Nature: Eat this food every day to reduce stress for 1 month!

People take food as the sky, and diet directly affects human health
.
Good and reasonable healthy eating habits are an important aspect of health care, which can make the body grow and develop
healthily.
Poor eating habits can lead to normal physiological dysfunction and infection with diseases
.

In recent years, a growing body of research has shown that diet can have a huge impact
on our mental health.
In fact, a healthy diet can even reduce the risk of
many common mental illnesses.

As we all know, diet shapes the intestinal flora, which is an integral part of the human body, and the trillions of bacteria living in our gut play an important role in health, affecting human weight, digestion, the risk of infection and autoimmune diseases, and even controlling the body's response to drugs
.

On October 27, 2022, researchers from the University of Cork in Ireland published an article in the Nature sub-journal Molecular Psychiatry titled "Feed your microbes to deal with stress:a psychobiotic diet impacts microbial stability and perceived stress in a healthy.
" adult population"
.

The study shows that a specific diet is an effective way to cope with stress, and eating more fermented foods and fiber every day for as little as 4 weeks can significantly reduce stress levels
.

In the study, researchers analyzed 45 healthy people aged 18-59 with relatively low dietary fiber intake
.
Participants were divided into two groups and randomly assigned diets, antihypertensive diets, and usual diets
during the four-week study.

Among them, the antihypertensive diet increased the number of
prebiotics and fermented foods that participants ate.

The study found that those who followed a blood pressure lowering diet reported feeling less
stressed compared to a regular diet.

Importantly, there was a direct correlation between the degree of rigor of adherence to the antihypertensive diet standards and stress, with participants who followed a strict antihypertensive diet reporting the greatest
reduction in stress levels over a 4-week period.

More interestingly, the antihypertensive diet group also reported better improvements
in sleep quality.
Earlier research has also suggested that gut microbes are linked to the sleep process, which could explain this link
.

Further, the researchers analyzed changes in the gut microbiota, and the study found that a hypotensive diet caused only subtle changes in
the composition and function of the gut microbiota.

However, the researchers also found significant changes in levels of some chemicals in the gut microbiota metabolites, some of which are linked to mental health, which may explain why participants on a blood pressure-lowering diet were less
stressed.

In conclusion, studies have found that eating more fermented foods and fiber every day can alter intestinal microbiota metabolite levels and further reduce stress levels
.
This diet may also help protect mental health
in the long run.

For now, researchers don't know how long this change will last, so long-term studies
are needed.

Links to papers:

https://doi.
org/10.
1038/s41380-022-01817-y