Do you love spending your Sunday morning behind the stove to receive the family at lunchtime? You excel in the art of preparing tasty and balanced dishes ? An asset for your physical health, but not only!
According to a recent study conducted by Australia’s Edith Cowan University, having cooking skills would be beneficial for the Mental Health. The researchers published their work in the specialized journal Frontiers in Nutrition. The editorial staff tells you about it.
Cooking improves mental health and vitality
To carry out their research, the scientists followed 657 volunteers from different university campuses between 2016 and 2018. The idea was to make them take cooking classes for seven weeksled by British chef Jamie Oliver who seeks to teach cooking around the world.
Each cooking lesson followed the same principle: learn to prepare healthy and balanced dishes. The researchers measured the effect of these cooking classes on their mental health, as well as on their overall satisfaction with cooking and food-related behaviors.
Results ? Scientists have found that students who participated in the program exhibited significant improvements in their overall health, but also in their mental health and vitality. These beneficial effects were felt from the end of the seven week course and up to six months later. They were observed equally between overweight or obese participants and those with a healthy weight.
Learning to cook: a strategy to fight obesity?
This new research also shows that the participants’ mental health was better even though their diet had not changed at the end of the program. “This suggests a link between confidence in one’s ability to cook, satisfaction around the kitchenand mental health,” said Dr. Joanna Rees, lead author of the study.
The doctor goes further, saying that improving the quality of people’s diets can be a “preventive strategy for stop or slow the deterioration of mental health, obesity and other metabolic health disorders”. Indeed, according to her, this can help “to overcome some of the obstacles linked to not knowing how to cook, (…) which can lead to consumption of prepared dishes high in calories but low in nutritional value”.
In France, about 17% of the adult population is obese, which represents more than 8 million people according to the Ministry of Health. In 2019, the World Health Organization already estimated that 38.2 million children under 5 were overweight or obese. “Once considered as specific problems of high-income countries, overweight and obesity are now increasing in low- and middle-income countriesespecially in urban areas,” says the organization.
Being overweight can have many adverse health consequences with increased risk of cardiovascular diseasefrom diabetesfrom musculoskeletal problems and some cancers (endometrium, ovaries, breast, prostate, liver, gallbladder, kidney and colon).