By May 2024, Ebony Dupas knew she had a problem. She had started to feel a mild anxiety about her sense of direction and purpose in life earlier that year, but within a couple months, that had spiraled into a paranoia that she could neither shake nor explain.

Referred by her doctor, Dupas began consulting with different psychiatrists, all of whom considered diagnosing her with generalized anxiety disorder, bipolar disorder, or schizophrenia. Most wanted to put her on medication right away. But one psychiatrist first ordered bloodwork to see if something else might be going on. “I was mostly depleted of magnesium,” Dupas says.

Most people being treated for mental health conditions such as anxiety or depression typically use a mix of just two strategies: medication (usually an SSRI) and psychotherapy. But there’s increasing interest in the connection between food and the brain, and especially how nutrition could affect psychiatric conditions. Researchers have not only found a connection between the gut microbiome and mental health, but also connections between deficiencies in certain micronutrients, including magnesium or choline, and conditions like anxiety and depression.

What’s less clear is how supplementation could alleviate certain symptoms. We don’t have robust clinical trial data showing how micronutrients affect people’s mental health, and the role of supplements in mental health is understudied, particularly because the research can be so challenging. Most supplements also don’t require approval by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to go to market, meaning there’s an abundance of different options, most of which have different formulas that aren’t robustly studied.

While researchers have long understood that nutrition is important for brain health, people don’t typically look to their diets as a way to improve their mental health, and doctors don’t always think to connect mental health with diet. The link between food and the brain “is overlooked by most people,” says Uma Naidoo, director of nutritional and lifestyle psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital and author of the 2023 book Calm Your Mind With Food. Future research to clarify the link between........

© Vox