What Spending Time In Nature Does For Your Diet

It’s generally well-known that spending time in nature is good for you. See for example:

• Seasonal Affective Disorder (Beyond Sunlight!)
• How Nature Provides Us With A Surprisingly Powerful Painkiller
• Over-50s Physio: What My 5 Oldest Patients (Average Age 92) Do Right

And of course, it generally means you are getting exercise.

But could it possibly do for your diet?

We eat what we see

No, that doesn’t necessarily mean snacking on the nature as we go!

Although we can do! Only if you can positively identify what is safely edible, though.

Note: whatever you do, please do not rely on AI to tell you what is safe to eat. You will die:

❝Popular AI-based mushroom identification tools were tested using 100+ photos of nearly 60 species, taken in real-world conditions.

Even the best-performing tool failed in almost 15% of cases, with others performing worse.

None of tested applications consistently provided a single, correct answer, demonstrating they cannot be trusted for definitive life-or-death identification decisions.❞

Read in full: AI-mediated risks and real-life challenges in mushroom foraging

Note that this is not good when sometimes the choice is between:

• Agaricus bisporus: small smooth white globe in a little stalk, also called “button mushroom” when it’s small. Tasty and nutritious.
• Amanita phalloides: small smooth white globe in a little stalk, also called “death cap mushroom”. Reportedly also tasty, and/but they will be able to pour your liver out of your body at your autopsy some days later.

Those two mushrooms do disambiguate themselves visually when they get older, and there are signs to tell them apart when they’re younger, but signs that AI is going to detect with anything resembling reliability.

But rather, what we wanted to talk about here is partly related to what you might have read about in such articles as:

Our “food environments” affect what we eat. Here’s how you can change yours to support healthier eating.

And we ourselves touched on in our own article: The Real Magic Number For Daily Fruit/Veg ← in that third study

But this does it better: it turns out that if we spend more time amongst plants, we want to eat more plants!

Researchers (Dr. Dahlia Stott et al.) found that people who reported more incidental or intentional contact with nature tended to have higher diet-quality scores (based on the Healthy Eating Index-2020) and more sustainable dietary patterns (based on the EAT-Lancet Index).

On which note, Dr. Stott and her team separated exposure into indirect (viewing nature), incidental (having plants or greenery nearby), and intentional (actively visiting parks or natural spaces), with incidental and intentional exposure showing the strongest associations with better diets.

And why does this happen?

Participants said that spending time in nature made them want to eat more fruits and vegetables or think more about the origin and sustainability of their food.

The researchers hypothesized several mechanisms of action:

• Stress reduction: feeling calmer after time in nature may reduce stress-driven or impulsive eating.
• Health motivation: people seeking better physical health may be drawn to both outdoor activity and healthier food choices simultaneously.
• Mindfulness and reflection: nature may promote reflective states that make people more deliberate about food choices.
• Nature connectedness: feeling connected to ecosystems may encourage diets perceived as more “natural” or sustainable, such as eating more plant foods (per what the participants said)

You can read the paper in full, here: The connections among interactions with nature, diet quality, and sustainable eating

Want to learn more

You might consider this book we reviewed a while back:

The Dirt Cure – by Dr. Maya Shetreat-Klein

Enjoy!