How Mood Affects Food
This week Nutrition Diva, Monica Reinagel, joins the Savvy Psychologist to reveal how our emotions affect what we eat.
Ellen Hendriksen, PhD
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How Mood Affects Food
Today we have a very special guest with us. Please welcome my new friend and fellow Quick and Dirty Tips podcast host, Monica Reinagel, otherwise known as Nutrition Diva. .
Savvy Psychologist: Today, I’m going to take full advantage of having Nutrition Diva here to ask questions I’ve had for a long time about the connection between food and mood. And I’ll bet you a kale smoothie you probably have the same questions, too. First, why is it so hard to make healthy food choices when we’re in a bad mood, stressed, or in a hurry? How can we do better during these times?
Nutrition Diva: First of all, your observation is right on the money, Ellen. It is really hard to make healthy food choices when we’re emotionally off-kilter and a number of different factors—both psychological and physiological—come into play.
Let’s start with the physiological aspects. We’ve all heard of “stress hormones,” chemicals that our bodies produce when we’re under emotional or psychological pressure – or when we don’t get enough sleep. When we experience ongoing, psychosocial stress—feeling overextended or under-appreciated, having to deal with difficult people, feeling out of control, and that sort of thing—our adrenal glands increase production of a hormone called cortisol.
One of the effects of cortisol is that it increases appetite, particularly for foods that are high in fat and sugar. So when your boss chews you out for something that’s not your fault, it’s no coincidence that you find yourself heading to the vending machine for a king-size chocolate bar.
One way to combat cortisol-fueled stress eating is to make sure you’re getting enough sleep. People who are chronically under-rested have higher cortisol levels—and increased appetite. Regular exercise, meditation, spending time with friends, and other stress-management tools are also helpful. These practices don’t necessarily remove stressors from your life, but they can help you—and your hormones—be a bit more resilient to life’s inevitable stresses.
In addition to affecting our hormones levels, bad moods also affect our cognitive and decision-making processes. Meryl Gardner and her colleagues at Cornell University have demonstrated that when you’re in a good mood, you’re more likely to make healthy food choices. Why?
To a certain extent, making healthy food choices involves making a short-term sacrifice (such as forgoing that second or third chocolate chip cookie) for future benefits (like feeling good when we step on the scale or get the results of our cholesterol test). But when we’re in a bad mood, those future rewards just seem less compelling than the concrete but short-lived pay-off from eating the cookie.
The good news is that it works both ways! Gardner’s group found that taking steps to improve your mood before you make a food choice can help you make better choices. Try thinking of something that you’re grateful for, something that makes you happy, or something you’re looking forward to—and you may find it easier to choose a healthier option.
People who are chronically under-rested have higher cortisol levels—and increased appetite.
Finally, in a harried and hurried world, a lot of our poor food choices really boil down to poor planning. You can’t eat healthy food if there’s no healthy food in the house. And waiting until you’re half-starved to start thinking about what you’re going to eat doesn’t tend to lead to great decision making, either. Deciding when and what you’re going eat (and taking steps to procure and prepare it) ahead of time can make a huge difference in how well you eat. I have more strategies in my episode called The Power of Planning.
SP: I do pretty well on the planning, but who knew that sleep and food were so connected? That gives me yet another reason to get to bed earlier. Next up: what are the most common problematic mindsets around food, and what can we do about them? For example, more than once, I’ve caught myself thinking “It’s healthy, so I can eat more!”
ND: A while back, I did a 3-part series on Biggest Nutrition Traps and the mindset you’re describing was #2! Whole wheat pasta or bread is definitely a better choice than the white flour equivalent. But you still need to pay attention to portion size. People often forget that, when it comes to food, quantity is just as important as quality.
A related phenomenon (which I also talked about in a past Nutrition Diva episode) is what I call the “health halo” effect. Potato chips dusted with kelp powder are still, at the end of the day, potato chips. Ditto for cheesecake topped with goji or acai berries.
But perhaps the most damaging mindset about nutrition is having an all-or-nothing, black-and-white mentality about diet—which I think sets us up to fail. We decide we’re going to completely eliminate sugar or wheat, or eat 100% unprocessed foods, or whatever it is. And when that regimen becomes too difficult, we abandon it entirely and revert to our junk-food filled diets.
Better to make small changes you can stick with than huge gestures that last only a few days or weeks. Instead of swearing off all desserts forever, for example, you could decide to eat fruit for dessert on weekdays and make ice cream a weekend-only indulgence.
SP: These are great ideas. On a related note, what are the top small yet high-yield dietary habit changes someone could make to improve his or her health? How would you recommend they institute the new habit?
ND: If you are someone who regularly drinks sweetened beverages (and that includes soda, sweetened coffee and tea, as well as sports, energy, and fruit-juice drinks), my number one goal for you would be to break that habit. As a nation, we consume about twice as much sugar as is good for us, and half of that is coming from sweetened beverages. That means we could solve the entire problem in one swipe, just by breaking our soda habit!
