Dicing Depression: Food for Your Mood

A friend recently shared a story of how, many years ago, learning to cook during college helped in dealing with depression. It’s a story that deserves a lot more attention.

Learning to cook is an invaluable life skill. No question that home cooking is the best path to healthful and economical meals. But could the act of cooking actually do much more…including helping to fight depression?

Tantalizing evidence, still in the preliminary stage, suggests that cooking can positively impact several psychological determinants of depression. Let’s explore a few of the ways that cooking might enhance a greater sense of well-being:

Improved Diet Quality

Self-made meals are likelier to be more nutrient-dense, have fewer calories, and contain less added sugar, salt, and unhealthy fat compared to fast-food or restaurant choices. This healthier way of eating is associated with less inflammation, improved cognitive function and elevated mood.

Opportunities for Mastery

The discrete skills acquired as one learns to cook, including chopping and dicing, mixing, and baking, offer the opportunity of “mastery.” The sense of accomplishment from learning to cook aligns with principles of mental health treatment that seek to move those suffering from depression beyond passivity and toward positive activities that enhance mood.

Cooking as Meditation

The repetitive nature of cooking prep-work offers an opportunity to relax and separate from the negative self-talk common in depression. Especially for those who find it difficult to sit still to begin a more formal practice, cooking can serve as a more active way to access some of the same benefits from meditation.

Cultivation of Creativity

Cooking encourages exploration and discovery and can serve as platform for creative expression. The range of opportunities for creative expression with cooking is vast—regardless of baseline training or skills. Even for those who have never cooked, it is relatively easy to move from “I made it” to “I made it my way.”

Sensory Activation

Cooking engages all of the senses: beside the colorful sights of vegetables and fruit, scents of fresh herbs, taste, touch and even hearing (the sound of slicing vegetables) are all in high gear when cooking—with the potential for all of these pleasure sensors to be fully activated.

Cooking Evokes Memories

Cooking can be a vehicle to take people back in time to pleasant memories associated with warmth and comfort. Think of the last time you smelled and tasted a favorite recipe from childhood. How did that make you feel?

For perspective, it is important to point out that cooking is, at best, a helper for some people with less severe forms of depression. We are only beginning to understand how cooking can influence mood and depression. And there is a lot more to learn about how to identify people likely to respond and, for them, how best to “prescribe” cooking to boost the chances of benefit.

Given the current challenges that can fuel depression, the time is now to learn as much as we can about lifestyle-based approaches that might help.

References:

Psychosocial Benefits of Cooking Interventions: A Systematic Review

Young Adults’ Use of Food as a Self-Therapeutic Intervention