How to ‘Eat & Flourish’

Today on “Post Reports,” the way what we eat – and how we eat it – affects our mental health, not just our physical health. Plus, how to eat for your emotional well-being in the new year.

Washington Post journalist Mary Beth Albright has been fascinated by the connection between food and mood for years. 

“What I began to realize is that food and emotions are inextricably entwined,” Mary Beth told Martine Powers. “We can either get to know the biology and the connection and how to use it, or we can deny the reality of it and just say, ‘Oh, I don’t want to emotionally eat,’” when really the science shows that all eating is emotional eating.” 

Today on “Post Reports,” we talk to Mary Beth about her new book, “Eat & Flourish: How Food Supports Emotional Well-Being.” We cover why we get “hangry,” the joys and benefits of eating with other people, and how to harness the power of food to improve your mood and your well-being in 2023.

Martine Powers:It is the end of the year, so I just want to say thank you for making Post Reports a part of your listening routine. And there’s actually a great way to show your support for us right now and begin the new year with everything that The Washington Post has to offer. You can save over 70% on a new premium subscription to The Washington Post, and that new premium subscription comes with a bonus subscription for you to share with someone in your life. You can find this deal at washingtonpost.com/subscribe. Okay, here’s today’s show.

Mary Beth Albright:How does food affect our mood and how does our mood affect what we choose to eat and how we experience that flavor? Because flavor happens and is created in the brain.

Martine Powers:That is Mary Beth Albright. She’s a reporter and editor at The Post. And for a long time, she’s had this interest in the link between food and mood. When the pandemic hit in 2020, Mary Beth, like many of us, found her relationship with food changing.

Mary Beth Albright:What I began to realize is that food and emotions are inextricably entwined, and we can either get to know this and the biology and the connection and how to use it, or we can deny the reality of it and just say like, “Oh, I don’t want to emotionally eat,” when really, the science shows that all eating is emotional eating.

Martine Powers:And what Mary Beth realized is if you can embrace this fact that food and emotion are fundamentally linked, then you can harness that to transform your life. From the newsroom of The Washington Post, this is Post Reports. I’m Martine Powers. It’s Friday, December 23rd. Today, a conversation with Mary Beth about her new book, “Eat & Flourish: How Food Supports Emotional Well-Being.” We talk about the joys and health benefits of eating with other people, the way that our bodies and brains process different foods, and how you can eat for your emotional well-being in the new year. About five years ago, Mary Beth found herself at the start of a new job, but at the end of a marriage. With a young child, life was hectic. But she found relief in breakfast.

Mary Beth Albright:At the beginning of when I was going through a divorce, my son was nine years old. In the mornings, I was — I had just started working at the Washington Post. Oh, my gosh, I’m at the Post. I’ve got to, like, make a good impression, right?

Martine Powers:[Laughs]

Mary Beth Albright:But I’m also a single mom and I would, like, show up and be like, “Oh, I forgot to put on deodorant, you know, this morning.”

Martine Powers:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Mary Beth Albright:So I made a commitment to myself that I would always make myself something warm for breakfast.

Martine Powers:Huh. Something warm?

Mary Beth Albright:Something warm, because one of the people who gave me a quote for the back of the book is Chef Jose Andres, who knows the power of a hot meal more than anyone else, right?

Martine Powers:Because he does so much work in disaster zones and helping to feed people who have been through crises.

Mary Beth Albright:Absolutely, and globally — just all over the world. It’s not culturally specific. And so it was a breakfast sandwich that I would make for myself, and I would have one, and I would share it with my son, and we would sit down and just eat it together. And there was something about the warmth, the break in the morning routine, even if sometimes — I mean, let’s be honest, sometimes I would run out the door and eat it in the car with him, right? But there was something about that connection and having a full belly walking into a new situation that really affected my mood and my ability to absorb everything that was going on around me in a busy newsroom.

Martine Powers:Yeah, yeah.

