Can Stress Reduce Fruit and Vegetable Intake?

The TLDR:

• A study found that daily menu planning increased fruit and vegetable intake in adults over one week, with continued increase observed two weeks later.
• However, the study also revealed that individuals with high stress levels did not significantly increase their fruit and vegetable consumption despite the menu planning intervention.
• This suggests that stress can hinder dietary changes, and physical therapists should consider stress reduction strategies and/or referral to dieticians for patients struggling with dietary modifications, especially those experiencing high stress.

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Transcript: 

I'm warming up and things are looking up. So anyhow, we've got a new research update. This one is from Nutrition, the Journal of Nutrition, January of this year by Zhu Qi et al.

And it's titled, Does Stress Reduce Fruit and Vegetable Intake? Interestingly, a lot of our content that we talk about, not only in my videos, my blog, and my courses, a lot of it focuses on research and like things to eat, things not to eat, how to optimize outcomes. But ultimately it comes down to getting that patient to make those changes. So we do have a dedicated section in our courses where we talk about motivating people to change and that how to be an agent of change and those stages of changes, right? And we study a little bit of that as physical therapists in terms of getting people to move, but getting people to change their diet is not too far off.

Although I would say it's also more complex, right? Because there's a lot of other factors there, like food culture, as well as accessibility to food, as well as socioeconomic factors. And there's taste, right? Some people just don't like the taste of spinach. Whereas with exercise, we can sort of maybe get them to like biking or find that exercise that they like, like pickleball.

In any event, what I'm talking about here is this randomized controlled trial they did with 99 adults. And what they did for seven days, they did an online treatment and they sat these individuals down and did daily menu planning, effectively saying, hey, listen, today, this is what you're going to plan to eat. And what they did is then track their overall fruit and vegetable intake.

The control group, they did not do that and they tracked their fruit and vegetable intake as well. So interestingly, at the end of the study of the seven days, they found those that underwent the planning increased their fruit and vegetable intake from 1.5 cups to 2.2 cups per day during that week. What was awesome is to see that two weeks later, they were actually eating even more fruits and vegetables, two and a half cups per day, which is awesome.

However, they did find a subset analysis of this group that those that had high levels of stress, which was another factor they were looking at is how much stress are these people under? And those that were more stressed, did they change as much as they should have, or as we would hope they would? And the study found that those under high levels of stress did not change their fruit and vegetable intake. So what does that mean? Well, that means our patients that we're talking to that have that high stress demanding job, they are not going to change as rapidly as those that are maybe less stressed, have less occupational hazards, have less occupational engagement. So we as physical therapists that are counseling these patients need to think about strategies that are going to reduce stress and or possibly work for those patients.

Simply meal, daily meal planning may not be enough for them. And so we may have to think outside of the box. Moreover, again, we're not specialists, we're not dieticians.

So if that person is really struggling, we need to refer them to a dietician for further analysis and further tools that they may be able to have at their disposal so that they can get expert care. So in the end, we're not the one-stop shop. We might be those that catch them eating small or lower amounts of fruits and vegetables that are impacting their daily life or their quality of health, quality of life or health outcomes.

So us referring them could be the first step to getting them not only better health outcomes or better physical therapy outcomes, but a better life in general. So only how if you like this content, like, subscribe, sign up for our physical therapy ceu courses today. They're awesome continuing ed courses for nutrition specific to physical therapy and physical medicine.

Have a great day. Thanks. Bye.