Mood Food: How a Healthier Diet Can Help Make Every Body Happy

You dropped a contact lens this morning, and by the time you found it, washed it and got it back in your eye, you were late to work. You tried to hurry, but all that netted you was a speeding ticket.

Over lunch, your boyfriend announced he wanted to be “just friends.” And when you finally made it to your front door at the end of a long day, the grocery bags in your arms split open.

You need comfort. You need consolation. You need chocolate.

Or do you?

Whether it’s in the form of truffles, ice cream or hot cocoa, chocolate is the quintessential mood food, according to several Orange County diet and fitness experts. It can pick you up, mellow you out and make life seem more pleasant--for a while, anyway.

But foods that make us feel better in the short run can have the opposite effect over time, experts warn. Unfortunately, the foods that can make us happier on a sustained basis are not the ones we crave when we’re down. (Ever found yourself thinking, “What a rotten day! Sure wish I had some legumes!”?)

“Foods definitely do have an effect on your mood,” says dietitian Debra Underwood, who works with Orange County doctors to help diabetics, other patients and athletes develop optimum diets for their life styles.

“Whatever you put in is really going to determine how well or ill you are,” agrees dietitian Leslie Eckerling, director of nutrition for the UC Irvine weight management course and president of Orange County-based LITE Nutrition Inc., a nutritional counseling service.

Fitness consultant Joe Dillon, president of Irvine-based Body Accounting, admits to being a former sugar and chocolate “junkie” himself. “For me, it was not just chocolate ice cream, but chocolate ice cream with chocolate syrup on it,” he says.

But Dillon says he learned the hard way that the instant gratification that came from chocolate carried a price tag. “Every up has a down,” he says. “So many things we think are stress relievers are actually stress compounders, because they really make stress worse.”

Chocolate is a favorite treat because it combines several substances known to make us feel instantly good. The refined sugar, or glucose, produces a temporary increase in blood sugar level and corresponding mood elevation. “As our blood sugar goes, so go our moods,” Dillon says. “It’s literally like a drug.” And the fat in chocolate, he says, “makes people feel good. It’s a stroke. It tastes rich; it’s filling.”

In addition to sugar and fat, Underwood explains, “Chocolate contains xanthene, a caffeine-like substance that makes you more alert. It also has phenylathylamine, a derivative of the amino acid phenylalanine, which is a mood elevator. But if you eat too much, it becomes a mood aggravator and makes you more aggressive and irritable. It also has magnesium, which can have a calming effect on the nerves in conjunction with calcium.”

Women who suffer from premenstrual syndrome, or PMS, are particularly affected by chocolate, Underwood and Eckerling agree.

Some researchers have theorized that sugar consumption also increases the level of tryptophan, another amino acid, which is converted into the neurotransmitter serotonin in the brain. Serotonin is known to produce a calming effect. That may be the reason many people become sleepy after drinking milk at night, Eckerling says. But she cautions that the serotonin theory has yet to be proved.

Another reason chocolate makes many people feel good has nothing to do with its chemical composition but its emotional rewards, according to Eckerling. “Think back to your childhood, and the foods that made you feel good then. I still have a thing about Oreo cookies, because whenever I fell down and skinned my knee, my mother would say, ‘Here, have an Oreo. It’ll make you feel good.’ To me they don’t say ‘Oreo.’ They say ‘love.’ But if somebody had hit me any time I ate a cookie when I was growing up, I wouldn’t like them.”

After the initial wave of good feelings, the crash comes. The body produces insulin to counter the infusion of sugar, reducing the blood sugar level to below its original level. The fat, meanwhile, slows the body down on two fronts. “If you eat too much fat, it causes blood to rush to the stomach and intestines and away from the brain,” Underwood says. Dillon adds that fat causes red blood cells to clump, inhibiting oxygen exchange in the body’s smallest blood vessels, also depriving the brain.

“Then you get blue, so you want to get up again,” Dillon says. “It’s a cycle.”

Underwood says several other kinds of food can have a pronounced effect on mood. “If you eat high-protein foods with a moderate level of carbohydrates, the amino acid tyrosine will cross the blood-brain barrier and produce the neurotransmitters dopamine and noradrenaline. That can make you feel more alert and energetic,” she says.

Certain people, however, are what is known as carbohydrate cravers, she says. For them, a snack of complex carbohydrates, such as a slice of whole-grain bread, in the late afternoon can “cause them to be more mellow, less anxious.”

To determine whether or not you may be a carbohydrate craver, Underwood recommends a food test. “The afternoon lull, around 3 to 4:30 p.m., is the best time to try it. Have a snack of a couple of ounces of popcorn, a bran muffin that’s not sugar-loaded, or pita bread with vegetables. Then check an hour later to see how you feel. If it makes you sleepier, you’re not a carbohydrate craver. If it doesn’t, you should see someone for more information about your diet.”

It’s just as simple to test yourself for protein sensitivity, Underwood says. At the same time of day, try a high-protein snack, four to five ounces of plain yogurt, cottage cheese, sliced chicken or turkey. If it revs you up, you’re benefiting from higher levels of dopamine and noradrenaline. If you don’t notice a major change, you may not need as much protein, the dietitian explains.

To help break the connection between mood and food, the experts advise against using food as a reward.

“The foods we turn to in times of stress are more from conditioning than the food itself,” Underwood says. “A large part of our society’s problem is that we use food as a comfort. We should find other things to take the place of that.”

“Food rewards are everywhere,” Eckerling says. “If a child does well in school, what does he get? A certificate for McDonald’s.”

“You can develop a list of things that are non-food-related that make you feel really good,” Dillon says. “Take a hot bath, a shower, go for a walk, listen to some music. There are a lot of soothing, nice things you can do for yourself that don’t involve eating.”

Instead of his old treat of chocolate-on-chocolate, Dillon says, he now indulges in whole-grain English muffins, air-popped popcorn (without the salt) and rice cakes.

Eckerling says food moods can severely affect hypoglycemics, people with low blood sugar. Although hypoglycemia was a trendy affliction for self-diagnosis a decade ago, she says most of the people who think they have it don’t. Only medical tests can determine for sure, she says.

“Hypoglycemics are incredibly affected,” Eckerling says. “I won’t even see low-blood-sugar patients unless they’ve had a full meal beforehand. Otherwise, they’re just off the wall.”

Some people are also sensitive to caffeine. “It can improve your performance,” Eckerling says, “but if you’re sensitive to it, it can also make you nervous and irritable.”

Dillon warns that too much caffeine can be dangerous. “After the first reports came out about caffeine improving athletic performance, three people involved in a marathon appeared to have heart attacks while they were running. Later, it was found that they had taken huge amounts of caffeine, and it irritated their cardiac muscle. So a little is fine, but more is not necessarily better.”

Perhaps the most important thing is to eat regularly, the experts say, concentrating on complex carbohydrates such as grains and vegetables, with some protein and reduced levels of sugar and fat. “When you don’t eat, your brain doesn’t get enough glucose, and your body starts to metabolize fat,” Eckerling says. “That creates ketones, which the brain can run on but it doesn’t like to, so that can make people act strange and irritable.”

“Our society is so convenience food- and junk food-oriented that most people think they can’t give up a lot of foods,” says Underwood. “Most of them don’t even know how bad they’re feeling until they start to feel better.”

If your diet is generally healthy, all three experts agree, it’s OK to have a treat now and then. Even chocolate. “It’s what you do most of the time that makes the difference,” Underwood says.