If you’re here then you’ve probably Google’d about: what b vitamin is good for anxiety.
Fact Checked
Few people want to deal with the time and effort of therapy, and fewer still want to use the medicinal treatments that are not only prescribed extremely fast in today’s medicine-oriented community – they also have a lot of side effects. Many believe that vitamins and nutrition are the key to improving anxiety. That’s because deficiencies in important vitamins appear to precipitate anxiety symptoms, so it is possible that improving our intake of these vitamins should have the opposite effect and decrease the amount of anxiety we experience.
There’s some good news and bad news. The bad news is that B-Vitamins only work for a select group of people, depending on their nutritional intake.
Background
According to the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH) , kava was a popular choice before researchers determined that it can cause severe liver disease.
Passionflower is an example of an anxiety remedy that does not have enough quality evidence to support claims of its effectiveness. However, the following supplements do show promise in easing the symptoms of anxiety.
1. B Vitamins
Your body needs eight B vitamins for optimal health:
All B vitamins play a beneficial role in reducing anxiety and improving your mood.
For instance, a study[5] published in the Journal of Functional Foods found that people who ate B vitamin-rich foods saw significant improvements in their anxiety and stress scores compared to those who didn’t eat B vitamin-rich foods. However, when it comes to vitamin B for anxiety, vitamin B12 is especially powerful for managing your mood. B12 also offers additional braincare benefits, such as increasing your ability to focus and remember information.
Abstract
A systematic review and meta-analysis was undertaken to examine and quantify the effects of B vitamin supplementation on mood in both healthy and ‘at-risk’ populations. Random effects models for a standardized mean difference were used to test for overall effect. Regarding individual facets of mood, B vitamin supplementation benefited stress (n = 958, SMD = 0.23, 95% CI = 0.02, 0.45, p = 0.03).
The review provides evidence for the benefit of B vitamin supplementation in healthy and at-risk populations for stress, but not for depressive symptoms or anxiety. Keywords: B-vitamins, mood, meta-analysis, review, mental health, stress, anxiety, depression.