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To learn how healthy eats might do more than just reduce the risk of cancer and heart disease, researchers at the University of Warwick in the U.K. and the University of Queensland in Australia had 12,000 participants keep food diaries that tracked their fruit and vegetable consumption for two years. The researchers periodically assessed the participants’ psychological states and overall happiness.
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They found that people who started eating more fruits and veggies reaped some massive mental benefits over the course of those two years—even after they had adjusted for other lifestyle changes at home and at the office that might take a toll on mental health. The more servings of fruits and veggies the participants ate (up to eight servings a day), the greater the psychological payoff. And it was a pretty big payoff, too: The happiness boost they measured was the equivalent of going from unemployed to employed. Whoa.
via GIPHY
While the researchers say more needs to be done to determine why exactly this happens, they have a couple of hypotheses. For starters, they say that it could be that antioxidants are causing this surge in optimism. They also say that a healthier gut could affect the brain (and thus your mood) in a positive way.
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The really impressive thing about these mood boosts is that they occur almost immediately. The researchers hope that these results might motivate more of us to start setting up healthier mealtime habits sooner rather than later. So excuse us while we go hit up the cold-pressed juice bar.
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