How Foods and Nutrients Control Our Moods

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Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. My name is Andrew Huberman, and I’m a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. This podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero-cost consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I’d like to thank the sponsors of today’s podcast.

Our first sponsor today is Theragun. Theragun is a handheld percussive therapy device that releases deep muscle tension. I was first introduced to Theragun in 2017 while on a laboratory expedition. We were in the middle of the Pacific Ocean filming great white sharks for my laboratory studies on fear using virtual reality. We were working very hard around the clock, and I and other people on the trip were picking up a lot of aches and pains and just kind of chronic soreness.

Couple people had injuries that were flaring up because of all the hard work and lack of sleep. Someone had a Theragun, and pretty soon it was getting passed around. It became the most coveted device on board. Everyone was using it to work on these different sites of soreness, and I really fell in love with the thing, so much so that when I got back, I immediately purchased one, and I’ve used it almost daily ever since. I use it on muscles that are sore.

I use it on areas that I’m really working on to release tension and improve tissue quality and so forth. The great thing about Theragun is it’s really quiet, so you can use it while you’re in a conversation or while you’re watching a movie, and it doesn’t disrupt those activities at all. If you want to try Theragun, you can try Theragun by going to theragun. com/huberman to get your Gen 4 Theragun. They start at $199, but if you think about it, a massage, which is an hour long or 90 minutes long, is typically in that range of cost.

And this is something you can use every day whenever you want and even while enjoying other activities. So that’s theragun. com/huberman. The second sponsor today’s podcast is Inside Tracker. Inside Tracker is a personalized nutrition platform that analyzes data from your blood and DNA to help you better understand your body and help you reach your health goals.

The great thing about Inside Tracker is that it gives you data that you can make sense of. I’ve long been a believer in getting blood samples taken and more recently I’ve become a believer in getting DNA samples taken in order to understand what’s going on at the level of hormones, metabolic factors, and other things that profoundly influence our immediate and long-term health. The problem always has been getting those samples taken and get making sense of those samples. Inside Tracker makes all of that really easy. They’ll even come to your home to take the samples.

Then you get the information back and while typically after getting information back there’s these long list of numbers and nobody knows what to do with them, Inside Tracker makes it really easy to interpret what those numbers mean and it points to things in terms of lifestyle, exercise, nutrition, and so forth that can help you adjust some of the numbers that you might need to bring down or up to put into the appropriate normal range. So, I find this whole process to be immensely valuable for guiding my health choices and also just for giving me peace of mind about how my body and the rest of my health are doing internally, something you just can’t know without a blood and DNA test. If you want to try Inside Tracker, you can go to insidetracker. com/huberman and you’ll get 25% off any of their programs. You want to put Huberman at checkout.

So, that’s insidetracker. com/huberman to get 25% off any of Inside Tracker’s plans and put Huberman at checkout. The third sponsor of today’s podcast is Athletic Greens. Athletic Greens is an all-in-one vitamin, mineral, probiotic drink. I started using Athletic Greens in 2012, so I’m delighted that they’re a sponsor of the podcast.

The reason I started using Athletic Greens and the reason I still take it once or twice per day is that I find it very hard to know what vitamins and minerals I need to take. And by drinking Athletic Greens, I get it all in one easy-to-consume, great-tasting formula. I really do like the way it tastes. I mix mine with water and a little bit of lemon or lime juice, and to me, it’s delicious. The other thing about Athletic Greens that I really like are the probiotics.

There’s so much data out there now telling us, and I certainly believe based on the data that I’ve seen, that probiotics are really important for support of the gut microbiome, the gut-brain axis, the immune system, and many other aspects of our biology. So, with Athletic Greens, I get the vitamins, the minerals, and the probiotics that I need. If you want to try Athletic Greens, you can go to athleticgreens. com/huberman. And if you do that, they’ll also give you a year’s supply of vitamin D3K2.

Vitamin D3, we also know, is really important for things like immune system and metabolic support. So, that’s athleticgreens. com/huberman to get Athletic Greens, the year’s supply of vitamin D3K2, and they’ll give you five free travel packs. Today, we’re talking all about emotions. Emotions are central to our entire experience of life.

Whether or not we’re happy or sad or depressed or angry is our life experience. And yet, I think with all the importance that we’ve placed on emotions, very few people actually understand how emotions arise in our brain and body. And I mention brain and body because, as you’ll see today, emotions really capture the brain-body relationship. We cannot say that emotions arise just from what happens in our head. It also involves events, biological events, chemical events within our body.

The other thing about emotions is that there’s no real agreement as to what’s a good emotion or a bad emotion. Today, we’re going to talk about the biology of the chemicals and pathways that give rise to emotions, and I’m going to equip you with several, if not many, tools that will allow you to regulate and change and steer your emotions should you want, but not using the typical advice. You know, you everyone’s probably heard of this thing, “Oh, you know, if you’re feeling depressed, just smile. You know, what you It’s impossible to be depressed while smiling. ” Look, if that were true, we wouldn’t have any depressed people because depressed people don’t want to be depressed.

And it is not the case that simply smiling will reverse depression or sadness. And it’s simply not the case that smiling can inhibit sadness. It just doesn’t work that way. However, it is the case that certain things that are happening in our body influence how our brain functions and the chemicals that are released. And today we’re going to talk a lot about how the brain and body interact to create these things called emotions in the context of food and nutrition.

And the reason we’re doing that is not because I’m beating the drum about particular diet regimens or anything. In fact, I’m not going to do any of that. What I’m going to do is I’m going to review some of the most important scientific data that point to how ingesting certain nutrients, both macronutrients like proteins, fats, and carbohydrates, as well as micronutrients, can impact the chemicals in our brain that give rise to the feelings of being happy or sad or sleepy or alert when you want to be sleepy or sleepy when you want to be alert. So, this is sure to be a broad discussion, and yet we’re going to get very specific about what emotions are, how they arise in the body, tools that one can use in order to better control their emotions. Tools that people can use to, believe