Do you suffer with depression? Did you know that there is a connection between depression and diet, so the foods that you eat every day might actually be contributing to your negative emotions?
Keep reading to learn more so you can make the right eating choices and feel great in both mind and body.
Here’s How Foods Affect Your Moods
A neurotransmitter known as serotonin is responsible for helping to regulate your appetite and your sleep. It can also help to balance your moods, as well as reduce pain. But roughly 95% of the body’s serotonin is made in the gastrointestinal tract, which is lined with neurons, and they also affect the way that you feel. Those neurons, as well as the body’s production of serotonin, are influenced by the good bacteria in your gut, which are responsible for helping to maintain your overall health.
Studies have already found that taking probiotics can help reduce your perception of stress, your mental outlook, and your anxiety level. Also, traditional diets, such as the Mediterranean diet or the Japanese diet, which tend to contain higher amounts of unprocessed grains, vegetables, and fruits, as well as fermented products that naturally contain probiotics, are better at reducing a person’s risk of depression when compared to the Western diet. Therefore, researchers have found that there is a connection between depression and diet, and people can simply change the way they eat to feel better.
How to Change Your Diet—and Your Mood—for the Better
To determine if your depression is caused by your diet, begin paying more attention to what you eat and how that food makes you feel in the moment and the following day. Then attempt eating a clean diet for at least two or three weeks. This means that you will need to eliminate sugar and processed foods, while adding fermented foods and other healthy options to your daily meals. You can also go dairy-free and/or grain-free as well.
Experiment and see how you feel. Then you can slowly introduce certain food groups back into your diet one at a time to see how you feel and figure out what foods are causing your depression.
Many people notice pretty dramatic changes in the way they feel when they go on a clean diet and when they start supplementing their diet with probiotics. Because there is a link between depression and diet, it is definitely worth seeing if the foods you eat every day are to blame.