Health & Wellness — By Denise Tureaud
KEY POINTS
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Feed Your Joy: 5 Mood-Boosting Foods Already in Our Culture
By Denise Tureaud | Black Source Media | Health & Wellness | May 2026
I want to tell you something our grandmothers never had to be told: our table is medicine.
Not the kind of medicine that comes in a bottle with a three-page insert and a list of side effects longer than your grocery list. The kind that comes out of a cast iron skillet that has been seasoned for forty years. The kind that simmers all Sunday morning and fills the whole house. The kind that has carried Black families through grief, through struggle, through every season of hard — not just because it tasted good, but because it made us feel whole.
Somewhere along the way, we were told that food was the problem. That our traditions were the enemy. That we needed to throw out what our people built and replace it with something foreign, expensive, and honestly a little tasteless. But that lie did a lot of damage.
So let me offer a correction — backed by science, rooted in who we are.
The emerging field of nutritional psychiatry has now documented something our grandmamas understood by instinct: what we eat shapes how we feel. Not just physically. Emotionally. Neurologically. The food on our plates either supports our mood or works against it. And when I look at what has always been at the center of our tables, I see five of the most powerful mood-supporting foods on earth.
We were never starting from zero. We were already home.
1. Sweet Potatoes: The Brain’s Favorite Comfort Food
If there is one food that belongs in both our Sunday dinner rotation and our conversation about mental wellness, it is the sweet potato — and I will not hear any arguments.
Here is the science, in plain language: our brains run on chemistry. The two chemicals most responsible for how good, how stable, and how motivated we feel are called serotonin and dopamine. To make them, the brain needs a nutrient called Vitamin B6. Sweet potatoes are one of the richest plant-based sources of B6 you can put on a plate. They are also packed with beta-carotene, potassium, and complex carbohydrates — the kind that give you steady, sustained energy over hours, not the spike-and-crash that leaves you foggy and irritable by 2 p.m.
That feeling of deep comfort that comes over you when you sit down to a mirliton casserole or a bowl of candied yams at somebody’s holiday table? But that is not just memory. That is your brain chemistry responding to exactly what it needed.
How to get more: Roast them with olive oil and cinnamon. Cube them into soups and stews. Keep it simple — baked, with a little butter — and know you are doing something good. There is no wrong way to eat a sweet potato.
2. Our Greens: The Mood Mineral Nobody Is Talking About
Collard greens. Mustard greens. Turnip greens. Spinach. I grew up watching the women in my family tend those pots like it was sacred work — and it was, even if they did not have the clinical language for it.
What makes dark leafy greens so powerful for our mood is a B vitamin called folate. Research has consistently shown that people with low folate levels experience higher rates of depression — and are also less likely to respond well to antidepressant medications. Folate is essential to producing the brain’s neurotransmitters, the chemical messengers that keep us regulated, grounded, and able to handle what life throws at us.
Here is what the research also tells us: Black women — who carry disproportionate amounts of emotional labor, caregiving responsibility, and chronic stress — are among those most likely to be running low on folate. Our bodies are working so hard, for so many people, that we are often depleting nutrients faster than we replace them.
The answer, beautifully and practically, has been sitting in our tradition all along. We just have to make the pot more often.
How to get more: A slow-cooked pot of greens a few times a week is genuinely therapeutic — biologically, not just spiritually. Add garlic and onion. Ease up on the salt. And keep the pot liquor. That liquid holds nutrients too, and it deserves more respect than we give it.
3. Beans and Peas: Our Original Mood Stabilizers
Red beans and rice every Monday. Black-eyed peas on New Year’s Day. Butter beans in the heat of summer. Lentil soup when the weather turns cold. Our food tradition has centered legumes for generations — and our nervous systems are better for it, whether we realized it or not.
Let me explain what beans actually do inside the body, because this matters. One of the most underappreciated causes of bad mood, irritability, and low energy is blood sugar instability. When our blood sugar drops sharply — which happens after we eat refined carbohydrates or skip meals — our bodies go into a mild stress response. Everything suddenly feels harder. Our patience evaporates. Our anxiety ticks up. Our energy crashes. We snap at people we love.
Beans interrupt that cycle. They are rich in complex carbohydrates, plant protein, and fiber — a combination that slows digestion, feeds us steadily over hours, and keeps blood sugar stable. What some medications try to do artificially, a good pot of red beans does naturally.
