The Happiness Diet

The Happiness Diet

Introduction

What if you discovered that the best place to begin your personal pursuit of happiness is at the end of your fork? Emerging research from the fields of neuroscience and nutrition shows that by changing what you eat, you can improve your mental and emotional wellbeing.  You can stabilize your moods. You can improve your focus. You can even make your brain grow.

So what do we mean by happiness? There have been many books
published in recent years that explore different approaches to attaining happiness—some from motivational speakers, others from experts in the field of positive psychology. At their core these are suggestions for behavioral changes that are meant to improve your psychological well-being and outlook on life. We are coming at this from a very different perspective: Before you start changing your outlook on life to improve your emotional well-being, we want to make sure your eating behavior is the best it can be so that the master mood regulator—the brain—is provided with what it needs to be strong, sharp, healthy . . . and happy.

Increasingly, in our experience, it seems that fewer people truly feel
they have control over their diet. “It’s just too hard to eat right,” we often hear. “Everyone says something different” is another refrain we get a lot.  We want to change this state of affairs and settle the confusion about what needs to be eaten for a happy, healthy brain and body. The Happiness Diet provides concrete tools (tasty ones, too) for doing just that.

But as modern Americans, we face some formidable and largely invisible obstacles in seeking happiness. The food we eat each day is undermining our emotional and mental well-being. Many of the nutrients that human brains depend on for healthy functioning have been stripped from our food supply by factory farming and by modern methods of food processing. Compounding these losses, new chemicals have been added that impair our brain functioning. You’re probably well aware that our food is responsible for our epidemic levels of obesity and diabetes, but you might be surprised that it’s also largely responsible for skyrocketing levels of brain disorders. We all want to be happy, but every day most of us consume what amounts to a series of “Unhappy Meals.”

Thanks to the introduction of industrial-scale food processing,
Americans have changed their dietary habits more in the past 100 years than all of humanity had in the previous 100,000. The Modern American Diet—we call it the MAD—is characterized first and foremost by simple sugars and refined carbohydrates now found in everything from cereal to pasta. These sugars play tricks on your brain, so you keep craving more and more of them, even though sugar consumption actually contributes to the shrinkage of key areas of your brain responsible for everything from memories to mood regulation.

Excerpted from THE HAPPINESS DIET by Tyler Graham and Drew Ramsey, MD.  Copyright  © 2011 by Tyler Graham and Drew Ramsey, MD.