Mary Beth Albright:You know, it was a lot. It was a lot.

Martine Powers:Interesting. Well, I want to build on that a little bit, because you mentioned the fact that you wanted to start your days by making a meal, even a simple meal — just because it’s a breakfast sandwich — making something that’s warm, but also sharing it with your son. And you talk a lot in the book about the feast paradox. I’m wondering if you can explain a little bit more about what that means.

Mary Beth Albright:Yeah. So, so often, because we’ve been so steeped in diet culture, many of us — I include myself in that — we think about eating more food with having worse health outcomes. Like, the goal is to eat less food all the time, right? But the feast paradox is that science shows that when you eat with other people, you tend to eat more, but you have better health outcomes. And —

Martine Powers:What?

Mary Beth Albright:Absolutely. And you look at the the U.S. Surgeon General, the current one, says that there is a loneliness epidemic in this country and that the loneliness that happens, it can be equivalent to ten cigarettes a day, the effects on your health.

Martine Powers:Really?

Mary Beth Albright:Yes. And so — And it’s only gotten worse, right? That was the last time they looked at it, and it was pre-pandemic. And so the idea that you can sit with somebody and eat with them, it’s almost that regardless of what you’re eating, the well-being that you get from being with another person is health-protective.

Martine Powers:Wow.

Mary Beth Albright:And as much time as we can make for our kids to have a communal experience — eating experience, regardless of what they’re eating — You know, we talk so much and we do so many studies about how important it is for kids to eat family meals. The same is true for us, for adults. You don’t grow out of that. It’s still important for your performance, for your well-being, for your connection with other people to eat a communal meal together. And so even if you’re a person without kids and you’re sort of, like, tuning this whole thing out because you’re like, “Okay, somebody else can do,” you know. That’s why I didn’t have kids, so I don’t have to listen to this — which is a legitimate choice. Even if you’re an adult and you don’t have kids in your life, it’s sort of like, this is something that I need to do for myself. Because there’s a — there’s a lot of evidence about it, about eating with other people and the importance of it. And so when you look at food helping emotional well-being, there’s a lot of science in the book about the gut microbiome and about nutrients and about inflammation and how those affect you. But there’s also this idea of pleasure, and pleasure is a form of nourishment, including food pleasure, and we’ve lost that in a lot of the science. So what I tried to do in the book is bring in all of the ways that food affect us.

Martine Powers:But what I don’t understand is why? Like, why is it that, even if we’re eating more when we’re with other people, that it actually is having this affect on our loneliness and anxiety and having kind of a net positive effect for us?

Mary Beth Albright:The body is more than a container for parts. The body is a system. And so when you eat food, it’s not just the nutrients that are going into your body. I mean, food is more than just a group of nutrients. And so it’s affecting how your body uses the food for some reason. We don’t know why, and this is a really important point — that the mechanisms, right now, are not known.

Martine Powers:Hmm.

Mary Beth Albright:It’s hard to do diet studies, and the reason is because unless you have a camera on someone’s head and film everything that goes into their mouth and everything that’s happening around them while they’re eating, there’s so many variables involved. And, you know, we all know that if you’ve ever kept a food journal — I mean, I’ve kept a lot of food journals in my day.

Martine Powers:You do really well for the first 36 hours, [laughing] and then it’s kind of all that after that.

Mary Beth Albright:I thought you’re going to say — I thought you were going to say, “For the first 30 seconds,” because that’s like — because it’s, like, how do you — you know, do you record the lick of the brownie batter?

Martine Powers:Yeah.

Mary Beth Albright:Like in science, the lick of the brownie batter matters. Everything matters in science. It has to be controlled. And so all of the scientists and researchers I spoke with — and these are researchers globally — said we are not going to know in our lifetime exactly what the mechanism is because the system of the body is so complicated. But the research is there now. For people who want to do actionable things for their emotional well-being through food, we have a lot of research about that.

