Enjoying the sun and eating citrus fruits isn’t enough to stock up on vitamins. Here’s the one you should focus on for your mental health and your heart.
Dietary supplement fans eat them to their heart’s content: vitamins help maintain vital balance. They enable cells to use nutrients, which are sources of energy. However, with the exception of vitamins K and D, they cannot be produced by the body. Fortunately, they can be consumed in many ways, by eating fruits and oilseeds. Among the many vitamins, one vitamin called “forgotten” by Dr. Reem Malouf, a renowned neurologist at Oxford University, could even improve mental health according to recent studies.
The French National Agency for Food, Environmental and Occupational Health Safety (ANSES) lists thirteen families of vitamins defined and classified into two categories: fat-soluble vitamins (A, D, E and K), which can dissolve in fats, and water-soluble vitamins (B and C), which can dissolve in water. It is one of these last two vitamins that several British researchers are interested in, including Jess Eastwood, a doctoral student in nutritional psychology at the University of Reading in Great Britain. Their research shows that increased and continuous consumption of vitamin B6 can play a role in the decrease in brain activity that can occur in cases of mood disorders.
“The effect of vitamin B6 on mental health is not a new concept,” the doctoral student told New York Times. And his tests confirm this quite spectacularly: with 100 milligrams per day for about a month, the subjects felt much calmer than those who had consumed a placebo, reveals the study.
However, this study was conducted on only 500 university students, too small a number of subjects to confirm the researchers’ conclusions, but they are still very enthusiastic about these results. Few studies of this type exist, some focus on the benefits of vitamin B6 for the heart. In addition to its positive impact on mental health, vitamin B6, in fact, “also helps the body maintain normal levels of homocysteine, an amino acid that can lead to the formation of blood clots,” says an article from Cleveland Hospital.
A vitamin B6 deficiency could therefore lead to the formation of coronary heart disease. But in reality, it is rare for a person to encounter this type of deficiency if they have a healthy and varied diet because vitamin B6 is present in many foods such as offal, meat, fish, dried vegetables, cereals, bananas or even brewer’s yeast. The recommended intake of vitamin B6 for adults is between 1.3 and 1.7 milligrams per day, which is one hundred times less than the doses consumed by the participants in the study conducted by Jess Eastwood and her colleagues.