The Diet Protocols for Happiness
5/25/202646 min
We obsess over diets, fasting, and weight-loss drugs in the name of health. But we rarely ask a more important question: what kind of eating actually makes us happier?
In this episode of Office Hours, I explore what the science say about the relationship between food and well-being. Eating gives us pleasure, but meals bring deeper enjoyment when they also combine people and memories. I explore what that means in practice along with seven other practical rules for “happy eating.”
In the end, happiness at the table depends less on the food than the company. As my Spanish wife likes to say: the point of eating is not the food—it’s the love.
—
Brought to you by:
• David Protein—The most effective portable protein on the planet https://davidprotein.com/arthur
• Noble Mobile—With Noble, there is only one plan: The No-Bull Plan. It’s simple. It’s transparent. And if you use less data, you get cash back. Get an exclusive offer at: https://noblemobile.com/arthurbrooks
—
Where to find Arthur Brooks:
• Website: https://arthurbrooks.com/
• In-person Retreats: https://retreats.arthurbrooks.com/
• Newsletter: https://www.arthurbrooks.com/newsletter
• X: https://x.com/arthurbrooks
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/arthurcbrooks/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ArthurBrooks/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/arthur-c-brooks/
• Email: officehours@arthurbrooks.com
—
Timestamps:
(00:00) Intro
(09:55) Why eating is pleasurable—and why pleasure alone does not create happiness
(13:56) Two ways to turn pleasure into enjoyment
(17:12) How both positive and negative emotions influence eating
(18:43) Why eating moderately often is linked to greater happiness
(22:14) Dietary patterns associated with greater happiness
(25:19) What the research shows about alcohol and well-being
(28:16) Junk food’s impact on mood and well-being
(30:08) The pros and cons of a vegetarian diet
(32:19) Why crash diets are bad for your well-being and happiness
(35:59) Time-restricted eating and GLP-1 drugs
(37:13) #1: Balance across a variety of foods
(37:46) #2: Emphasize proteins and fats
(37:58) #3: Avoid junk food and refined sweets
(38:11) #4: Moderate alcohol consumption
(38:24) #5: No recreational drinking
(38:34) #6: Avoid obesity without starving yourself
(38:49) #7: Organized, regular, formal meal times
(39:00) #8: Meals in the company of others
(40:19) Q&A: The neuroscience behind how books affect our brains
(42:53) Q&A: Leisure vs. Sabbath
—
Referenced:
• The Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness:themeaningofyourlife.com
• Meaning Membership: https://hub.arthurbrooks.com/the-meaning-membership
• Arthur’s newsletter: https://www.arthurbrooks.com/newsletter
• The Happiness Scale: https://learn.arthurbrooks.com/the-happiness-scale
• The Pursuit of Happiness with Arthur Brooks: https://www.thefp.com/s/the-pursuit-of-happiness-with-arthur
• The pleasure of food: underlying brain mechanisms of eating and other pleasures: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s13411-014-0029-2
• Health, Happiness and Eating Together: What Can a Large Thai Cohort Study Tell Us?: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4802060
• ...References continued at: https://www.arthurbrooks.com/office-hours
—
Production and marketing by https://penname.co/.
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsSpeaker 10:00
If we knew more about our sleep, what would we do differently? Would we go to bed at a consistent time or take steps to reduce interruptions to our sleep? With Sleep Score, Apple Watch measures your bedtime consistency, interruptions, and sleep duration. Then every morning, it combines these factors into an easy-to-understand score from one to a hundred, so you'll know how to take the quality of your sleep from okay to very high. Know your Sleep Score with Apple Watch. iPhone 11 or later required.
Arthur Brooks· Host0:29
Today, I wanna talk about something that, that could be kind of a lighthearted topic, but actually is pretty deadly serious, and that's eating. How can we eat in such a way that we get happier? There are many things that we do. We sleep every day. We talk every day. But one of the things that's most important, obviously, to our health and wellbeing, to our flourishing, is what we put into our bodies. And, and it turns out it matters a lot. The longer you live with greater health, the more you're able to, to appreciate a lot of happiness and a lot of love in your life. But the truth of the matter is that when you're living in such a way that you have more love and happiness, you want to live longer. Emotions are related to eating and, and it's, it's sort of paradoxical because people will eat a lot and eat in an unhealthy way, both because of negative and positive emotions. So now the main point, which patterns of eating and diets lead to the highest levels of happiness?