Can Nutrition Change Your Personality?

Research suggests it's possible to reduce anger, anxiety, depression, addictive behaviors, and more with foods and supplements.

- Kat James

We've all heard the expression "You are what you eat." But if emerging research is any indication, it might be more accurate to say, "Who we are is what we eat." It turns out, what we take in-whether food, liquid, or supplement-is a factor in both our moment-to-moment moods and even our long-term self-perceptions and relationships with others. It can encourage (or prevent) the playing-out of inherited predispositions such as motivation, outgoingness, over-sensitivity, and compulsiveness. Because nutrition dominates neurological and hormonal influences on the brain, it can affect countless behavior patterns that most view as character-driven.

Is Your Personality Under Siege?

Life is full of emotional responses to real circumstances. But if feelings or behaviors such as low moods or negative reactions to stress become increasingly common, prolonged, or magnified, there may be more at play. Over time, poor nutrition can cause emotional and physical changes that can come to define your personality and even your success in life.

I remember living under a constant black cloud of debilitating mood swings that started in my teens, soon after I began restricting calories in response to weight gain at puberty. This led to my first binge, and what I thought was purely "emotional eating." But no matter how much progress I made with my "emotional triggers," my desire to binge overpowered my willpower each day for the next 12 years-until my liver began to fail. The reason I'm alive today and have been completely free of this unhealthy cycle of behavior for 25 years is not because I finally mustered eternal willpower and completely conquered my past "issues" (and there were many). It was conquering my biochemistry by adopting a diet that restored my inner peace after all else failed. I now teach clients the nutrition protocol that helped me get my life back.