When it comes to eating right, go with your gut: We are neither nutritionists nor mental health experts, but we do know that 90% of our serotonin receptors are located in the gut, according to Harvard Health Publishing. This means that the way we eat profoundly affects the way we feel, so a good diet can protect us against anxiety, depression, and other mental illnesses — not to mention helping us look our best.

More and more studies are discovering links between your food and your mood. Findings have linked an unhealthy diet to long-term depression, sugar to food addiction, stress levels, and schizophrenia (it’s been dubbed the “white death” for a reason), and a varied and balanced diet to psychological well being. This field of study is broadly known as nutritional psychiatry or clinical nutrition, and a recent paper found that an improvement in diet affects plasticity in the brain, leading to a larger hippocampus — the part of the brain associated with learning, memory, mood regulation, and depression.

Our enjoyment of food is also closely linked to memory. Eating, says the Guardian, is an “intricate sequence of stimuli” that can influence how we perceive, interact with, and come to remember life experiences. So if our goal is to be both healthy and happy, there is no need to rule out pleasure when judging what kind of food is good for you.

Honoring your taste buds: If you like food, the best way to find and stick to a healthy diet is to flesh out a few golden rules for healthy eating, but allow yourself to prioritize taste, socializing, and enjoyment, say nutritionist Margareta Büning-Fesel and chef Cornelia Poletto. You could do this by looking into the genetic factors that make you like or dislike certain foods, and perhaps training yourself to better enjoy superfoods and greens with taste profiles that match your own — or pairing them with other foods you gravitate towards naturally.