Spending your day in bed doing little beyond crying, masturbating and playing Fifa? Here are five foods that can fend off depression and lift your mood.
By Robert Carry
Spinach
Olive Oil’s slutty behaviour with Brutus never seemed to get Popeye down. How did he manage to keep his chin up? His spinach-rich diet. Dark, leafy green vegetables are rich in iron – which is key to a properly functioning circulatory system. Those lacking in iron can often feel drained, listless and overly tired – everything that Popeye wasn’t.
Happily, you don’t have to eat the stuff reduced to a green sludge from a tin – spinach is a great replacement for lettuce in salads.
Oily fish
Oily fish like salmon and mackerel are increasingly being recognised as one of the world’s genuine super foods. For the most part, their status is earned by their high Omega-3 content. As well as boosting various aspects of your physical health, this fatty acid is also used to treat clinical depression.
Many consider fish too difficult to cook (buy it in fillet form, wrap it in tinfoil and put it in the oven for 15 mins) while others simply don’t like it. Happily, this doesn’t necessarily mean they are condemned to struggle through the long, dark tunnel of misery – they can simply take omega-3 supplements.
Whole grain pasta or bread
Carbohydrate-heavy foods have long held the status of comfort food, thanks largely to the fact that they ramp up your blood sugar levels, boosting energy and helping to increase the production of happy chemical serotonin.
The problem is that white bread, rice or pasta are crammed with calories and are a great way of landing yourself with a gut with matching moobs that will make your girlfriend sob quietly in the darkness post-coitus. Switching from the heavily refined white carb products to whole grain versions will give you much of the mood-lifting benefits while preventing you from turning into Jabba the Hut’s left arse-cheek.
Sunflower seeds
Somewhat unsurprisingly, the seeds of the happiest flower in the natural world, the sunflower, work great as a mood lifter.
Seeds of most kinds are a great addition to your diet, adding high doses of protein and fibre. However, sunflower seeds are also rich in selenium. The chemical version of your favourite song, this nutrient is believed to be able to trigger an instant mood lift directly after consumption.
Milk
There is no such thing as a depressed calf. Why? Because the milk they suck from their mother’s bizarrely elongated nipples (unless we steal it first) are rich in tryptophan; an amino acid our brains turn into serotonin.
Serotonin, essentially the product our brains produce when we do something that makes us happy, has been replicated by many anti-depressants but the real stuff is still top of the pile. Milk also contains antioxidants, vitamin D and vitamin B12 which all help fight stress.
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