This diet offers benefits for a wide range of health concerns, including but not limited to lifting mood, preventing or treating heart disease, obesity, type 2 diabetes, irritable bowel syndrome, Crohn’s disease, digestive cancers, and other common 21st-century illnesses.
Based on the scientific data, it is undeniable that food is medicine.
But which type of meals, animal-based or plant-based, can improve mood?
Neuroscientists from MPI CBS in Leipzig conducted three smartphone-based investigations in over 400 university cafeterias throughout Germany and have recently published their results in the journal npj Science of Food.
Studies done recently demonstrate that cutting less on meat and dairy may cut agricultural greenhouse gas emissions by as much as 80 percent. Yet, little is known about the physiological and psychological effects of consuming plant-based diets.
What happens to our body after eating plants vs animals? And who in the cafeteria is most likely to choose which dish?
Evelyn Medawar, a researcher on food decision-making at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany, suggests that a plant-based meal could lead to a greater sense of satiety and improved mood compared to an animal-based meal due to the association of dietary fiber with enhanced signaling between the gut and the brain.
To test this, more than 16,300 individuals from over 400 university cafeterias in Germany took part in three large-scale smartphone-based investigations. The participants used the iMensa app to score the food’s taste as well as express their mood and level of hunger both before and after eating by using emojis.
The findings demonstrate that, as anticipated, eating meals often increased satiety and improved mood, regardless of whether the meal was vegetarian, vegan, or meat.
But compared to those who picked an animal-based meal, those who chose a plant-based meal “reported a slightly better mood before the meal and a smaller increase in mood after the meal,” says Medawar. Although gender and taste rating had a significant impact on post-meal satiety and mood in general, protein content only had a little impact.
So, more women and people of different backgrounds ate plant-based dishes in general. Post-meal hunger and mood were greatly worsened by really poor-tasting foods. But, while eating delicious food, hunger was greatly reduced and mood was somewhat elevated. Also, plant-based foods were consumed alone rather than in company, which may have contributed to a lack of mood enhancement via social contact.
Source: 10.1038/s41538-022-00176-w
Image Credit: Getty
