Dr. Wolfgang Marx

Yeah.

And so, you know, the psychosocial components of sitting down with friends and family to eat, to the skill building that comes with, you know, trying new recipes, the flavors that give pleasure, all these sort of psychosocial mechanisms, I think, sometimes get sidelined because everyone's like, ooh, gut microbiome, how interesting.

But these are really important parts of the human experience of eating good food with people.

And I think that has a strong effect on how food can help our mental well-being as well.

Yeah, so I guess as the name suggests, our primary focus is the relationship between the food that we eat and our mood, our mental health.

Right on the nose.

But we run a diverse clinical trial platform.

We ran the first randomized controlled trial that looked at a dietary intervention for major depressive disorder and people with clinical diagnosis of major depressive disorder.

We've also looked at various sort of real world studies, so trying to move beyond that very tightly controlled environment of a clinical trial to see how these approaches actually work in the real world setting.

And then the other pillar of our center is really around that education and implementation, because there is all sorts of misinformation.

As you were saying, there's all sorts of conflicting research, messaging, particularly within social media.

We want to not just publish papers so that it's within the academic sphere.

We want to actually bring our research to the people that are interested, the people that need it.

And so we've developed quite a broad research education program so that people can download and access this information in a way that cuts through the jargon and gets to the meat of the information that people need.

This was essentially the first randomized controlled trial to investigate whether a dietary intervention might improve or reduce depressive symptoms in people with a clinical diagnosis of major depressive disorder.

So this was a randomized controlled trial.

It was in 67 adults with a clinical diagnosis of major depressive disorder, as well as a low diet quality score.

So they weren't eating a nutrient dense diet when they entered the trial.

And they were randomized to two different treatment arms.

They either received a Mediterranean dietary intervention.