In nuts may lie one of the keys to improve mood and relieve stress. But the positive effect is only for the young kids, college students, especially males. The advice is to eat a handful a day. This is what emerges from a study of the University of New Mexico, published in the journal Nutrients. Scholars have examined 64 students, aged between 18 and 25 years.
The participants were invited to eat three slices of ‘banana bread’ a sweet typical of Anglo-Saxon tradition, a plum cake, banana, every day for sixteen weeks. For eight weeks, nuts were added to the mixture, for eight other not. The nuts have been finely chopped so that the two types of ‘banana bread’ were similar in taste and appearance.
In the period in which the boys have eaten plum cake banana with addition of walnuts it was also asked them to eat half a cup of walnuts a day. At the end of the experiment, it measured the mood with a special test, Profiles of Mood States (Poms) covering six areas: tension, depression, anger, fatigue, energy, confusion.
“There was a significant 28 percent improvement in mood in young people – explains the author of the research, Peter Pribiš – while the same improvement did not affect the girls, but we do not know why.” There are several nutrients in nuts that could be responsible for the improved mood according to the scholars, such as alpha-linolenic acid, vitamin E, folic acid, the polofenoli and melatonin. But the secret could be in reality the combination of all these elements.