Martine Powers:But Mary Beth, I think some of what you’re saying here is directly challenging a lot of what I feel like I hear about how to make healthy choices around food. I mean, I’m thinking about the start of January, dry January, trying to turn this new leaf eat more healthfully. And one of the big ways of doing that is, like, not going to the office happy hour, where they’re just going to be serving fried food and beer, or not dining out all the time, because then you have more control over your food when you’re eating at home, eating by yourself. But what you’re saying is that there actually are benefits to doing those things, or that it’s more complicated.

Mary Beth Albright:It’s absolutely more complicated. Again, because the body is a system. It’s not just a container for parts. And in this world, we’ve conflated often being with other people and entertaining. They’re not the same thing. We start receiving catalogs for Thanksgiving in August. You know, “Prepare for the perfect Thanksgiving and everybody coming over and you need these new napkins,” and whatever. And we’ve lost the sort of, like, “Come over for coffee and a muffin.”

Martine Powers:Hmm.

Mary Beth Albright:Just sitting down at a table with someone. It doesn’t have to be a production.

Martine Powers:But we also know that so many more people live alone now than they used to. I mean, I think, as you mentioned, so much of the loneliness epidemic was exacerbated by COVID, and I think that’s still the case for people. Talk a little bit more about how people can make communal eating a big part of their lives, even if they are not living in a house with family or with roommates who can make communal eating part of their day to day.

Mary Beth Albright:Well, I live alone part of the time. My son lives with his dad sometimes, he lives at school sometimes, and so it’s back and forth with that. And I’m going to give you an example that’s an extreme example, but I think it speaks to the power of this. My father passed away last week.

Martine Powers:I’m sorry.

Mary Beth Albright:And — Thank you. And the last Thanksgiving that we had together, just a few weeks ago, I brought the entire meal to his nursing home to have Thanksgiving dinner with him and some family members. And we didn’t really eat a lot.

Martine Powers:Mm-hmm.

Mary Beth Albright:And there was a lot going on there. The reason I bring up this example is that there are opportunities around us all the time that we don’t take. And I’m not pathologizing eating alone. Eating alone can be like an amazing, wonderful pleasure. When you eat anything — doesn’t matter what it is — a carrot stick, a Snickers bar, whatever, your body releases dopamine, and that dopamine helps with bonding. To incorporate even one extra meal a week with another person, it has a significant effect. You might get a lot of pleasure out of that with that other person. The feast paradox is one of, I think, the most fascinating parts about it, but it’s not the only part.

Martine Powers:So let’s talk a little bit about some of the other revelations from your book. You wrote about food rituals, which I think is in many ways related to this idea of the feast paradox — that there’s something sacred about, as you say, you know, even going to a nursing home and just bringing some food, sharing it with someone that you love. But what are some of the other rituals that you became fascinated by and the ways that they can have an effect on you?

Mary Beth Albright:So a lot of the pleasure science that I write about is about how the way we eat is just as important as what we eat. And so there’s some really interesting science around how people eat specific foods and whether they get pleasure out of it. So let’s say you’re eating an Oreo. Everybody eats Oreos differently, right?

Martine Powers:Are you one of the, like, twist off the cap people and then, like, licking the inside?

Mary Beth Albright:You have my number. [Laughing] How did you know that? That’s amazing.

Martine Powers:I mean, that’s a crazy way to eat an Oreo, for the record. But I feel like I just want to, like, keep the ratio of cookie to frosting the same in every bite.

Mary Beth Albright:And I’m sure that there is some sort of personality quiz behind this, right? That I think The Washington Post should put out. But because that’s part of it. What we know from the neuroscience is that when you disrupt your food ritual — when you eat your Oreo by just doing every little bite instead of twisting the top, you enjoy that Oreo less. You get less pleasure from it. So let’s say you’re at a meeting and there are Oreos there and you’re like, “Well, I’m a little embarrassed to like, do my twisty thing and whatever,” and you eat one Oreo. You will be less satisfied with that one Oreo than you would have been if you had twisted it off and licked — and licked the frosting out and then eaten the cookies.

