Just a Gut Feeling: Eating and Emotions Across Time
People have always been weird about food. Food is really baked into culture, which means that there are a lot of mixed emotions that go into who we eat with, how we eat, and what we eat. With all of that extra baggage, it’s no surprise that people have historically associated controlling food with controlling how people feel.
Image 1: An illustration about the four humours from “Quinta Essentia” by Leonhart Thurneisser zum Thurn, 1574.
Going all the way back to the Four Humours theory from Ancient Greece, physicians have been prescribing different diets to regulate their patient's moods. The Four Humours theory was all about balancing the four fluids, blood, black bile, yellow bile and phlegm, to try and keep people healthy. Each humour was associated with a different emotion. Happiness was associated with blood, anger with yellow bile, sadness with black bile and neutral feelings with phlegm. These emotional connections carry on in some words we still use today. The terms sanguine, choleric, bilious and phlegmatic all come from ways to describe someone with an abundance of one of the four humours. Physicians would prescribe people special diets to balance out their humours by giving them food of the opposite temperament. Each humour was considered either hot or cold and wet or dry, so if you were having hot wet emotions, they would prescribe cold, dry foods. For example, if you had a bit of a temper, you’d be considered choleric, which was considered a warm and dry kind of mood, so the physician would have to prescribe cold and wet foods like cucumbers or lettuce. Each humour would have its own equal but opposite diet, and even the way that people prepared their food was considered part of what made which foods have which properties.
Images 2 and 3: An advertisement for Dr. Cassell’s Tablets for stomach problems and nerves, 1977.12.203, from the Collection of the Museum of Health Care at Kingston.
The same superstitions about foods and feelings emerged in a new way in the 18th and 19th centuries with the rise of “nervous sympathy.” The idea was that a bunch of key internal organs were connected together into one unified communication network, so if you had an unhealthy stomach, you would also have an unhealthy brain. Positive emotions were mostly associated with the heart, whereas negative emotions were mostly a product of the stomach. Essentially, people believed that eating bad foods and drinking too much alcohol would damage the nerves in the gut and put someone in a permanent bad mood. An unchecked diet was seen as a potential cause of a permanent bad temper for male patients and heightened nervousness and anxiety in female patients.
Image 4: A print of Sylvester Graham, the inventor of the Graham cracker, from the Library of Congress, 1880.
These connections between emotions and food even carried over into fad diets of the time, like the one created by the inventor of the Graham cracker, Sylvester Graham. Graham believed that a bad diet would lead patients down the path of desire, and he wanted to keep his patients from engaging in what he considered bad behaviour. He advocated for a vegetarian, alcohol and tobacco-free, whole-grain diet, which included his famous invention, the Graham cracker. The original Graham crackers were pretty different from the ones we have today in their unbleached sugarless form, and it’s unlikely that Graham would have been a big fan of s’mores with their high sugar and fat content. John Harvey Kellogg, the inventor of cornflakes, also made his creation as food-based way to stop his patients from pursuing their urges.
Image 5: A picture of John Harvey Kellogg, the inventor of cornflakes, from the Library of Congress, 1914.
The practice of incorporating specific diets into medical care was so integrated into the field of medicine in the 1800s that it’s still possible to find recipes like what you might find in a cookbook tucked away in medical journals. One interesting example of this is a cornbread recipe from an 1854 edition of Hall’s Journal of Health. In addition to the “medicinal” cornbread recipe, the author also included a second recipe for “persons who prefer not to take physic in their food” for a “superior” cornbread. If you're feeling brave and willing to try deciphering 1800s baking measurements with little to no instructions, the list of ingredients for both is included at the end.
All of this is to say that people’s relationships with food, feelings, and health have always been complicated. Although there’s no longer a full roster of doctors ready to get you on a diet to balance out your humours and suppress your urges, there’s still a lot of discussion around eating and emotions. “Hangrieness,” for example, is no joke. Your body actually releases stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline when you are hungry to try to rebalance your blood sugar. Eating right is an important part of keeping the brain healthy by giving it the resources it needs to thrive, so in a way, the doctors of the past weren’t so wrong for believing that a healthier gut makes for a healthier mind.
The Recipes
The “Medicinal” cornbread
1 pound of cornmeal
1.5 pints of milk
5 eggs
1 piece of butter, the size of a hen’s egg
1 lump of soda (baking soda), the size of a pea
1 teaspoon of cream of tartar
The only instructions included on mixing and baking were to bake the cornbread for 3/4s of an hour.
The “Superior” cornbread
1 quart of sour milk (buttermilk)
2 tablespoons of flour
3 eggs
“As much cornmeal as will make a stiff batter” (use your best judgement)
No instructions included.
Author’s note: I tried out the “Superior” cornbread recipe in a 350-degree oven for enough time for the edges to brown and the center to spring back after touching it. I would not recommend it. It was denser than the sun and super dry and flavourless. I’d suggest using a modern recipe instead, but if you’d like an edible version of the superior cornbread, try adding some salt, sugar and some kind of leavener like baking powder or baking soda to get a better result.
References
Cleveland Clinic. “Is Being ‘Hangry’ Really a Thing ― or Just an Excuse?,” June 7, 2021. https://health.clevelandclinic.org/is-being-hangry-really-a-thing-or-just-an-excuse.
Eglė Sakalauskaitė‐Juodeikienė. “‘Heroic’ Medicine in Neurology: A Historical Perspective.” European Journal of Neurology, November 20, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1111/ene.16135.
He, Angela. “The Humors and You! Medieval Health, Diet, and Humoral Theory.” Becker Medical Library, August 31, 2023. https://becker.wustl.edu/news/humors-and-you/.
Lewandowska-Pietruszka, Zuzanna, Magdalena Figlerowicz, and Katarzyna Mazur-Melewska. “The History of the Intestinal Microbiota and the Gut-Brain Axis.” Pathogens 11, no. 12 (December 15, 2022): 1540. https://doi.org/10.3390/pathogens11121540.
Miller, Ian. “The Gut–Brain Axis: Historical Reflections.” Microbial Ecology in Health and Disease 29, no. 2 (November 8, 2018). https://doi.org/10.1080/16512235.2018.1542921.
Nguyen, Mytien, and Noah W. Palm. “Gut Instincts in Neuroimmunity from the Eighteenth to Twenty-First Centuries.” Seminars in Immunopathology 44, no. 5 (July 4, 2022): 569–79. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00281-022-00948-2.
Nord, Camilla. “There’s a Reason They’re Called ‘Gut’ Feelings.” TIME, March 25, 2024. https://time.com/6960278/gut-feelings-mental-health-effects-essay/.
Ross, Alice. “Health and Diet in 19th-Century America: A Food Historian’s Point of View.” Historical Archaeology 27, no. 2 (1993): 42–56. https://www.jstor.org/stable/25616238.
Wills, Matthew. “A Hell of a Cracker.” JSTOR Daily, November 4, 2014. https://daily.jstor.org/origins-of-graham-crackers/.
“The Strange Story behind Your Breakfast Cereal.” JSTOR Daily, February 26, 2019. https://daily.jstor.org/the-strange-backstory-behind-your-breakfast-cereal/.
About the Author
Emma Huigens (Summer Staff 2024)
Emma is in her third year at McGill university. She has worked at the Museum of Heath Care for two summers. She is a big fan of the history of science and medicine! When she is not hard at work you will find Emma playing a variety of instruments, with the ukulele being her favourite.