Listening to how your body feels after eating certain foods is essential to determining the best nutritional pattern for your physical and mental health, but here’s a hint: a cornerstone of it. must be vegetables. Referring to a randomized controlled trial published in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and DieteticsSapola described 75 adults in North Dakota that they were not reaching the recommended intake of vegetables. “In this study they had their control group that continued to eat very few vegetables and then their intervention group, which was given vegetables from different groups.”
The intervention group ate two and a half servings of vegetables (plus legumes, avocados and other nutrient-rich plants) per day. At the end of eight weeks, these participants scored higher on a happiness scale compared to their baseline rating and the control group. “It’s a small study, but it speaks to the gut-brain connection and the power of just making very small changes,” says Sapola. “These people weren’t eating 10 or 20 cups of vegetables a day. It was only two and a half cups.”
An interesting point to note in this study is that two and a half cups is still not a exceptionally large amount of vegetables, especially relative to what leading health experts recommend. “When you look at some of the therapeutic interventions with vegetables and people like [physician] Terry Wahls, M.D., recommends 12 to 15 cups of vegetables a day. So two and a half is still very low,” adds Sapola. “The Mediterranean [diet] plan he usually eats about four cups of vegetables a day.” Moral of the story? Even small changes in diet can have a big impact on your well-being.
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