Martine Powers:So the traditions are important. The rituals are important. Those are actually a big part of that pleasure experience.

Mary Beth Albright:Everything matters — what’s happening around you, the music, what the food looks like, the size of the plate. There’s neuroscience that shows that desserts on round plates taste sweeter than desserts on square plates.

Martine Powers:[Laughs]

Mary Beth Albright:Same dessert.

Martine Powers:That’s bad news if you own some square plates.

Mary Beth Albright:There’s going to be a run on round plates now. But it’s true. When people eat with heavy cutlery, they will rate the same meal as higher quality than if they eat that meal with plastic cutlery.

Martine Powers:Wow.

Mary Beth Albright:Yeah.

Martine Powers:That’s incredible.

Mary Beth Albright:It is.

Martine Powers:Also inspiring because now I have to bring some nice cutlery to my desk rather than eating with the same plastic fork every day.

Mary Beth Albright:Yes, and absolutely. And it’s all of those things affect. When you drink whiskey, if you have a sound piped in of birds chirping and a lawnmower, the whiskey will taste grassier. If you have sounds piped in of a crackling fireplace, it will taste smokier.

Martine Powers:Wow.

Mary Beth Albright:That’s what I mean by flavor is created in the brain. Your mood will affect that flavor.

Martine Powers:After the break, Mary Beth and I get technical as we dive into the science that links our brains, our bodies, and our food. We’ll be right back.

Martine Powers:So, Mary Beth, I think one of the things that’s so powerful about your book is that it both gives a lot of logistical advice on the things that you can do in your day to day to kind of improve that relationship between food and your mental health, but also that you do go into some of that science. And you talk about a brain scan that you did, where your brain was scanned while you were eating food. Can you talk about that?

Mary Beth Albright:Oh, yeah, I can talk about that. There is a guy, Eric Stice, at Stanford University who does fMRIs, functional MRIs, of people while they’re eating. And his research revolves around milkshakes, just showing that if you eat ice cream a lot, your brain gets a little less pleasure from ice cream, but your brain is also more attuned to cues for ice cream. So if you get used to eating ice cream, you need, like, a little bit more ice cream every time. It’s almost like a tolerance building, right? But and that’s —

Martine Powers:This confirms to me that ice cream is a drug, which I have known for a long time, I have struggled with.

Mary Beth Albright:It’s just seeing — It’s just seeing any kind of cue, and there are food cues everywhere. But I was interested in going a little deeper than that, so I showed up on his doorstep with a pint of kale juice and a bottle of Cav — Cabernet Sauvignon wine — and I was like, “I want to try these three and see how it’s different.” Yeah, I went through a brain scan. We go through all that in the book and the results of it.

Martine Powers:Wait, how do you drink wine while in a brain scan?

Mary Beth Albright:This is this is a great point, because in an fMRI, you’re not allowed to move, right?

Martine Powers:Yeah, and that’s the one where you’re laying down in that big tube.

Mary Beth Albright:And it’s like [imitates whirring] and, like, making noises.

Martine Powers:I’m just imagining, like, a little straw connected to your glass of Pinot Noir.

Mary Beth Albright:Oh, my gosh, Martine, that’s exactly what happened.

Martine Powers:[Laughs]

Mary Beth Albright:And they had to clean the straw between because it’s, like — you can’t — you know, it’s science. You can’t have any kale juice residue when you go through the Cab and that kind of thing, yeah.

Martine Powers:Wow. What did you see on the scans? Like, what did it show that your brain — how your brain was responding when it had something that was pleasurable?

Mary Beth Albright:The other thing that he did was flash photos before you would get the wine. So, for example, there would be a glass of wine. So it would show how your brain would anticipate the wine. And if you drink a lot of wine — guilty as charged — your brain has a heightened sense of, “Oh, my gosh, there’s wine coming, there’s wine coming. I see the wine.” And then when it drips into your mouth, you just don’t get as much pleasure from it.

