Emotional Eating
You’re famished. Nothing has touched your lips since your out-the-door breakfast bar (except maybe gloss), and then there it is, inches from your mouth, happiness in your hand: a classic Chipwich, its two warm chocolate chip cookies meeting the vanilla ice cream middle that’s slowly melting down your fingers. This may sound like a Liz Lemon dream sequence, but food legitimately affects your mood—more than you probably realize. Take the chocolate in your ’wich: It contains happy-making serotonin and anandamide, and once it hits your gut, your body thanks you with a surge of opioids—the cocktail of all three reaches your brain and, voilà, bliss! “Different foods signal pleasure both through the substances they contain and the chemicals they cause the gut to release,” says Gianrico Farrugia, director of the Enteric Neuroscience Program at the Mayo Clinic. This prompts the question: Should we be eating to balance our moods, not just our scales?
The brain-gut connection has necessitated a new field of science, neurogastroenterology, whose experts reverentially refer to the gut (comprised of the esophagus, intestines, and stomach) as the “second brain.” Unglamorous as it may sound, the gut is a physical and emotional powerhouse: It’s estimated to contain more than 200 million neurons, more than the spinal cord has, and can do its work (i.e., digestion) independent of the brain.
Indeed, many of the mood-related messages between these two brains go from the bottom up. Researchers now look at the digestive system as an indicator of what may be going on in the brain: Tissue lesions from Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases have been found in the stomach wall, matching those in the brain—a discovery that could aid in early diagnoses. Studies also indicate that people stricken with intestinal diseases, including irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), benefit from low doses of antidepressants, drugs once thought to work only in the brain. Since the gut contains about 95 percent of the body’s supply of serotonin, some neurogastroenterologists now believe that antidepressants actually work primarily in the digestive system, as opposed to the brain, by blocking the reuptake of serotonin and making it more available to bind with important receptors.
Depression sufferers who are unresponsive to antidepressants sometimes turn to vagus nerve stimulation—which essentially delivers a mega-dose of the rush you’d get from that Chipwich. Electrodes are im­planted under the skin near the neck to send electrical impulses through the nerves, “mimicking the good feelings that the gut usually sends to the brain,” says Michael Gershon, professor of anatomy and cell biology at Columbia University and author of The Second Brain (HarperCollins).
In fact, Emeran Mayer, director of the Center for Neurobiology of Stress at UCLA, believes that one day psychiatry may improve mental well-being by treating both brains. He’s currently running a brain-imaging study to examine the effect of probiotic supplements, hypothesizing that they will impact mood positively (possibly by improving the digestive system’s function). “When we ingest something, it doesn’t just sit in our stomachs. It most certainly has an affect on our overall being,” Mayer says. Of course, anyone who has ever savored the perfect Chipwich knows that already.