Hi Reader!

I hope you had a restful Thanksgiving weekend, or at least a moment to catch your breath before the winter holidays start picking up steam.

This season can be a lot, for our clients, for our families, and for us. So I’m keeping this week’s update simple and useful.

🗂️ New: Mental Health Nutrition Resource Library​

I’m excited to share something I’ve been building behind the scenes:
​a curated resource library for practitioners who want to integrate nutrition into mental healthcare.

You’ll find:

• book recommendations
• courses
• research hubs and toolkits
• client-facing resources
• professional development materials
• tools to manage your business

These are the things I use, return to, or recommend most often, finally organized in one place.
Feel free to bookmark it and send me suggestions if there’s something you’d like to see added, such as a category I didn't think of, or a book you love.

📚 Study of the Week

​Effect of Almonds on Mental Health and Gut Health: A 12-Week Randomised Controlled Trial​

This 12-week RCT looked at how daily almond consumption influences gut symptoms and mental health in healthy adults. A few highlights:

• Participants consumed 56 g/day of almonds (about 2 ounces).
• Researchers did not observe significant improvement in mood scores.
• Almond intake did not appear to alter the short chain fatty acid concentration in fecal samples.
• Microbiome analysis was ongoing at the time of publishing.
• Bowel function improved with significantly fewer hard stools.

My thoughts? First off, why didn't they wait for the microbiome analysis to be complete before publishing?

This article came across my email from a Google Scholar alter. I wanted to highlight it for a few reasons.

1. It's a super short read.
2. I think it's important to publish "negative" data. By this, I mean, the results did not back up the hypothesis. With a heavy publishing bias of "positive" studies, I feel like we are missing out on a lot of the picture when it comes to nutrition research.
3. I'm curious about how you feel about single food interventions. In my opinion, they aren't helpful, as they do not reflect real world dietary intake.

That being said, this study may have found different results had they gave a specific meal plan to participants, and included the almonds in some and the muffins (control food) in others.

As it is, we have no idea of the baseline diet in participants, so we can't know how big a change the daily almonds were.

If you’re heading into a busy stretch of client care, I hope something in here makes your week a little easier or sparks an idea for your practice. As always, feel free to reply with thoughts, questions, or topics you’d like to see covered.

See you next week!

Jennifer Hanes MS, RDN, LD

P.S. Follow me around the web!

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