Alisha Wainwright

Thanks for listening to this episode of When Science Finds a Way.

Thanks also to Professor Linda Partridge, Shamita Sharmacharja, and Dr. Mika Kivamaki.

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Welcome to When Science Finds Way, a podcast about the science changing the world.

I'm Alisha Wainwright, and on this series, I'm talking to the global experts who are making a difference, as well as the people who have inspired and contributed to their work.

Now, it's obvious that the food you eat has a big influence on your physical health.

In this episode, we're going to talk about something that's less widely understood, how diet could impact your mental health.

This is the question driving an emerging field, nutritional psychiatry.

Nutritional psychiatry is the evidence-backed investigation of how the food we eat affects our mental and brain health.

This is not about fad diets, and it's not really about general mental health wellbeing either.

As we'll hear, there is promising evidence from multiple small-scale pilot studies about how diets could work in combination with other treatments as effective interventions for a range of diagnosed mental health conditions.

Now the field is ready to test this hypothesis in larger trials.

Joining me to discuss this area of research is Dr. Wolfgang Marx.

He's senior research fellow and deputy director of the Deakin University's Food and Mood Center.

In this episode, we'll get an idea of the breadth of nutritional psychiatry and discuss two research projects looking at how two different diets could help to reduce the symptoms of bipolar disorder.