Do you have questions about nutrition? Send us to comer@lavanguardia.es, our nutritionist Aitor Sánchez will answer all your questions.
Are there healthy foods that calm anxiety? (Gabriel González, reader)
Hello Gabriel,
We cannot assign any food a property as drastic as calming anxiety. A different thing could be that some people use food to regulate their emotions, and within that regulation, we find that by resorting to a specific food or routine, they see that their anxiety is reduced. In any case, it would not be something attributable to the characteristics of the food, but rather to the relationship and previous experience we have with it. Working on these issues can be key to avoiding falling into eating disorders or other psychological problems with food.
In these cases there is something much deeper that cannot be corrected with the addition or elimination of a simple food; there may be emotional discomfort or very deteriorated mental health. There are many factors to consider that could be causing that person to have anxiety, and in all that tangle of sensations, sometimes we can feel that food is something external that can be controlled, and in this way use it to try to regulate those feelings. emotions.
Once we have clarified what food cannot achieve on its own, it is worth remembering that the opposite case could occur, and that is that we do have foods that can make us nervous or excite us, such as stimulants such as coffee, tea, caffeinated drinks and even chocolate. For people who may feel that they get very nervous, these types of foods should be limited, or at least study the possibility of partially restricting them, so that in this way we do not include more distortions in all the complexity that exists in the relationship between anxiety and eating.
The best advice I can give you is that if you yourself, or someone around you, is experiencing anxiety, to seek psychological help to try to better manage the situation, and see what issues in your environment can be modified. Good luck
Is chewing gum a good alternative to not snack between meals? (Joana Giménez, reader)
Hi Joana,
Chewing gum can only calm our desire to snack between meals in a very impostered way; it would be an attempt to deceive our body and mask those sensations we are having. We should not combat our appetite or our feeling of hunger with a patch, but rather we should analyze what is happening.
Surely our previous meal was not satiating enough, or we may be exposing ourselves to external stimuli that make us crave some food between meals and to avoid it, we resort to chewing gum.
The first thing I would recommend is that we could check if our diet is complete and healthy. It makes no sense to seek to reduce caloric intake through willpower and these deceptions. A better strategy would be to include healthy but filling foods.
Even if we eat a healthy diet, it is not strange that we can feel hungry between meals. It is important to reflect on what we have accustomed our body to in recent years. If, for example, we usually have a routine of incorporating sweets or snacks mid-morning or mid-afternoon, it is completely understandable that our body continues to ask us for it. If this is your case, here I would recommend making this change progressively and not making it all or nothing, in which the gum is a simple lure to at least “give something” to the body.
