Diet may not help beat stress?
Sometimes I am flabbergasted by research. London’s Imperial College today released the results of a study that says that Improving your diet may not help you beat stress.
So, what do you think they did? Take two groups of people, put one on a healthy diet with lots of fruit and vegetables and one on a junk food diet, and see which people respond better to stressors? No, they had several groups of rats, which they stressed by removing their mothers or water (I do not understand why people think this is ethical, but at the same time are outraged when one sparrow is killed). The rats with the healthy diet had a diet richer in long chain polyunsaturated fatty acids. According to the researchers, these healthy fatty acids are normally found in milk. This is strange, because milk is actually very low in those fatty acids and very rich in saturated fat.
Just because a milk heavy diet does not seem to beat stress does not mean at all that diet has no influence on stress at all. I am shocked that researches jump to those silly conclusions. It reminds me of the recent news that diet does not influence cancer risk, just because one particular type of low fat diet did not show much results.
If there is anything to learn from this diet it is that milk doesn’t help beat stress. That’s not really surprising, is it?
I am positive that a healthy diet full of fruits and vegetables is one factor in beating stress, but of course there are others. Getting enough sleep, doing relaxation exercises/meditating/going to church are some of the other factors that help you deal with stress.
