Lately on the web many users claim that the pizza both thefood of happinesswith the aggravating circumstance of “science says so”. The connection between pizza and happiness, as you can read in those articles, is the serotoninwhich is found in abundance in the dough and in the mozzarella, in the form of its precursor, the tryptophan. It is also said that pizza would make you happy thanks to the release of endorphins In the brain. But things are much more complicated than that: the correlation between pizza and happiness is a mistake oversimplification.
Food gives pleasure, but not happiness
Eating something good can improve our humorand this is clear to us every time we cheer ourselves up with a nice chocolate bar. Our brain circuits They are wired to release dopamine and other neurotransmitters associated with pleasure whenever we perform a behavior useful for survival.
For example, the simple sugars they are a food that our brain is very fond of, generally scarce in the places where we have lived for hundreds of thousands of years and, even if today we have them in abundance, our reward mechanisms have not adapted to this excessive availability, continuing to push us to consume them and triggering, precisely, sensations of Pleasure when we put them in our mouths. But that physiological sensation of pleasure is very far from what we call “happiness”.
Pizza and serotonin, how things really are
There serotonin it’s a neurotransmitter which is produced starting from tryptophana amino acid essential (which therefore must be obtained through our diet) that needs to be synthesized firstly from the enzyme tryptophan hydroxylase and subsequently undergo a further process of decarboxylation to become available as serotonin. This last step is essentially linear: the more hydroxytryptophan is available, the more serotonin is produced.
Now, however, if it is true that the quantity of serotonin release is actually modulated by food intake, and that therefore the serotonin produced depends on how much tryptophan we ingest, it is also true that not all tryptophan that we ingest becomes serotoninsince the synthesis process of the first depends on the enzyme availability which we have talked about, necessary for the transformation.
Another crucial thing to know is that the tryptophan It is a precursor not only of serotonin, but also of melatoninfrom the vitamin B3 and some phytohormones. It is clear therefore that the tryptophan we ingest has more than one metabolic destination, and it is completely inaccurate to state that since pizza contains tryptophan, then we have more serotonin and therefore more happiness!
As if that wasn’t enough, the serotonin synthesized It doesn’t just end up in the nervous system. In fact, this also plays a decisive role in the gastrointestinal tractas well as being used on the periphery of our body in pain receptors under our skin. At the level of the central nervous system, serotonin must compete with other amino acids for the transporter that allows them to cross the blood-brain barrier.
The happiness hormone does not exist
It doesn’t exist an ingredient or a happiness neurotransmitter. It is quite correct to say that serotonin is a mood modulator which contributes to general well-being and emotional regulation. Not only that, in depression research, the fight against this condition is not so much about the amount of total serotonin, but rather theserotonin reuptake inhibitor (the elements of the synapse that “suck up” the released serotonin).
The more we can fit serotonin into the synaptic space by inhibiting reuptakeers, the more serotonin is absorbed by the next neuron. The matter is so complex that the scientific community speaks of “serotonin myth”, and today the total amount of serotonin available in the body is a decidedly marginal factor when trying to understand the causes of depression, so much so that LAmerican Psychiatric PressIn the Textbook of Clinical Psychiatry clearly says that the serotonin deficiency as the cause of any mental disorder is, to date, aunconfirmed hypothesis.
And so, as often happens, we are faced with an undersimplification of reality, so simplified as to appear more misleading than informative. Approximate pizza to tryptophan only, think that tryptophan is equal to serotonin and, finally, hypothesize “more serotonin equals greater happiness”: all wrong deductions.
There are many neurotransmitters that come into play in the body’s wellness processes, and the situation and moment in which these transmitters are activated are also relevant. It would then be necessary to see whether other foods in the pizza compete or inhibit the synthesis of tryptophan, or whether the total count between the “pro” elements and the “con” elements in a nice pizza can lead to a positive result in its overall. In short, the philosopher’s stone has not yet been found.
