How to Boost Mental Health: Include Fruits and Vegetables in Your Daily Diet

A wise man once said that a healthy body is like a temple for a healthy mind. Body, mind and soul are three essential components for bringing balance, happiness and strength to your life. We live in a world where everyone misinterprets good health for a perfectly shaped body, and they are willing to work hard for it while overlooking mental health. People often find it uncomfortable to discuss their mental health. The times that we live in with high levels of stress, it is important that we start paying heed to our mental health too. It is an absolute must. And the first step to achieving that is to maintain a healthy diet. Clean eating can take you a long way towards good health.A healthy diet can prevent many ailments such as the risk of obesity, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, stroke, and some types of cancer. The regular consumption of fruits and vegetables particularly are also beneficial for our mental health. A new research done by the Department of Psychology at University of Otago in New Zealand found that increasing fruit and vegetable consumption may improve psychological well-being in as little as 2 weeks.Lead researcher Dr. Tamlin Conner and his team found that young adults who were given extra fruits and vegetables each day for 14 days ate more of the produce and experienced a boost in motivation and vitality. According to leading health experts, a healthy diet should constitute of two cups of fruits and about three cups of vegetables daily.For their study, Conner and team enrolled 171 students aged between 18 and 25 for their study, and they were divided into three groups for 2 weeks. One group continued with their normal eating pattern, one was personally handed two additional servings of fresh fruits and vegetables (including carrots, kiwi fruit, apples, and oranges) each day, while the remaining group was given prepaid produce vouchers and received text reminders to consume more fruits and vegetables.Participants were subjected to psychological assessments that evaluated mood, vitality, motivation, symptoms of depression and anxiety, and other determinants of mental health and well-being.
 
The researchers found that participants who personally received extra fruits and vegetables consumed the most of these products over the 2 weeks, at 3.7 servings daily, and it was this group that experienced improvements in psychological well-being. In particular, these participants demonstrated improvements in vitality, motivation, and flourishing.Furthermore, no improvements were seen in symptoms of depression and anxiety in any of the groups. "The majority of research linking depression to dietary patterns has been longitudinal, meaning that possible differences in ill-being may be established over a much longer period of time rather than our brief 2-week period," note the authors.The researchers recently reported their findings in the journal PLOS One.