Can you eat yourself happy?

According to the World Health Organization, Arab countries hold some of the highest rates of depression in the world. The main risk factors for depression include genetic predisposition, poverty, trauma and abuse. While these variables are usually out of one’s control, there’s one thing individuals can do to reduce their risk of depression or recover from it, and it has to do with what they eat.

Evidence from all over the world shows that what we eat matters to our mental health. The president of the International Society for Nutritional Psychiatry, Felice Jacka, claims that people “whose diets were higher in vegetables, fruit, fish and wholegrains, with moderate amounts of red meat, were less likely to have depression or anxiety disorders than those who consumed a typical western diet of processed foods, pizza, chips, burgers, white bread and sweet drinks”. She also insists on the fact that no ingredient alone or specific food trend can act as a quick fix, but rather that a healthy and balanced diet is necessary over a long period of time to reap its benefits.

While there’s no one right way to eat well, regardless of where you live, Jacka recommends eating closer to a traditional, pre-industrial diet rich in plant foods, fish, unrefined grains and fermented foods, with less meat and processed food, to reduce your risk of depression. The Mediterranean diet is therefore a good example of a healthy way to eat. She adds that fish-oil supplements can be helpful for some people with severe clinical depression, but eating “sardines on your toast” should suffice for the wider population. Sugary foods in particular should be avoided as they tend to increase the same inflammation markers that are raised in people with depression.

Since a good proportion of mental health disorders start setting in during adolescence, it is especially important for young people to have a healthy diet. Many organisations talk about the long-term consequences of eating junk food, but pictures of an abstract future do not seem to be influencing people’s eating behaviors. So maybe knowing that junk food can make them unhappy now can give them an incentive to start changing their eating habits sooner rather than later and therefore eating themselves happy!

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