supposition, cognitive biases and old wives tales. For instance, a lot of people will insist that aspartame gives them migraines despite weak scientific evidence to say so when done in a randomized, double blind way . There does appear to be some effect, but the majority are imagining things. People get this idea mostly from sensationalist and unscientific pop-media and "naturopathic" propaganda. However we shouldn't need studies done by duke university or the FDA to convince us that aspartame is harmless when it comes to headaches (or anything else for that matter). We should be able to deduce it from the fact that aspartame is essentially a string of very common metabolites that break apart almost instantly when entering the stomach and that are found in all kinds of "organic" foods that we eat every day. Sugar and hyperactivity is another. There is absolutely no link between sugar consumption and hyperactive kids beyond post hoc ergo ad hoc correlation fallacies and suggestion effects. Its been studied to death to the adamant denial of parents who are incapable of over coming their perception biases. Yet again, these studies shouldn't be necessary. Sugar is a carbohydrate, one of three potential sources of calories. Eating a potato or a whole wheat sandwich won't be substantially different from eating a couple pixie sticks in terms of carbs or hyperactivity. This myth arises out of the distinction between "energy" and "energetic". Similarly I would love to hear the reason why I should, as a non-diabetic, avoid refined sugars and simple carbohydrates. Blood sugar regulation within non-diabetic individuals keeps blood sugar in a remarkably narrow range using insulin and your liver. The belief that starches are favorable over fructose, or white sugar favorable over brown sugar, whole grain over white bread, or for that matter fats and proteins over carbs, is completely unsupported scientifically in terms of health and well-being, and (though I don't claim the effects are identical) I believe the potential effects in terms of "feelings" are negligible. For example, eating bananas can make you feel happy because its tryptophan is converted into serotonin, the neuro-transmitter that fights depression. That sentence is completely true, but what I omitted was that you would have to eat around 500 bananas in one sitting for it to be significant. Speaking of tryptophan, you've heard that milk and turkey can make you sleepy because one effect of tryptophan is drowsiness. However you will be required to drink literally liters and liters of milk, and similar volumns of turkey to notice the effects. Rather, the so called "thanksgiving coma" is not caused by any particular chemical but by simply being very full. Again, well studied and established, but myths have a habit of persisting especially when they sound scientific. Basically all proteins contain tryptophan, but this fact is usually ignored. Some claim the certain alcohols make them drunker (or sicker) faster, or are better/worse for hangovers. You don't have to be biochemistry student to see why this is ridiculous. You get drunk from the alcohol a beverage contains and therefore different alcohols have different effects only in terms of their proofs or percent alcohol content. For the same reason negative effects from mixing alcohol or "liquor before beer" are as baseless as "milk before OJ". Chocolate is no different. To quote this article on scienceblogs.com : "There has been plenty of research suggesting that many people eat in response to negative moods and stress, but there is less evidence that eating actually improves mood. Many of the studies done on emotional response to food have been poorly controlled. Others have shown that mood can improve as a result of nutrient consumption -- but this impact may be delayed for some time. Michael Macht and Jochen Mueller wanted to know if eating chocolate could immediately improve mood. ..." The basic results were that the mood chocolate put you in depended on the stimuli the subjects were shown before hand, and the results could thus be manipulated towards happiness or sadness. Further, the effect worked best when the chocolate was palatable -- that is, tasted good. And I would never dispute that eating a delicious food can make you happy -- but its psychological. Tasteless chocolate with almost precisely the same composition having less to no effect is proof of that. I'm not a food and mood denialist. I don't dismiss at the outset that eating certain foods isn't capable of releasing this or that endorphin, or producing this or that hormone. The reason I object is that these 'cause-and-effect' explanations, usually with a single chemical and single effect, are overly simplistic. With the exceptions of stimulants and drugs, the effects (when real) are usually trivial when attempts are made to measure it (that's why they aren't called drugs in the first place!), and when they aren't trivial, they over shadowed by the truer determinants of mood, like psychological and social context. Edited by Hamandcheese on 10/13/09 - 02:50 PM
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