What are healthy approaches to dieting?

Take our Healthy Lifestyle Test

Find a health professional

What we eat shapes our mood, brain health, and mental health.

Mediterranean-style eating provides remission rates equal to antidepressant medications.

Gut microbes and psychobiotics influence brain chemistry, including serotonin and GABA.

Most medical schools do not provide adequate nutrition training, and patients suffer as a result.

Psychiatrists are trained to prescribe medicines, refer patients to psychotherapists, and perform procedures — such as ECT, TMS, or IV ketamine. But this is changing. Some psychiatrists are learning to utilize an equally valuable and effective strategy for relieving suffering and promoting mental health.

The idea that diet and nutrition have significant effects on mood and mental wellbeing would have been dismissed as fringe medicine two decades ago. But research increasingly demonstrates that healthy nutrition improves mental health, and an entirely new subspecialty has formed to support this.

Nutritional Psychiatry

Nutritional psychiatry — which is the study of how dietary patterns, nutrients, and gut-brain interactions influence our mental health — is expanding rapidly. Research in nutritional psychiatry grew 15-fold from 2000 to 2024, which reflects the growing interest in this topic. Over 31,000 articles were published during this period. This is also evidence of the increasing acceptance of the role diet plays in our mental health.

Epidemiological evidence, particularly for depression, suggests there’s an association between the quality of our diet and our mental health. These associations don’t appear to be explained by other demographic or lifestyle factors.

Perhaps the most important single study in this field is the 2017 SMILES trial. It was the first randomized controlled trial designed to evaluate a dietary intervention for reducing depression in adults with clinical depression.

The SMILES trial was a 12-week, single-blind, randomized........

© Psychology Today