Increased fruit and vegetables consumption has a beneficial effect on young people's wellbeing

A new study suggests food changes mood and that eating fruit and vegetables each day helps keep the blues away.

Eating more fruit and vegetables may make young people calmer, happier and more energetic in their daily life, the University of Otago research indicates. Otago psychology department researcher Dr Tamlin Conner, and Dr Caroline Horwath and Bonnie White, both of the Otago human nutrition department, explored the relationship between day-to-day emotions and eating.

The study, which analysed the consumption of food, and of a wide range of fruit and of vegetables, including carrots, was published in the British Journal of Health Psychology yesterday.

A total of 281 young adults, with a mean age of 20, completed an internet-based daily food diary for 21 consecutive days, rating how they felt and indicating what they had eaten that day. They were asked to report the number of servings eaten of fruit – excluding fruit juice and dried fruit – vegetables, excluding juices, and of several kinds of unhealthy foods, such as biscuits or cookies, potato chips and cakes or muffins.  (MTI)