The Happiness Diet: A Nutritional Prescription for a Sharp Brain, Balanced Mood, and Lean, Energized Body, by Tyler Graham and Drew Ramsey, is full of useful bits of information that are essential for making good, informed dietary decisions. It also covers the history of how processed foods are made, and uses plain scientific facts to explain why whole foods are usually superior sources of the nutrients we need.
The most important part of the book, in my opinion–and the reason why I chose to review it–is the “elements of happiness” portion. In addition to the essential nutrients that our body cannot produce and must acquire from our diet, the book adds a list of nutrients (like folate, vitamins D and B12, and others) that the body needs in order to synthesize happiness. This, of course, reminded me of a passage in the Letter to Menoeceus where Epicurus is expounding the hierarchy of desires:
among the necessary desires some are necessary for happiness, some for physical health, and some for life itself.
While the food industry does not consider nutrients necessary for happiness to be essential in the same way that nutrients necessary for health are essential, an Epicurean who is interested in applying the knowledge in this book will likely consider the “elements of happiness” to be as important as the nutrients needed for health, since both are considered natural and necessary in Epicurean doctrine.
In Tending the Epicurean Garden, I suggested that we know more about the science and diet of happiness now than the ancient Epicureans did, and that it might be possible to start considering what an Epicurean diet might look like for us–one that considers happiness, moods and pleasure, as well as health, in its calculus. For those who are serious about reassessing their dietary choices along Epicurean lines, the book The Happiness Diet fills the knowledge gap that must be filled to pursue this project, and invites a deeper study into the foods and ingredients that contain the essential elements of happiness. If you’d like to conduct your own research online on the essential elements of happiness, and what the best food sources are for each, they are:
- Vitamin B12
- Iodine
- Magnesium
- Cholesterol
- Vitamin D
- Calcium
- Fiber
- Folate
- Vitamin A
- Omega 3 oils
- Vitamin E
- Iron
These are the vitamins, molecules, and natural elements that the body requires from a dietary source in order to be able to synthesize happiness and good moods. Because these ingredients are required for happiness (one of the three “necessary” goods in the Letter to Menoeceus, and a separate priority from “health”), they fall within the “natural and necessary” category in our hierarchy of desires, even if only a small measure of them is needed for happiness.
It’s my view that the dietary science of happiness invites a reform, or at least the addition of specificity, to Epicurean ethics. Epicurus argued that we only need a little food, not much more, to sustain our bodies. But the three categories of what is considered natural and necessary add nuance to this natural measure of food: we now know that our intake of food must contain enough of certain essential nutrients (for health) and enough of the elements of happiness in order to enable our bodies to experience health and happiness.
Therefore, we know that we don’t just need enough food: we need enough of these particular nutrients.
The Happiness Diet reminds us that happiness and moods are physical, natural things. Somewhere encoded in the molecules of our bodies there are hormonal changes and chemical reactions that account for our moods and states. As an Epicurean, the physicality of happiness makes sense to me. It rescues happiness from speculative discourse, and helps to ground our dietary and lifestyle choices and rejections in concrete, scientific, empirically-informed data.
The book does more than provide guidance concerning how diet relates to happiness, knowledge which is useful in our dietary choices and rejections. It also warns us–with many examples–of the dangers of processed foods to our health and moods.
The Happiness Diet is not preachy, or vegan, or very restrictive. It supports, for example, the consumption of some measure of pork, lard, and dairy products. The book presents hard scientific facts. The science lends the book authority, and the reader is left to decide what to do with all the information provided. Many recipes and ideas for using the ingredients it recommends are provided towards the end of the book.
Overall, I strongly recommend this book. It presented my mind with new and useful perspectives concerning my choices and rejections at the table, it influenced my culinary adventures in a positive way, and gave me the power of knowledge.
Further Reading:
The Four Foods Epicurus Enjoyed
