Does the food we eat improve our mental health?
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Diet is really an interesting example of the mind-body connection. If we can improve the health of our body, it's also improving the health of our mental well-being and our brain health.
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. We'll also hear how the lived experience of patient communities and the questions of implementation and personalization are incorporated in this field.
So let's get into it. So when we think about food and mood, you know, I think about the old saying, you are what you eat. But I wonder how true that is when it comes to our mood and mental health. What do you what do you say to that?
Yeah, I think there's some truth to that. I mean, it's an old saying. And I think when you look really at any culture across time, there's this understanding or this sort of intuitive understanding that what we eat is linked somehow to our physical health, but also our well-being, how we feel. And I think even as individuals, we think, well, that time where I perhaps hadn't been eating so well, I feel a little bit lethargic, a little bit fatigued. I'm not quite on as I usually am. And there's times when I've been eating really well and I've been eating really healthily. I feel a little bit sharper. I feel a little bit better in myself. But I think what's new is that we've added that scientific method to interrogate this intuition, this feeling to determine whether
Well, is that actually true? And if it's true, what's going on? Why is that true?
How does diet influence mental health?
And how true is it? You know, is it a small effect? Is it a large effect? These are all the things that have been happening in the field of nutritional psychiatry probably within the last 10 odd years.
I want to talk about... How does diet impact our mental health? What are the mechanisms and what do we know so far and what are you most curious about?
I guess there's sort of three layers or three sort of converging pathways as I sort of see it. The first one is the biological mechanisms related to diet and mental health. And so by that, I mean, diet has substantial literature showing that various components of the diet, things like omega-3 fatty acids, polyphenols, dietary fiber, various nutrients, vitamins, minerals, all have a role in reducing inflammation, improving our antioxidant defenses, interacting with our gut microbiome. All these sorts of various pathways that we're now understanding is also linked to our mental health. But then in addition to that, I think two other areas that perhaps don't receive as much attention is the effect of diet on metabolic health.
So we know that areas like insulin resistance, obesity, cardiovascular disease, all the rest are highly comorbid in people with mental disorders.
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