Eat Your Way to Lower Anxiety
Anxiety can be crippling.
It can cause you to withdraw from your friends… leave you unable to work… and make it impossible to make decisions.
Even worse, it can mess with your health, impacting your breathing, digestion, sleep, and more.
Doctors predictably treat anxiety with drugs. And while meds might work for some in the short term, they don’t address the root cause—which means they’ll never FIX your issue.
In my experience, key lifestyle changes can make the biggest difference in kicking anxiety to the curb.
This latest study highlights one way to achieve that.
Researchers compared a group people with anxiety to another group without the condition.
These volunteers had been diagnosed with anxiety by a psychiatrist, and the severity of their anxiety was determined using the General Anxiety Disorder-7 questionnaire.
Participants answered a food frequency questionnaire to determine whether they ate a…
- healthy diet (fruit, vegetables, whole grains, fish),
- a Western diet (processed meat, fast food, refined grains, sugar),
- or a combination of both.
The researchers found that the healthier someone’s diet was, the lower their risk of suffering from anxiety became.
In fact, those with the HEALTHIEST diets of all had a 74 percent lower risk of having an anxiety disorder.
And in those who did suffer from anxiety, those with the healthiest diets had less severe anxiety symptoms.
On the flip side, people who ate more of a Western diet had more severe anxiety scores.
This study shows correlation rather than direct cause and effect. However, plenty of other research has found the same connection. And where there’s smoke, there’s usually fire.
These results are yet another reason to ditch processed, sugary junk foods and opt for a healthy whole-food diet instead.
P.S. Need more anxiety support? Try one of these six natural anxiety fixes.
SOURCE:
Torabynasab, K., Shahinfar, H., Zeraattalab-Motlagh, S., Jazayeri, S., Effatpanah, M., & Azadbakht, L. (2024). The association of major dietary patterns with odds and severity of anxiety disorders: a case–control study. Nutritional Neuroscience, 1–10.
