Can Nutrition Affect Your Anxiety?
When it comes to what affects anxiety we often think of genetics, sleep, life events, and our general predisposition to stress. Other than sleep, we think about factors mostly outside of our control. But what if there was another major factor we could control, like nutrition?
That’s the question I set out to answer in this post: Does nutrition affect your anxiety? And if it does, then how and to what extent?
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Does nutrition affect your anxiety?
Our body is a complex interconnected set of 12 systems and 78 organs (give or take, depending on the way they’re counted). Each one of them maintains a delicate balance for optimal performance.
But when it comes to our nutrition, we most often think about organs like our heart or system like our immune system. We overlook the impact it has on our brain, the home of our hypothalamus.
The hypothalamus is a gland located in your brain. It uses information from your nervous system to determine when to tell other glands to produce hormones.
One of those glands is the pituitary gland. Among other things, the pituitary gland affects your brain, energy, and mood.
According to the Mayo Clinic, anxiety can be defined as intense, excessive, and persistent worry and fear about everyday situations. Worry and/or fear are affected by hormones, our hormones are made by our glands, and our glands are stored in our organs. And food directly affects our organs.
So to answer the above question, yes, nutrition does affect your anxiety.
How does nutrition affect your anxiety?
But you still may be asking, “But how does nutrition affect my anxiety?”
It comes down to what we do eat – more fiber – and what we don’t eat – less meat. Fiber-rich foods are great at producing short-chain fatty acids (SCFA).
Research has shown that specific prebiotics known to boost SCFAs suppress your body’s response to stress by dampening the secretion of the stress hormone, cortisol. SCFAs also regulate the way your brain processes emotional information, keeping it from dwelling on negative thoughts and emotions.
The process of how fibrous foods prevent anxiety
It’s a complex process, but let me explain the process of how fiber prevents anxiety as explained by Psychology Today.
Fiber travels through the stomach and small intestine intact ending up in the colon. At that point, it becomes food for the healthy microbes. They turn the resistant carbohydrates (known as prebiotics because they enhance the growth of beneficent gut bugs) by fermenting them. This process releases energy, gases, and metabolites called short-chain fatty acids.
“SCFAs are one of the many ways the gut communicates with the brain. SCFAs serve as signaling molecules throughout the body—mobilizing hormones and activating nerve pathways and many types of cells to regulate appetite, energy balance, body weight, immunity, brain function, and mood states.”
"With narrowing of the microbiota, there's a failure to produce certain molecules that are essential to normal brain function," explains Timothy Dinan, professor of psychiatry at University College Cork, Ireland.
How do you eat to improve your anxiety?
As I previously mentioned, the best way to improve your anxiety is to eat more fiber and less meat.
According to Dr. Michael Greger, in his 2019 book, How Not to Diet, “A single meal high in animal protein can nearly double the level of the stress hormone cortisol in the blood within a half-hour of consumption, more than twice that of a meal closer to the recommended level of protein.”
A plant-rich high-fiber-low-meat diet is essential for the diversity of the microbiome, explains Dinan. Not only is this healthy for overall bodily function, but this way of eating also helps maximize the production of SCFAs.
High-fiber foods such as grains, legumes, and vegetables stimulate the production of these SCFAs.
And to be even more specific, there are several foods that provide high levels of SCFAs from gut bacteria. They include Jerusalem artichokes, globe artichokes, onions, garlic, leeks, chicory, and bananas.
In conclusion: Nutrition does affect your mental health
As you can clearly see, yes, nutrition does affect your anxiety and overall mental health. Your body is comprised of an intricately interwoven collection of organs and systems. Compromising the health of one affects the other.
But this conclusion doesn’t mean you have to adopt a radical transformation to see results – in this case, that means decreased anxiety levels.
It comes down to filling your plate with more fiber-rich foods that will help your colon produce more SCFAs to promote healthy hormones and a healthier response to stress.