Dr Federica Amati

Seriously.

So she found that in this trial, and I think it's been repeated now, replicated rather, she found that giving a Mediterranean dietary intervention, she also did an affordability study with this, so she showed that

The diet that she recommended these patients was actually more affordable than the diet that we were on to start with, right?

So it was actually cheaper to eat this way.

The Mediterranean dietary intervention with a little bit of red meat, because a lot of these patients would be B12 deficient, she found that she could reduce severity of depression symptoms by up to 30%.

Wow.

And these people were resistant, so they had like really resistant depression.

So we know that we can improve mental health symptoms and we also know that there's lots of beautiful reviews done on things like Mediterranean diet and likelihood of developing depression and likelihood of developing anxiety and if you have a Mediterranean dietary pattern then you're less likely to develop these conditions.

So we know that it can help protect against mental health issues.

Now having transient mental health problems is part of being human so I think

we also need to you know it's normal to have periods where you have issues with your mental health but it's the resilience it's the being able to recover it's the it's for it not to become a chronic mental health condition that's what we want and um and yeah diet has absolutely plays a part not only in prevention but also actually in curing it and making sure people can live a healthy life i mean do people with severe mental health conditions like schizophrenia

Their life expectancy is 20 years less than people without.

That's not because schizophrenia is killing them.

That's not what it is.

It's because their metabolic health, their diet, their physical activity, their social isolation is such that they lose 20 years of life.

You know, the two things go hand in hand and we can't, if someone is suffering, you need to treat the whole person, not just the symptoms.