From spending time with people you love to scheduling fun vacations, you probably do a lot in the name of happiness. But as it turns out, maintaining a positive outlook might not be all about what you do—but also what you eat. A new study from The British Journal of Health Psychology finds that people who eat more fruits and veggies have a higher sense of purpose, engagement, curiosity, and creativity—and they’re more likely to have a positive attitude.
For the study, researchers asked 405 17- to 25-year-olds to keep an Internet diary for two weeks. Each day, they recorded how many servings of fruits, vegetables, sweets, and fried potatoes (yes, this is a little random) they ate. They also answered questions about how engaged, curious, creative, positive, and negative they felt, as well as how much sense of purpose they had for that day. On days where the participants ate more fruits and veggies, they reported higher levels of those positive qualities.
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Although the participants’ daily consumption of produce ranged from zero to four servings—and the average daily serving was just over one—apparently that was enough to impact the participants’ outlooks. The researchers wrote that they could only speculate as to why chowing down on produce led to a better attitude on life, but it could be because of the nutrients found in those foods. Eating foods packed with vitamin C, antioxidants, and B vitamins could improve your wellbeing since those nutrients help your body produce feel-good chemicals like dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin, say the study authors.
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The study authors note that these findings aren’t strong enough to show that eating produce actually causes a mood boost. (After all, the study was only correlational, and previous research has found that a positive mood may make people more likely to eat healthier.) While more research needs to be done, it certainly can’t hurt to swap your afternoon vending machine snack for fruits and veggies.
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