Martine Powers:Oh, interesting.

Mary Beth Albright:And so that’s how you prove — you’re showing the tolerance. As opposed to kale juice. I don’t drink a lot of kale juice, but I do — I love kale, but my brain reacted a lot more to the kale juice, whereas it didn’t get that excited about it when I saw the picture. When I got the actual kale juice on my tongue, my brain reacted.

Martine Powers:Interesting. So what does that tell you? Like, what is the takeaway from that?

Mary Beth Albright:The takeaway is neuroplasticity and that we are constantly creating our own comfort foods. They’re created culturally. People who locate from one region to another, their comfort foods will shift and change — maybe not completely, but will shift. And so we create our comfort foods in our associations every single day with every single meal. And so the takeaway is that we can continue to play with our brains because that’s where the flavor happens.

Martine Powers:Let’s also talk a little bit about the gut microbiome, which has become kind of a buzzword in the world of, like, what you should do for healthy eating. I feel like I see “gut microbiome” and all I think is yogurt, and that, like, maybe I should be eating a lot of yogurt and that’s supposed to be good for me in some way. Tell me a little bit more about what you learned about the gut microbiome and what we should do to keep our own personal microbiomes happy.

Mary Beth Albright:Well, the gut microbiome is a collection of trillions of bacteria and fungi and viruses that exist in your digestive tract — so from your mouth all the way down to the other end. And these bacteria, it’s been shown over the past 15 years, regulate a lot — regulate our stress response. They could regulate our cravings, our food cravings. They regulate sleep metabolism, anxiety symptoms, and that kind of thing. So it’s really influential. And what we eat can dramatically change our microbiomes. And you can’t change your genes, right? Whatever genes your parents gave you, that’s what you’re stuck with for your rest of your life. You can change your gut microbiome. That’s why it’s such an exciting field to look at right now. They did a study of human twins, and one was a leaner weight and one was a heavier weight. And they tested their microbiomes, and among all these pairs of twins, the heavier twin had specific bacteria in their gut microbiome. So then they took the microbiomes of the heavier twin and put them into lean mice, and the mice gained weight. There are a lot of studies like this. There are mice that they impose early childhood trauma on — so they’ll take it away from their mother or they’ll put it in a maze that has no end. Those mice have different gut microbiomes than mice that are raised with their mother and not in traumatic situations. And then when they take the gut microbiome from the early childhood trauma mouse and put it into the healthy mouse, the healthy mouse starts exhibiting anxiety symptoms.

Martine Powers:But then what do you do? Like, how do you — How can I improve my microbiome to make sure that the little doodads in there are making me feel good and happy? Not stressed, not anxious, and that we’re, like, all on the same page together, getting where we want to go.

Mary Beth Albright:Well, first of all, I want to remind everyone that it’s a combination of things. This is a tool in the toolbox. So don’t go off meds. Don’t stop seeing your therapist. You know, I do all those things, and it’s very helpful. But to improve your gut microbiome, there are two things that science shows. One, probiotics, which you’ve probably heard of, and those are the bacteria that are in yogurt, that are in fermented yogurt.

Martine Powers:It all comes back to yogurt.

Mary Beth Albright:[Laughs] Yeah. But non-sugared yogurt, right? Like put fresh fruit into the yogurt, that kind of thing. And then there’s also called prebiotics, which feeds the bacteria inside of you. The microbiome has to eat, right? They’re living things. And if they don’t get enough food, they’re going to start eating your gut lining, and that can lead to leaky gut syndrome, which is also associated with depression and anxiety symptoms. So prebiotics is fiber, and that’s —

Martine Powers:That’s vegetables.

Mary Beth Albright:That’s — It’s —

Martine Powers:I assume.

