Nazmi Demir

The Link Between Healthy Eating and Mental Health

The impact of diet on mental health A Healthy Food Epidemiological studies have shown that diet impacts mental health, and intervention studies confirm this relationship (17). The challenge for “nutritional psychiatry” is to produce comprehensive, consistent, and scientifically rigorous evidence-based studies that define the role of diet and nutrients in different aspects of mental health (67–70). Overall, few randomized trials investigate the effectiveness of dietary change in mental health treatment. One intervention study to date involved a 12-week Mediterranean diet. This study reported significant improvements in mood and reduced anxiety in adults with major depression (71) More recent RCTs – HELFIMED (72) and PREDI_DEP (73) have confirmed the benefits of a Mediterranean-style diet for mental health in depression. In contrast to these studies, in the MooDFOOD RCT, multiple nutrient supplementation did not reduce episodes of major depression in overweight or obese adults with subsyndromal depressive symptoms. This study found that multi-nutrient supplements containing omega-3 PUFAs, vitamin D, folic acid, and selenium neither reduced depressive symptoms, anxiety symptoms nor improved health utility indices (74). Similar results regarding the lack of effect on mental state improvement were obtained in a review of the literature in the context of vitamin D (75). For omega-3 PACs, one RCT including people with mild to moderate depression found no beneficial effect of omega-3 PACs on depressive symptoms (76). No effect of folic acid supplementation in combination with vitamin B 6 and B 12 on the onset of depression was found in older men (77) and older women (78). Furthermore, Rayman et al. (79) found no effect of selenium supplementation on mood in older people. Overall, the studies available to date, do not support the use of nutritional supplementation to prevent depression[1].