Curing The Winter Blahs With Food

Beating the Winter blues can be as simple as getting to your local fish market and stocking up on Omega-3 rich foods like salmon and nuts!

Research has begun to reveal how mindful eaters can choose their fuel to help achieve or maintain a desired mental state. The food you eat can also brighten your winter. Our moods are linked to the production or use of certain brain chemicals, and scientists have identified many of the natural chemicals in foods that change the way we feel. That’s right, you can eat certain foods in order to beat the winter blues. Food influences neurotransmitters by attaching to brain cells and changing the way they behave. This opens pathways to those cells, so that other mood-altering chemicals can come through the gates and attach themselves to brain cells.

Read more to find the kinds of foods to shake your winter moods.

Winter Weight; Fact or Folly?

Does the cold weather increase your appetite?

Cold weather, shorter days and plenty of holiday feasts contribute to winter weight gain but is it biological or just bad habits?

Not all scientists agree about our winter food-seeking habits.

“I’m not disputing the possibility that people eat more in the winter,” says Marcia Pelchat of the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia. But she says doesn’t think it’s a vestigial “chipmunk” instinct.

Pelchat says another explanation: Our winter eating habits are likely born of opportunity. There is more holiday feasting, better leftovers, more grazing in the kitchen, and fewer opportunities for playing and exercising outside.

Watch out for tanning “Prescriptions” from doctors

Although many people think otherwise, a good tan does not equal good health. In reality, tanning is the skin’s way of telling you that it has been damaged.

The American Osteopathic College of Dermatology endorses the position of the American Cancer Society and the U.S.

Department of Health and Human Services on the topic of tanning.

And that position is that tanning, whether outdoors or indoors, poses a danger to one’s health.

A high school junior in frigid Vermont, Payet had been tired and unhappy for weeks when her family doctor gave her a diagnosis of seasonal affective disorder (SAD), a fall and wintertime melancholy brought on by changes in ambient light, body temperature and hormone regulation. He told her to get some sun. “But it’s not like I could take a long vacation,” Payet recalls. “He said that going to a tanning bed would do the trick.”

She went three times a week from February right through the summer. For about the next three years, she’d pop in now and then. She didn’t realize there could be long-term effects: “I loved being tan, and I thought I looked and felt healthy.”

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