We’re crabby until we’ve had a coffee. Sad some days until we’ve had chocolate. Stressed out other times until we down a beer… this will sound familiar to plenty of us. But we all know that the less healthy choices, no matter how appealing at the time, will come back to bite us on the behind later in the form of guilt, or love handles. Emotional eating and drinking is a frustrating thing in hindsight.
So which foods are guilt-free, and also come with the feel-goods? Unsurprisingly, it’s not sugary or hyper-colour drinks off the shelf, which have actually been linked a number of times to high rates of depression and other mood disorders.
Nope, contentment comes from foods much simpler. They’re colourful, they come in a multitude of dazzling colours, shapes and sizes, and they’re cheap: fruit and vegetables. Mother Nature’s finest is the quickest way to bliss.
One recent study even claims that the humble veg renders us better looking, which can only be a good thing for anyone’s feelings of self value!
Check out these 5 foods below and get munching – leave behind the blues and eat your way to a happier day.
1. Fruit – take your pick!
A study published recently in the British Journal of Health Psychology found that eating fresh fruit every day boosted the emotional well-being of young people significantly. And it didn’t matter what sort they ate – just so long as the fruit wasn’t dried or in juice form, participants who ate fruit reported feeling much calmer and energised than those who did not.
Apart from feeling great, eating fruit is strongly associated with staving off cancer, hypertension, cataracts, stroke, and many other gloomy health conditions.
2. Green tea
There’s nothing more precious than our memories, and green tea has been shown to help with just that. A 2014 study at the University of Basel, Switzerland did brain scans on a group of healthy volunteers, and found that those who had taken green tea before the test performed significantly better on memory-processing activities than those who hadn’t. The findings have sparked ongoing interest from scientists that this humble beverage may have huge potential in slowing down dementia and other mental decline conditions.
Of course there’s a whole host of other health benefits we’ve all heard about before – green tea has been linked many times with lower risk of prostate cancer, cardiovascular and liver disease, assisting with better energy levels and even evidence of healthier skin.
3. Dark leafy greens
It seems that these vegies can do no wrong. We hear about their benefits all the time, but now it’s also come to light that the folate they contain contributes to the production of serotonin and dopamine – the chemicals in our brains which regulate mood. The International Society for Affective Disorders recently published these findings, concluding that people who ate good levels of folate were much less prone to depression than those who ate low levels.
4. Mushroooms
With Australia’s anxiety and mood disorder prevalence on the rise, mushrooms should be on everyone’s plate regularly. These modest little morsels contain selenium, a powerful antioxidant that has been proven to fight anxiety in a number of studies.
That’s apart from their contribution to reducing the risk of miscarriage, birth deformaties, low sperm count and diseases like cancer.
5. Organic black coffee
Collective sigh of elated relief – coffee’s on the A-list. Black is best, so you’ll be better off without all the milk and sugar, but that doesn’t mean you can’t still reap benefits even if you must have it.
Coffee is good in most of the same ways as green tea; it can help with better brain functioning, assist in reducing the incidence of cancers and cardiovascular diseases, and is packed with antioxidants to keep us healthy.
Because it has so much of that national vice, caffeine – keep coffee to the mornings, and switch to tea in the evening for maximum benefits.
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These five are just the beginning – the better your food choices, the happier our brains and bodies are. Everything in balance of course though; the odd naughty treat is essential for the feel-goods too.
