Fruit and vegetables are the key to happiness

Eat­ing fruit and veg­eta­bles could be the key to hap­pi­ness, ac­cord­ing to new War­wick re­search.

A study into food and psy­cho­log­i­cal well-be­ing ex­am­ined the be­hav­iour of 80,000 par­tic­i­pants in Britain and found a link be­tween a high in­take of fruit and veg­eta­bles and hap­pi­ness.

The re­sults show that the ideal amount of serv­ings each day is seven, two por­tions more than the cur­rent gov­ern­ment-rec­om­mend­ed num­ber of ‘five a day’.

The sur­vey de­fined one por­tion of fruit or veg­eta­bles as 80 grams.

Cur­rent­ly, only one in ten Britons man­ages to eat seven daily serv­ings whilst a quar­ter of British peo­ple eat no fruit or veg­eta­bles on a daily basis.

Eco­nom­ics Pro­fes­sor, An­drew Os­wald and Pro­fes­sor Sarah Stew­art-Brown, of the War­wick Med­ical School, con­duct­ed the re­search over a year-long pe­ri­od in con­junc­tion with the Amer­i­can uni­ver­si­ty Dart­mouth.

The re­sults of the sur­vey came as a sur­prise to its au­thors, who de­scribed the “shock­ing pat­tern” be­tween fruit and veg­eta­bles and well-be­ing as “unan­tic­i­pat­ed”.

Whilst the rea­sons be­hind the re­sults are still rel­a­tive­ly un­known, Pro­fes­sor Os­wald told the Boar that the study’s find­ings prove that “fruit and veg­eta­bles are worth tak­ing se­ri­ous­ly” al­though he also added that he would like to “get to the bot­tom of real causal­i­ty”.

Until now, there has been a lim­it­ed amount of re­search into food as a fac­tor in well­be­ing.

Pro­fes­sor Os­wald com­ment­ed that though there has been a “huge amount of re­search un­der­stand­ing human hap­pi­ness, so­cial sci­en­tists have thought amaz­ing­ly lit­tle on types of food”.

He stat­ed that the study’s out­come stressed the im­por­tance of healthy eat­ing and sug­gest­ed that there is now “an ad­di­tion­al rea­son to have healthy foods avail­able on cam­pus­es like War­wick”.

Peter Dunn, a spokesman for the Uni­ver­si­ty com­ment­ed on the glob­al sig­nif­i­cance of these re­sults: “We are de­light­ed that this re­search, which brings to­geth­er two War­wick De­part­ments and a War­wick re­search Cen­tre, has at­tract­ed such world-wide and con­tin­u­ing media cov­er­age.”

Source: The Boar (http://goo.gl/eI2zq)