ALL THE FUN OF THE FARE
You know in your gut the food that makes you smile, even if your brain demurs. Don’t be hangry
Junk food, right in that glorious moment of imbibing, delivers both pleasure and comfort. Biologically, we’re programmed to seek it. Human jaws and stomachs are small. We cannot, like the storied pythons of Youtube, ingest entire alligators and subsist without further nourishment for months on end. To our bodies, evolved to survive as hunter-gatherers over millions of years, the next famine is always coming. Consequently, your system is calibrated to propel you toward the maximum amount of calories fitted into the most easily digestible package.
Back on the African savannah, that meant meat, and increasingly more of it. In 2017, it translates as sugar, fat and salt – the dietary dark triad – which remorselessly strobe your brain’s reward centres. In particular, the muchpilloried white powder is catnip for your pleasure hormones: as well as triggering a big squirt of dopamine, it chivvies along the amino acid tryptophan, which facilitates production of the body’s ‘happy hormone’ serotonin.
The catch, of course, is threefold. Too much of what you fancy a) makes you fat, b) damages your health, and c) – here’s the kicker – draws you into an addiction cycle wherein your dopamine signal down-regulates, requiring larger and larger sugar doses just to unleash the same pleasurable response. That doesn’t sound much like a Happy Meal to me.
It’s therefore unsurprising that contemporary nutritionists strongly discourage the satiated route to contentment. Scientifically, it’s tricky to argue. The mood/food quandary is a case of chicken and egg because it is unclear which comes first: the healthy choice or the happy outlook. (Incidentally, when it comes to chicken and eggs, most agree that you should try to eat both in large quantities.)
However, what plentiful research does suggest is that positive feelings lead to healthy choices. Meanwhile, the black dog is likely to drag you back toward the glare of the backlit menu.
A study at Penn State University that tracked the interaction between diet and mood over the course of seven days found that an increased intake of calories, salt and fat resulted in black moods a full two days later – a phenomenon we humbly suggest should be christened DOFS (Delayed Onset Food Sadness). Similarly, harvesting the vegetable aisle one day tends to lead to a sunnier disposition the next.
Case closed then? Well, not quite. Clearly it’s not that simple. A subject that’s as complex and nuanced as our relationship with food cannot be unravelled by cold science alone, however robust. That’s because humans are unique in the way we view our grub. Animals feed, while we dine. Food as chemistry can be studied, tabulated and codified; food as culture cannot. To put it another way: there is no experiment that can quantify the sense of wellbeing a dad feels when knocking up his trademark shepherd’s pie every weekend. Or the electric thrill gleaned courtesy of a date-night meal at the newest restaurant in town. On a more personal level, the euphoria that hits as I bound up the stairs on a Friday having collected an Indian takeaway is overwhelming enough to justify even the most severe case of Sunday DOFS.
Surely, then, a truly happy diet is to be found neither in the aspartame glut of processed junk nor the monastic joylessness of punitive eating plans. The key, as ever, is balance.
From the pyrotechnic creations of Heston Blumenthal and his fellow ‘gastrophysicists’ to the revelatory quality of Lidl’s Magnum knock-offs, we in the UK have never been as mesmerised or as spoiled by the culinary options available to us. Reader, we implore you, dig in. You can prep tomorrow’s salmon and rice later.