Does the food we eat improve our mental health?
5/6/202642 min
We know that the food we eat affects us physically, but how might our diets help or hinder mental health? Dr Wolfgang Marx tells Alisha Wainwright about his work to find a link between mental health and diet. We also hear from Dr Iain Campbell, who found that a famous diet helped his own bipolar symptoms, inspiring him to work on a new large-scale trial. And Dr Sheri Johnson explains why we should explore not just what we eat, but when.
Mentioned in this episode and further reading:
- Food and mood centre, a multi-disciplinary research centre that aims to understand the complex ways in which what we eat influences our brain, mood, and mental health, Deakin University (https://foodandmoodcentre.com.au/)
- Time-restricted eating as an adjunctive intervention for bipolar disorder – Wellcome funding award (https://wellcome.org/research-funding/funding-portfolio/funded-grants/time-restricted-eating-adjunctive-intervention)
- Personal keto journey leads to career in research: Iain Campbell's story (https://www.metabolicmind.org/thinksmart/explore-strategies/iain-campbell/)
Clips
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsWolfgang Marx· Guest0:00
Diet is really an interesting example of, you know, the mind-body connection. It's, you know, i- if we can improve the health of our body, it's also improving the health of our mental wellbeing and our, our brain health.
Alisha Wainwright· Host0:11
[upbeat music] 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