Eat your vegetables. Your happiness could depend on it.
A study by scientists at the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service found that when healthy adults consume the daily amount of vegetable servings recommended by the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, it has a positive effect on how happy the person feels.
Although several studies show that eating the DGA-recommended daily amounts of fruits and vegetables is good general health, only a few studies have demonstrated the role that vegetable consumption has on one’s mental health, according to a news release.
Scientists at the Grand Forks Nutrition Research Center in North Dakota conducted an eight-week study to evaluate the impact of increasing daily vegetable servings to match DGA recommendations on how happy one perceives themself to be, a key measurement of psychological well-being, the release said.
The study group received daily servings of DGA-recommended number and variety of vegetables, including dark green, red, and orange, and starchy vegetables, based on their energy needs during the study, the release said.
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All participants completed a questionnaire called the Subjective Happiness Scale (SHS), which is a subjective assessment that provides a mean overall score of a person’s state of happiness based on the respondent’s perspective.
The study measured attitudes before and after the eight-week study.
“We observed an increased in SHS scores in participants from the group that followed the DGA recommendations for vegetable intake, whereas SHS scores stayed the same for the control group, who didn’t change their diet,” ARS Research Biologist Shanon Casperson said in the release. “Results suggest that increasing the amount of vegetables you eat every day may benefit your mental health.”
The study was part of a larger study at the Grand Forks Human Nutrition Research Center that sought to determine whether adults with overweight and obesity would become more motivated to eat vegetables if they increased the number of servings they ate every day, the release said.
“Unlike very tasty less healthy foods, which become more reinforcing if you eat them every day, increasing the amount of vegetables eaten daily does not make them more reinforcing, highlighting the difficulty of increasing vegetable consumption in adults,” a summary of the report said. “However, focusing on the benefits eating more vegetables has on psychological well-being may provide a more salient reason for people to increase their vegetable consumption.”
