Dr. Wolfgang Marx

So this is a dietary intervention that focused on nutrient-dense plant-based foods, the consumption of extra virgin olive oil,

increased intake of fish, reduction of processed meats, sweets, sugar-sweetened beverages, those highly refined sugars and all the rest of it.

And the other group received a social support control intervention.

So this was essentially

A intervention that was matched for how often we were meeting with the participants, but it was really just sitting down, having a chat with them and talking about anything other than diet.

So this was the controlled condition.

I do want to emphasize, though, with the intervention, it wasn't, all right, go do, this is what a Mediterranean diet is, off you go, tell us how you'll go in 12 weeks.

This was an intervention where we met with them once per week with a trained dietician.

We provided nutritional education, but it was also around meal planning, budgeting, various recipes, shopping, all these sorts of things that come into that general health literacy to improve health.

our understanding of how do we actually incorporate these foods into our diet.

What we found was that at the end of those 12 weeks, we found a dramatic reduction in depressive symptoms in people that received that dietary intervention arm, so much so that 32% of those that went onto the dietary intervention arm achieved what we call remission criteria.

So they were no longer meeting that

clinical cutoff of what one would consider major depressive disorder.

And that was compared to the control condition where we didn't see that same effect.

And so it was quite a dramatic improvement.

And what's really encouraging is since then, because this was published some years ago now, there's been a number of independent research groups across both within Australia and across the globe that have replicated these results in their own populations as well.

Yes, a crucial point, which is that our research isn't aiming to replace evidence-based interventions, antidepressants.

pharmacotherapy psychotherapy physical activity all the rest of it we see this as an adjunct a combination approach it's it's essentially an additional evidence-based approach that can be used in combination with other evidence-based approaches that is tailored to the individual's circumstance and so we've produced um

clinical guidelines where we show how dietary interventions can be implemented into clinical care based on treatment as well as the severity of symptoms that are being seen by the individual.

And indeed, in our randomized controlled trials, such as the SMILES trial, this wasn't a dietary intervention in place of standard care.