A Mediterranean diet, like the Personal Chef To Go menu, is good for its more well-known reasons — protecting against heart disease and cancer— but did you know it could help your mental health? According to a new study published in the Archives of General Psychiatry, the Mediterranean diet, rich in fresh fruits and vegetables, whole grains, olive oil, nuts, and fish, may decrease risk of depression.
Spanish researchers reported that 30 percent of patients who ate a Mediterranean diet which includes monounsaturated fats such as olive oil and low in saturated fats from meat and dairy products; including moderate intake of alcohol, and high intake of legumes, fruits, veggies, nuts, and grains, were at a lower risk of mental illnesses compared to populations who did not.. It also showed that the main followers of the Mediterranean diet are males, ex-smokers, married people, and elderly individuals.
“The specific mechanisms by which a better adherence to the Mediterranean dietary pattern could help to prevent the occurrence of depression are not well known,” the researchers report. To explain how exactly the Mediterranean diet links to protection against depression, however, more studies have to be performed.
The researchers don’t think its individual components on their own but the whole diet combined that’s important for protecting against depression. Almudena Sanchez-Villegas, the lead researcher of the new study, says:
The role of the overall dietary pattern may be more important than the effect of single components. It is plausible that the synergistic combination of a sufficient provision of omega-three fatty acids together with other natural unsaturated fatty acids and antioxidants from olive oil and nuts, flavonoids and other phytochemicals from fruit and other plant foods and large amounts of natural folates and other B vitamins in the overall Mediterranean dietary pattern may exert a fair degree of protection against depression.
The Mediterranean diet, already well known for helping to reduce a person’s weight, improving mental sharpness and reducing cholesterol, is becoming a popular green style of eating because its followers consume smaller amounts of meat, purported to be one more way to help decrease your carbon footprint.
These optimistic findings could lighten up a world touched more and more by depression. So it looks like you mental health is just one more reason to eat the Personal Chef To Goway!
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