Whether you eat them straight out of the packet, slather nut butter on toast and or prefer to roast and sprinkle on salads, nuts are totally delicious. But did you know they’re more than just a tasty snack? We know that they count towards our 30-plants-a-week gut goal, but they also come with huge mental health benefits too.

In fact, a handful of almonds might be a handy tool in reducing stress at work or over the festive season. A study by King’s College found that by swapping typical snacks for almonds, you can improve how your heart responds to mental stress. In the research, participants underwent a mental stress challenge and had their heart rate variability (HRV) measured. Those who ate almonds for six weeks in place of a calorie-matched popular snack had significantly improved their HRV. 

HRV is an important measure of stress. The higher it is, the better your body is at dealing with stress; the lower it is, the less resilience you have.

“Heart rate variability is a simple way of kind of seeing how responsive and how resilient your heart is,” explains Dr Sarah Berry, a researcher specialising in diet and cardiovascular disease risk at King’s. “Having a high heart rate variability means the heart is able to switch gears faster depending on the demands on the body. If when you’re under stress you can’t increase your heart rate variability, it means you don’t have good enough cardiac resilience and flexibility.

“As the participants who had been eating almonds were able to adapt their heart rate variability in a more favourable way, it shows that people who are experiencing high stress or high anxiety can “somewhat attenuate or modulate how their body is responding to that stress through diet.”

Given that we’re arguably in the most stressful part of the year with looming deadlines, the prospect of spending more time with difficult family members and back-to-back social engagements, this is welcome news. Nuts are a key part of Christmas – everywhere you look, there are packs of festive walnuts, almonds and Brazils. 

But why nuts? One of the main reasons why they are so good at helping with stress management is because they contain “non-nutrient bioactives”, which include flavonoids, polyphenols and antioxidants. Not only do many of these nutrients have their own beneficial effect on mental health, but they also can reduce inflammatory measures, blood lipids, liver fat and support insulin sensitivity, Dr Berry tells Strong Women.

“What’s really novel here is that this research shows that actually a simple dietary swap can really reduce this the stress impact, or the impact that stress has on our health.”

There are other reasons why nuts can help boost our mental health – and it’s all to do with the gut. Nuts have very rigid cell walls, Dr Berry explains, and while we can break some of the cell walls down to absorb the nutrients, a lot of them remain intact. “You’re giving a lot more material to your gut, which improves your microbiome and your gut health, which we know does have a big impact on mental health as well,” Dr Berry adds. 

Remember, a huge proportion on our serotonin (the happy hormone) is made in the gut – so if you feed that with the right kinds of nutrients, it may benefit mood.

That’s not to say we should only ever be snacking on nuts. “My recommendation is that where possible we should opt for whole foods, vegetables, fruits and particularly nuts,” says Dr Berry. 

“This research really clearly shows how a simple dietary swap can improve your health. But my belief as a nutritionist is that it is very challenging to modify your diet because it’s so intricately interlinked with culture, lifestyle, family, work and other factors.”

And, don’t worry, we checked: nut butters count. That’s us off to spoon Pip and Nut from the jar. 

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