Author’s Note : I am not talking about comfort food or delicious food. Also, I am going to rant about nutrition again.

You hear a lot about what food tastes good, and what food is (supposedly) good for you, but very little about how food makes you feel. And this seems odd to me.

It’s like there is no happy medium between the (sometimes very) long term thinking of healthy eating and the extremely short term pleasure of flavour. After all, we human beings are not terribly good at thinking in the long term when it comes to our basic pleasures like food and sex, and on the other hand, the most delicious taste in the world is gone seconds after you experience it. There has to be some kind of middle ground.

What I want to know is how foods make you feel later that same day. What foods lead to a better day, and which ones are almost guaranteed to make you miserable? In short, how does one eat to be happy?

This problem is complicated by something I have talked about before, which is the need for human beings to stimulate the reward centers of their brains in order to maintain positive self-worth. It might well be that the high-reward foods we love so much that it is killing us are nevertheless, in a strictly short-term sense, the better bet for being happy that day.

Or maybe not. The problem is, we simply do not have the information to make this kind of decision. The world is polarized between “tastes good” and “good for you”, and while corporations compete to push that reward button harder than anyone else, they also compete to sell you health food and fad nutrition.

Meanwhile, ideologues of nutrition, as well as people that can only be described as nutrition denialists, muddy the waters further by trying to get followers for their own little empires of thought and influence, and all under the guise of trying to help people lead better lives.

If they truly wanted people to lead better lives, they would look at the whole picture.

We the public are left without plausible data. The world of nutrition research is maddeningly unscientific and non-comprehensive. as well as completely without method or reason. There are so many vested interests trying to sway the science their way, and so many people wedded to their nutritional beliefs because it seems like they worked for them, as well as various actual medical professionals selling, with total innocence, nutritional folklore as science, and it’s no wonder that the modern human just shrugs and eats whatever seems to make sense to them at the time.

And when it comes to how foods make people feel good after eating them, the data basically does not exist. People have theories about it, but there is no systematically collected and carefully collated dataset on which to base these theories.

All we have is mountains of unhelpful anecdotal evidence, and people’s own life experience, which as I have mentioned before is not so great at long term thinking when it comes to basic needs.

A person could live a decade in deep depression because of how they eat and have absolutely no idea. In fact, they might double down again and again on the very foods making them miserable because they use those foods to self-medicate their depression.

This is clearly and categorically unacceptable.

What is needed is a coordinated and integrated effort to study the effects of nutrition on mood. Not a million little projects from corporate scientists looking to please their masters or desperate professors seeking tenure.

Instead, it should have the same combination of open-source accessibility and the ability to put all valid results in a comprehensive framework that will lead to a single body of solid knowledge that the Human Genome Project used.

People will be free to claim a section of the problem and work on it on their own, and if their results are deemed valid, that section of the problem will be considered solved.

Frankly, this is how all large and complicated science issues should be tackled.

Of course, the first and most likely to stir the hornet’s next is a comprehensive review of all current nutritional data and beliefs. No sense in re-inventing the wheel on that score, but the review would have to follow all the current lore to its source and then evaluate the validity of that source.

And if no valid source is to be found, the information is deleted.

The next phase would be to do all the basic research needed to fill the gaps left in nutritional lore (I have a feeling those gaps will be quite large) so that the basics of human nutrition can finally be hashed out.

That will not be easy, but it will at least be a matter of biochemistry. The final phase is the really tricky one.

In said phase, we will have the enter the murky, slippery world of happiness research. You will have to feed people certain foods (or types of meals) and then figure out how that food made them feel.

Obviously, there will be self-reporting. As unreliable as self-reporting can be, it is still the best way to establish a baseline on what the participants think is going on.

Harder data would be more elusive. You certainly can’t tell how happy someone truly is simply by observing them. Possibly, in the modern day of fMRI, it might be possible to at least establish what is really going on in the brain, and by comparing that to the self-reports of participants, it might be possibly to get some kind of clue as to what the real story might be.

But for the most part, we would have to take people at their word.

In the end, what I hope for is to give unto the world the knowledge they need to make informed diet decisions. If people could see what they eat in terms of how it will make them feel after eating it, they would be empowered to make smarter choices and in the end we would have a happier, healthier population.

And that’s something we all want.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.