Eating a handful of nuts a day can help your mental health

Society is getting evermore complex and the stress of daily life is taking its toll on nearly everyone’s mental health. Depression rates are rising and things are really looking grim. 

However, there’s actually one simple thing you can do once per day to lower your risk of developing depression and all you have to do is ensure your kitchen is properly stocked. 

Researchers have discovered that eating a handful of nuts a day can drastically reduce your risk of developing depression. But how much risk can you reduce by eating nuts?

It turns out that you can lower your risk of developing depression by a whopping 17% if you’re eating just a handful of nuts a day, which is pretty easy to do if you’re not allergic. 

Researchers also noted the benefits to your mental health gained from eating nuts were present “regardless of relevant sociodemographic, lifestyle, and health confounders.”

This finding was discovered after researchers analyzed data from the United Kingdom’s Biobank online medical database that recorded the lifestyle habits of 500,000 people. 

Researchers didn’t use data from all 500,000 people but rather from just 13,504 individuals who noted that they were not depressed. Participants were aged 37-73 and the data was collected between 2007 and 2020. 

After roughly five years of eating a low to moderate serving of nuts every day, those who ate nuts reported much lower rates of depression while 8.3% of people who didn’t consume any nuts ended up developing depression. 

“Our findings highlight yet another benefit of consuming nuts, with a 17% decrease in depression associated with nut consumption,” explained Bruno Bizzozero-Peroni, a researcher at the University of Castilla-La Mancha according to The Independent.

“This provides an even stronger rationale for people to become enthusiastic about consuming nuts,” Bizzozero-Peroni added. 

A serving size of 30 grams or roughly 1 ounce was the Goldilocks Zone for the perfect amount of nuts to eat in a day to reduce your risk of depression and they could come from a variety of sources. 

Brazil nuts, walnut nuts, hazelnuts, pistachios, and almonds were all pointed out by the study’s authors as helpful while non-nuts like peanuts and cashews were also okay. 

The Independent noted the researchers weren't sure why consuming a handful of nuts a day translated into lower risks of depression, but they theorized it might have to do with the special nutritional profile nuts enjoy. 

“Specifically, nuts provide a rich variety of bioavailable phytochemicals that might be associated with various mechanisms, such as anti-inflammatory or antioxidant activities, involved in the progression of pathogenic processes,” the study’s authors wrote. 

The study’s findings were published in the peer-reviewed journal Clinical Nutrition but not everyone agreed that the new findings should be taken as a sign to eat more nuts. 

Dr. Jenna Macciochi is a senior lecturer at the University of Sussex and she commented on the new study, saying it “builds on the growing literature in nutritional psychology showing diet to be a factor in mood disorders,” according to The Independent. 

Unfortunately, Dr. Macciochi added that the study only showed a “positive association” rather than “a mechanistic effect,” and added that a lot still needed to be learned about the mechanism at play before we could make useful dietary recommendations. 

“In the meantime, the best evidence for supporting good mental health through diet is probably from consuming a Mediterranean-style anti-inflammatory diet pattern of which nuts are considered to be a component of,” Dr. Macciochi concluded.