Mental Health

I slam a bag of mixed frozen veggies most days, each bag has 4-6 servings. Tons of different mixes available with different plants for variety. Stir fries directly from frozen w/ a little olive oil in literally a few minutes (frozen veggies are typically blanched before freezing so they don’t really take much cooking, they’re ready to eat basically as soon as they’re warmed up). Go nuts with your favorite seasonings.

Delicious and near zero time commitment accompaniment to anything else you make for dinner. No prep work. Zero food waste ever. Dirt cheap.

I mention it because from what I see most people who attempt to to hop on the “eat a shit ton of veggies every day” grind usually feel pressured to “do things properly”, which involves fresh produce and a bunch of complicated recipes or whatever. But then trying to eat like that every day is time consuming, so they give up, and most of the veggies end up in the trash

Dr Mujcic found participants were at their happiest when they ate five portions of fruit and four portions of vegetables each day.
[...]
One portion is the equivalent to one piece of fruit or vegetable the size of the palm of your hand.
[...]
The research paper can be found here.

Eating too much fruit in one sitting can cause diarrhea.

I can barely motivate myself to eat, never mind anything else

how many is that in USian units of measure? half a horse?

the produce my local grocer carries is oftentimes too fucking expensive, looks like shit, tastes like shit, and doesn't last

Unironically that's what i've been thinking for a while now. You know that a lot of the pharmaceuticals you swallow are actually produced by fungus and bacteria? Basically the same thing happens in your gut. Over time, the bacteria in your gut produce (low amounts of) pharmacologically active substances. And that affects your health, your mood, it's basically like magic mushrooms produce substances that affect your brain, so does your gut biome.

I skimmed the original study (published in 2014).

This is a correlation study, as are nearly all large-scale population studies. Everything (including number of produce servings a day consumed, physical health, and mental health) is self reported. The author says they controlled for income among other variables, but I'm calling SUS, because there's a lot of factors regarding diet/food accessibility not easily captured in a handful of basic data points. In other words, there might be something here, but absolutely nothing has been proven.

Remember, ice cream consumption is not a driver of the murder rate.*

*It's a science meme, go look it up

If youre sad, just stop being sad. This is 100% effective for 100% of people.