The Chemistry of Emotions: How Food Fuels Your Mood

Certain foods trigger the production of specific hormones, including neurotransmitters. Neurotransmitters are chemical messengers that help brain cells communicate. While there are around 100 known neurotransmitters in the brain, they play a crucial role in regulating mood, behavior, and numerous bodily functions.

Let’s talk about what happens when you eat carbohydrates. Foods like potatoes, beans, and vegetables provide a steady release of glucose into the bloodstream, which helps your brain produce serotonin—the neurotransmitter responsible for making you feel calm and content.

However, when you consume sweets it’s a different story. These foods cause a rapid spike in blood sugar, triggering a surge of insulin. Insulin’s job is to lower your blood sugar, but when it happens too quickly, your brain doesn’t get enough glucose, and that can disrupt how you feel and think.

Now, take sugar as a more specific example. Drinking a glass of orange juice or eating a doughnut may seem harmless, but even without added sugar, orange juice is still packed with concentrated glucose. This results in a quick hit of sugar in your bloodstream.

Here’s why that’s a problem: Your brain relies on a steady supply of glucose to produce neurotransmitters, which are crucial for stable moods and clear thinking. When your blood sugar is constantly spiking and crashing, your brain struggles to maintain balance. As a result, your thoughts, emotions, and focus end up bouncing around just like your blood sugar levels.

Balanced Whole Foods for Stability

Here’s where balanced whole foods come in. Even though all foods eventually turn into glucose, how fast they do it matters. A whole food like broccoli converts to glucose slowly, while a potato chip causes a quick spike. Foods like vegetables, grains, and unprocessed carbs give your body a steady release of energy, keeping neurotransmitters balanced.

That’s why a meal like salmon, beans, and broccoli leaves you feeling calm and clear. You’re getting a steady flow of glucose, which helps your neurotransmitters function properly. And when your neurotransmitters are balanced, you feel more emotionally stable and less reactive to stress.

The Blood Sugar Spike: Why Speed Matters

Here’s where it gets critical: It’s not just about how high your blood sugar climbs—it’s about how fast it rises. Even a quick jump from 80 to 90 can send your body into overdrive, prompting a flood of insulin to bring it back down.

This rapid response can leave your bloodstream with too little glucose, and when that happens, your brain struggles to function. Without a stable glucose supply, neurotransmitter production slows, leaving you feeling unfocused, irritable, anxious, or worse.

The rate at which your blood sugar rises is just as important as the number itself—because when it rises too fast, your brain can’t keep up.

A Bean Protocol meal, created by nutritionist Karen Hurd, includes protein, vegetables, and beans, providing soluble fiber to stabilize blood sugar and support detoxification for sustained energy.

When you have a bean protocol meal—like salmon, steamed broccoli, and a side of beans—you’ll notice a big difference in how you feel. You’ll be more clear-headed, calm, and grounded. Stressful situations won’t trigger you the same way because that meal provides a slow, steady release of glucose into your bloodstream, which keeps your neurotransmitters working properly.

This is why people get "hangry." When your blood sugar drops—whether because you haven’t eaten or you’ve had too much sugar and now you’re crashing—your brain doesn’t have the steady fuel it needs to produce neurotransmitters. When that happens, you’ll feel irritable, unfocused, and stressed. The key is to give your brain a constant, reliable source of fuel by eating meals that provide a slow release of glucose throughout the day.

The Impact of Whole Foods on Stress and Connection

When people shift to a whole-food, bean protocol diet, the changes are often profound. One of the first things people tell me is how calm they feel—calmer than they’ve ever felt.

So, what’s happening biologically when they experience this calm? When people stop riding the blood sugar rollercoaster, they avoid the spikes of stress hormones like epinephrine and norepinephrine, the very hormones that drive that adrenaline-fueled rollercoaster of highs and lows.

Without these intense surges, everything in the body starts to even out, allowing them to handle stress more smoothly, without the intense swings.

The Impact of Sugar and Caffeine

Cutting out sugar is key. Sugar is one of the biggest culprits behind the emotional rollercoaster many people find themselves on. It’s the thing that turns you from calm to irritable in an instant—one moment you’re fine, and the next you’re snapping at someone or experiencing road rage, wondering, "What just happened?"

And if you combine sugar with caffeine—like in soda or energy drinks—it’s a recipe for disaster. You might feel a temporary surge of energy, but that inevitable crash will leave you feeling worse than before. It’s a vicious cycle of short-lived highs followed by deeper dips in mood and energy.

What’s fascinating is how directly our biology impacts our thoughts and emotions. When your blood sugar is on that constant rollercoaster—spiking and crashing—your neurotransmitters can’t function as they should.

This imbalance affects how you perceive the world. For example, when blood sugar is low, you might feel negative or easily overwhelmed, and your thoughts may become more self-critical or resentful toward others.

But when your blood sugar, hormones, and neurotransmitters are balanced, everything changes. Your thoughts become calmer, clearer, and more compassionate.

Balancing Neurotransmitters for Emotional Stability

As we’ve discussed, neurotransmitters like epinephrine and norepinephrine, which drive your fight-or-flight response, influence your reactions to the world around you. When these hormones are elevated, you might feel sharp and focused, but also impatient and irritable, with thoughts of judgment or frustration toward others. Once your sugar crashes, though, so does that sharpness, leaving you sluggish and craving another "fix" to feel better.

Balancing your hormones and neurotransmitters through stable blood sugar allows everything to run more smoothly. You’ll think more clearly, respond calmly, and avoid the emotional highs and lows that disrupt your day-to-day life.

When most people hear the word "hormones," they think of sex hormones like estrogen or testosterone, often linked to fertility or puberty. But hormones are so much more than that—they're the body's chemical messengers, influencing nearly every function and process. From how we perceive the world to how we react to stress, hormones shape our entire experience.

Take cortisol, for example—it helps you respond to stress, while insulin regulates your blood sugar, and serotonin impacts your mood and sense of well-being. These hormones aren’t just working in the background; they’re the driving force behind how you feel, think, and react each day.

Hormonal balance can completely change how you interact with the world. So when we're talking about hormone imbalances, we're not just talking about sex drive or fertility—we’re talking about a system that influences your whole life experience.

Hormones: The Body’s Master Messengers

It’s crucial to understand that every chemical reaction in the body is triggered by hormones. Every cell has receptor sites for these hormones, which act like messengers, telling the cell what to do. Without hormones, nothing in the body would function properly.

For example, people with Addison's disease lack sufficient adrenal hormones, and without treatment, they wouldn’t survive. Similarly, without thyroid hormone, many vital processes in the body would slow down drastically. Hormones control everything—blood pressure, digestion, muscle contraction, and more. They’re not just about regulating sex or mood; they’re essential for life.

Hormones as Catalysts for Every Reaction

Think of your body like a finely tuned orchestra. Every function, from releasing a neurotransmitter to contracting a muscle or forming a thought, follows a predictable chain of chemical reactions.

Hormones are the key players that initiate these reactions. Without them, nothing would happen. Every thought you form, every feeling you have, and every action you take is the result of these chemical processes, with hormones as the catalysts making it all possible.

While sex hormones like estrogen and testosterone are important, they’re just one small part of a much larger hormonal system. It’s this complex network of hormones working together that keeps you alive, healthy, and functioning.