Secret to a brighter day

When you can’t decide which flavor to order on an outing to the fro-yo shop with the family, consider choosing vanilla: It can boost your mood, report researchers in the journal Food Research International. They asked volunteers to taste various yogurt flavors, then measured their emotional responses. The surprising results: People got the biggest happiness kick after eating low-fat vanilla yogurt—even if they didn’t end up liking it. And a separate study found that simply sniffing vanilla led to a 63 percent reduction in anxiety. That’s because compounds in vanilla boost endorphins and calm tension, reducing aggression and anxiety.