The pleasure of real food! A dopamine journey.

I heard a podcast today that I think explained something that might be useful to all of us in our food journey to health.

I listen to a huge number of podcasts. One of my favourites is Huberman Lab with Dr Andrew Huberman, a professor of Neurobiology at Stanford University. He discusses neuroscience—how our brain and its connections with the organs of our body controls our perceptions, our behaviours, and our health.

Today’s episode was “Controlling Your Dopamine For Motivation, Focus & Satisfaction”. I realised while I was listening that my journey into the WFPB lifestyle has, to a large degree, been enabled by dopamine.

Bear with me here! A little backtracking. First what is dopamine? It’s a neuro-transmitter that affects how we feelpleasure. It's a big part of our unique human ability to think and plan. It helps us strive, focus, and find things interesting.

It is distributed through pathways in the brain and is in charge of our reward systems and interestingly, our sense of time (which when you think about it makes sense – time goes fast when you’re having fun and moves like treacle when you’re waiting for something)

There were several big take-aways from this podcast for me.

1. The fact that I am gaining knowledge about the role food plays in the health of body is giving me pleasure and making it easier and easier to develop and maintain my WFPB diet! The mere effect of knowing that you know something or as he calls is “knowledge of knowledge” can “change these deep primitive circuits related to dopamine”.

2. We can develop a pleasurable self-perpetuating dopamine response simply by knowing that what we’re doing is good for us!

3. The more I understand how food assists my health and keeps my arthritis and auto immune issues at bay the better I feel. Not just because the pain has gone but because dopamine is making me content and happy.

4. Fast foods are addictive; dopamine creates cravings. BUT the good news is, we can retrain/rewire the pathways really easily and get to love a platter of vegies and hummus as easily as a plate of cheezels.

5. Reminding yourself you love fresh and whole foods over and over again becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy!

The amazing ability of dopamine to help us onto the path of health is anchored in the fact that these circuits are not just attached to the more primitive behaviours of food, sex heat etc, they are also attached to the things that we decide are good for us and important for us – we can rewire our thoughts and get rewarded for it!

This is well established in science in a study published last year (2020) in the journal Neuron showed that hearing something which reinforces ones prior beliefs actually evokes dopamine release, so the dopamine pathway is SO vulnerable to subjective interpretation that it actually makes it such that when we see something or hear something that validates something that we already believe, that, in itself, can evoke dopamine release.

The take-away here is that if we eat good food and we know it’s good and we talk with other people about why and how it’s good, we’ll get a dopamine release! (And a lasting one, not one that lessens over time…)

This ties into why our diets have become full of processed foods. Food companies study dopamine pathways so they can hijack them. We don’t need a study to show us that if you eat something that tastes good to you and then follow it with something that is even sweeter or even more savoury and then you go back to the food that you ate previously – well you don’t like it as much. You’ve over-dopamined* and you’ll want to try more and more to get that feeling of pleasure back. Snack food is based on this shift in perception.

“Big dopamine release makes it more challenging to experience more big dopamine release”, says Huberman. “So, for the very savoury foods that are now everywhere, referred to as “highly palatable foods”, it’s making the more bland foods, the foods that aren’t highly processed, it’s making them taste less good”.

But he assures us that after just a few days of not eating packaged and processed highly flavoured foods we’ll start to get our dopamine from whole foods, foods that are eaten in their original state.

After all, what is better in flavour than a perfect strawberry or a carrot pulled straight from the ground or a perfect ear of corn?

My dopamine is going off just thinking about it!

The wonder of dopamine is that its value is not about right this minute, but it’s established over days and weeks of regulation by your own brain. Don’t aim for dopamine hits – they just create massive unmanageable highs and lows that our bodies can’t tolerate. Aim for managing and increasing the brain’s ability to regulate dopamine and be happy much more often!

*I don’t think this a word, but you get the general idea!

The Podcast Link:

https://hubermanlab.com/controlling-your-dopamine-for-motivation-focus-and-satisfaction/