In the meantime, to ascertain the effectiveness of the dopamine diet, you could look at the popular Mediterranean diet – which, she says, “shares a lot of common foods, like dairy, yoghurt, meat, oily fish and legumes. So you naturally get lots of dopamine production without restricting yourself.”

Studies report that people who follow this type of diet enriched with omega-3 fatty acids and leafy greens, have repeatedly “demonstrated significantly greater improvement” in depressive symptoms.

As for the earliest you can expect to feel the mood-lifting effects of adopting the happy diet, Mamada says: “It depends on the individual’s genetic predisposition to dopamine release, but normally we would say from two to four months would give us an accurate reading.”

Can the protein-rich dopamine diet make you happier and stronger? We asked an expert