In a recent study, it was discovered that fermented foods can actually improve social anxiety for those who suffer from this disorder, and that includes sauerkraut's health benefits among those of foods like yogurt.

According to The Telegraph, the team who recently uncovered sauerkraut's health benefits for the socially anxious were from a joint project between the University of Maryland and the College of William & Mary in Virginia, and they believe that the probiotics (so-called "good bacteria") found in different fermented foods can actually increase the production of the GABA neurotransmitter, which actually produces similar effects than anxiolytics, namely anti-anxiety medication.

Science Daily reports that the study on sauerkraut's health benefits was recently published in the journal Psychiatry Research, under the name "Fermented foods, neuroticism, and social anxiety: An interaction model," in the first in what's to be a series of studies on the relation between probiotics and social anxiety.

According to Yahoo! News, for the sauerkraut health benefits study, researchers gave approximately studied the eating habits of approximately 700 college students, trying to find the relationship between their diets and their tendency to have social anxiety.

To follow up the sauerkraut health benefits experiment, the researchers gave their college subjects a questionnaire measuring anxiety, neuroticism and other similar traits, then asking them about their eating habits, focusing on fermented foods consumed in the past 30 days (also including fermented soy milk, miso soup, dark chocolate and pickles, among others).

Other questions also included in the questionnaire involved the consumption of fruits and vegetables as well as exercising, to control healthy habits outside of fermented foods.

In all, it was found that, out of those students who had neurotic tendencies, the ones who consumed the most fermented foods ultimately showed less symptoms of social anxiety.

"These initial results highlight the possibility that social anxiety may be alleviated through low-risk nutritional interventions, although further research is needed to determine whether increasing probiotic consumption directly causes a reduction in social anxiety," said co-author Professor Jordan DeVylder on the subject of their sauerkraut health benefits findings, according to News.com.au.