How to get more: Red beans, lentils, black beans, chickpeas — rotate them through the week. They are inexpensive, deeply filling, and they stretch a dollar the way our grandmothers knew how to stretch a dollar. Our wallets and our nervous systems will both be grateful.
4. Our Fish: The Anti-Inflammatory Brain Food
Catfish. Redfish. Salmon. Sardines. Even trout. Ever since these have been showing up on our tables — and in the South, they do — we have been giving our brains something they deeply need, even without knowing it.
Fatty fish are the best dietary source of omega-3 fatty acids, specifically the forms called EPA and DHA — the ones the brain can use directly. Here is why that matters: researchers now understand that inflammation in the brain plays a significant role in depression and anxiety. Omega-3 fatty acids reduce that inflammation. Multiple large studies have found that people who eat more fatty fish consistently have lower rates of depression. Harvard Health’s nutritional psychiatry research has shown omega-3 supplementation to be as effective as antidepressants for mild to moderate depression in some clinical trials.
This is not a supplement trend. It is fish. It has been on our tables for centuries. Fried catfish on a Friday night in New Orleans is not just a tradition — it is, quietly, a mental health practice.
How to get more: Bake or grill it a couple of times a week to maximize the benefit — though I am not here to take anybody’s Friday fish fry away. Canned sardines and salmon are affordable, convenient, and just as powerful nutritionally. Do not sleep on the sardine.
5. Dark Chocolate: We Deserve This One
I saved this one for last because I want us to receive it fully: dark chocolate is genuinely good for our mood. The research is solid. This is not a workaround or a rationalization. This is science giving us permission for something that feels like joy — because it actually is.
Real dark chocolate — 70% cacao or higher — does several things in the body. It triggers the release of endorphins, our body’s natural feel-good chemicals. It is one of the best food sources of magnesium, a mineral that calms the nervous system, reduces anxiety, and supports deep sleep. Studies show that magnesium deficiency is widespread among Black women specifically — linked in large part to chronic stress, which burns through magnesium rapidly. Dark chocolate also contains compounds that increase blood flow to the brain and small amounts of phenylethylamine, associated with feelings of pleasure and alertness.
A square or two of good dark chocolate is not a guilty pleasure. For us — carrying what we carry, every single day — it is a reasonable, evidence-based act of self-care. Receive it as such.
How to get more: Look for bars labeled 70% cacao or higher. Pair it with a handful of nuts for a snack that adds protein to the mood-stabilizing magnesium. Melt it into oatmeal. Or simply eat it slowly, without apology, and let it do what it was made to do.
Our Kitchen Was Always a Wellness Practice
I need us to sit with something for a moment.
The most damaging nutrition myth sold to our community in the last generation was not about any specific food. It was the broader message that our traditions were the problem. That the table our people built — under conditions of scarcity, under slavery, under Jim Crow, under every weight the world pressed down on us — was somehow inferior. That we needed to abandon it and start over with something that did not come from us.
But that was never true. And it was never kind.
The real issue was never the sweet potato. It was the excess sugar heaped on top. Never the greens — it was the excess salt. Never the fish — it was the frying oil used every single day of the week. The foundation of what we cook is built on some of the most nutritionally powerful, mood-supporting, brain-nourishing ingredients on earth. What our tradition needs is not replacement. It needs respect — and some thoughtful refinement.
Make the greens more often. Bring the beans back to the center of the plate. Eat the fish twice a week. Keep the sweet potatoes where they have always been. End the meal with something dark and rich and good.
And know this: every time we nourish ourselves with intention — every time we choose to feed our bodies the way our grandmothers fed their families — we are doing something powerful. We are saying that we matter. That our joy matters. That we are worth tending to. If the men in your life need this same reminder, share our Strong Enough to Live series — Black Source Media’s Wednesday health series written specifically for Black men.
Our grandmamas knew it. The science has now confirmed it. Feeding ourselves well is an act of love. And joy is something we can taste.
Sources: Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health — The Nutrition Source; National Institutes of Health Office of Dietary Supplements; Nutritional Psychiatry: Your Brain on Food, Harvard Health Publishing (2022); Journal of Affective Disorders — Folate and Depression Meta-Analysis (2023); American Journal of Psychiatry — Omega-3 Fatty Acids and Depression (2023); National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) — Magnesium Intake in Black Women.
About the Author: Denise Tureaud is a health and wellness contributor at Black Source Media. Her writing centers practical, joyful, culturally rooted wellness for Black women and families. She publishes every Wednesday.