My next priority would be to get everyone to eat more vegetables—because it’s really the quickest way to improve the overall nutritional quality of the diet. Vegetables provide more nutrition for the calories than any other food group. They also provide nutrients that aren’t available from any other food group so if you’re stinting on vegetables, you’re totally missing out on those benefits. Finally, when we eat more vegetables, it tends to displace other less healthy foods from the diet.
See also: How to Get More Vegetables into Your Diet
I have an entire episode on strategies for working more vegetables into your diet but one tip is to make vegetables a part of every meal and snack. Top those scrambled eggs with salsa. Add lots of chopped peppers, carrots, celery, and onion to your tuna salad. Snack on baby carrots and hummus in the afternoon. You get the idea.
SP: Great idea. It never occurred to me to eat veggies at breakfast. Speaking of breakfast, a lot of us use caffeine to keep our energy (and mood, and concentration) up throughout the day and enjoy a glass of wine with dinner to unwind at night. Is this bad? Would we be better off cutting out one or both?
ND: I definitely think it’s dangerous to use caffeine as a substitute for sleep, and equally dangerous to use wine as a stress management tool. However, both of these substances—if used responsibly—offer some health benefits.
Caffeine not only stimulates the neurological system, it also appears to protect it. People who regularly drink coffee have lower rates of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases, for example. People who drink coffee every day also have a lower risk of diabetes. And, of course, caffeine can perk you up, make you feel energized, and help you concentrate. It can even help enhance your workout!
The downside is that too much caffeine can keep you from sleeping well at night, which makes you need coffee to get through the next day, and so on. Although some people can drink coffee right before bed and still sleep like a baby, most people should lay off the coffee by about 3pm to ensure a good night’s sleep.
Alcohol also has some health benefits. Moderate alcohol consumption appears to lower the risk of heart disease and people who drink alcohol moderately have a slightly longer life expectancy than people who abstain completely. The problem is that as soon as you start drinking more than one or two drinks a day, alcohol turns from a healthy habit to a potentially deadly one.
See also: How Much Alcohol is Too Much?
Often people start out drinking moderately but slowly slide into unhealthy patterns. It’s definitely something to keep an eye on. If you are someone who can enjoy a glass of wine and leave it at that, it appears to be a relatively healthy habit. If you find it difficult to drink moderately, however, you’d definitely be better off not drinking at all.
Just for reference, one drink is defined as a 5 ounce glass of wine, a 12-ounce bottle of beer, or a single 1.5 ounce shot of liquor. Most of the martinis I see served in bars or restaurants these days contain at least 3 or 4 drinks’ worth of alcohol.
SP: Whoa! I guess even the martinis are supersized these days. To sum up, it sounds like moderation, and keeping an eye on that potential slippery slope, is the best approach. So rather than using the potential benefits of caffeine or alcohol as pretend permission to drink more, common sense—as usual—is the healthiest way to go.
Let’s keep talking about this—next week, I’ll be in the hot seat on the Nutrition Diva‘s show when we discuss how food can impact mood. So listen to the conversation on Monica’s Nutrition Diva podcast on iTunes, Stitcher, or our website quickanddirtytips.com/nutrition-diva.
Thanks again, Monica for all your great tips. I’m definitely having scrambled eggs with veggies for breakfast tomorrow!
References
Epel, E., R. Lapidus, B. McEwen, et al. (2001). Stress may add bite to appetite in women: a laboratory study of stress-induced cortisol and eating behavior. Psychoneuroendocrinology, 26, 37-49.
Zimberg, I.Z., Dâmaso, A., et al. (2012). Short sleep duration and obesity: mechanisms and future perspectives. Cell Biochemistry and Function, 30, 524-9.
Gardner, M.P., Wansink, B. et al. (in press). Better moods for better eating?: How mood influences food choice. Journal of Consumer Psychology.
Arendash, G.W. & Cao, C. (2010). Caffeine and coffee as therapeutics against Alzheimer’s disease. Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease, 20 Suppl 1, S117-26.
Ludwig, I.A., Clifford, M.N., et al. (in press). Coffee: biochemistry and potential impact on health. Food & Function.
Rostron, B. (2012). Alcohol consumption and mortality risks in the USA. Alcohol, 47, 334-9.
Disclaimer: All content is strictly for informational purposes only. This content does not substitute any medical advice, and does not replace any medical judgment or reasoning by your personal health provider. Please always seek a licensed physician in your area regarding all health related questions.
Mood swings image courtesy of Shutterstock.
About the Author
Dr. Ellen Hendriksen was the host of the Savvy Psychologist podcast from 2014 to 2019. She is a clinical psychologist at Boston University’s Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders (CARD). She earned her Ph.D. at UCLA and completed her training at Harvard Medical School. Her scientifically-based, zero-judgment approach is regularly featured in Psychology Today, Scientific American, The Huffington Post, and many other media outlets. Her debut book, HOW TO BE YOURSELF: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety, was published in March 2018.