Eating Your Vegetables Helps Fight Stress

Eating vegetables on a regular basis for two weeks helped volunteers in a nutrition study reduce levels of stress-related molecules and boost their blood levels of vitamin C (Journal of Nutrition, volume 134, pages 3021-3025).

Twelve healthy men and women participated in this collaborative study. In addition to other foods, each volunteer ate two daily servings of gazpacho--a chilled soup made with tomatoes, cucumbers, green peppers, onions, garlic and olive oil. By the seventh day of the two-week-long study, volunteers' blood levels of vitamin C had increased by at least 20 percent and remained elevated for the rest of the study.

Levels of four stress molecules decreased significantly. For instance, by the halfway point in the study, uric acid was reduced by 8 to 18 percent. High levels of uric acid can cause gout, a form of arthritis, and may increase risk of cardiovascular disease.

Source:
U.S. Department of Agriculture