Mary Beth Albright:It’s vegetables. It’s whole grains. It’s, like, all the things that you’ve — that that — this is the thing, is that the recommendations in this book — eat a whole foods diet, right? We’ve heard that a lot of different places. What this book has is the science behind why. And to me, the why is, like, the most important thing, because every single day that I’m walking around, I’m trying to improve my emotional well-being for myself and for the people around me.

Martine Powers:The last thing I want to ask about is an issue that is near and dear to my heart, as my family members will tell you about, which is hanger and how hanger can affect the way that we feel, affect the way that we respond to people, like those family members. And I’m curious why that became a big source of fascination for you, because you talk about some pretty surprising parts of, like, how hanger operates on a evolutionary level.

Mary Beth Albright:Yes. And it’s a great example of what the whole book is about. There is a gut-brain loop that happens. Our brain sends signals to our gut, and our gut send signals to our brain. And when we think about our nervous system, we usually think about the brain and the spinal cord, right? The central nervous system. The gut has its own nervous system, and it’s called the enteric nervous system, and it is connected directly with the brain. And the nervous system communicates through neurons passing messages to each other. When you are hungry — and I’m talking about really hungry — there are neurons in your brain called hangry neurons by the researchers — the official name is AGRP neurons. But, you know, science is just like anything else. People create these, like, you know —

Martine Powers:Great nicknames.

Mary Beth Albright:Great nicknames, right. So the hangry neurons send the signal of hunger, but they also send the signal of anger. Feelings of anger and hunger happen together.

Martine Powers:Why?

Mary Beth Albright:Well, the theory is that when we were first hunters and gatherers, we would have these feelings of hunger, but our brain didn’t understand just how important it was to eat. So we evolved to have anger happen at the same time as hunger so that we would feel so uncomfortable. That hunger signal wasn’t enough. The anger would make us feel so uncomfortable, and that would be the motivation to find food. Our bodies are just food-motivated.

Martine Powers:So, Mary Beth, going into this new year, 2023, a lot of people have their New Year’s resolutions that they have every year of, like, I’m going to eat better, “I’m going to lose weight, I’m going to be more fit, yada, yada.” I guess what is your advice around what people should be thinking to themselves and promising to themselves to feel better more largely — not just, like, lose some weight, but actually feel good?

Mary Beth Albright:It’s vitally important that we look at food holistically and not just as a combination of nutrients and the pleasure that it brings and how we eat it in addition to what we eat. There are ways that you can improve your emotional well-being through food that have nothing to do with weight, and that’s important. In all of the studies, all of this is independent of weight. And so pay attention to your emotions. Pay attention to what you eat with those emotions. And pay attention to how you eat, not just what you eat.

Martine Powers:Mary Beth, thank you so much.

Mary Beth Albright:Martine, I’m so thrilled that we did this together. Thank you.

Martine Powers:Mary Beth Albright is the author of the new book “Eat & Flourish: How Food Supports Emotional Well-Being.” This episode was produced by Charla Freeland, mixed by our engineer, Sean Carter, and edited by our executive producer, Maggie Penman. That is it for today’s episode. Thank you so much for listening. The rest of the Post Reports team includes our supervising senior producer, Reena Flores, our senior producer, Ted Muldoon, our editor, Lucy Perkins, our producers, Eliza Dennis, Elana Gordon, Ariel Plotnick, Arjun Singh, Jordan-Marie Smith, Sabby Robinson, Emma Talkoff, and Rennie Svirnovskiy. My co-host is Elahe Izadi. The Post director of Audio is Renita Jablonski. And I’m Martine Powers. One more thing before we go — a reminder about a last minute gift idea. Right now, you can save over 70% on a new premium subscription to The Washington Post, and that comes with a bonus subscription to share. You can find this deal at washingtonpost.com/subscribe. And just a heads up, we will be back tomorrow with a bonus episode about the battle for the title of the Queen of Christmas. Don’t miss it.