Nutritional psychiatry: Towards improving mental health by what you eat

Abstract:

Highlights

• Epidemiological data highlight the association between nutrition and mental health but do not provide information about causality or underlying mechanism.

• Emerging findings from intervention studies suggest that diet (often combined with lifestyle) modification has potential in the prevention and treatment of mental health and may modify drug treatment effects.

• Dietary intervention studies are informative but often limited methodologically due to: heterogeneity in population characteristics, lack of biomarkers to adequately stratify within and across populations, small sample sizes, lack of blinding of participants to treatment allocation and/or lack of blinded observers.

• Progress will require mechanistic insight into the impact of different diets and dietary components at various levels: metabolic and cellular processes, neural circuits, core cognitive and emotional processes, whole organism and disease (models).

• Genetic background can be used to strengthen hypotheses on the effects of specific nutrients on mental disorders, which can subsequently be tested in randomized controlled trials.

• High quality and adequately powered experimental medicine studies will enable the identification of interventions that have a higher probability of succeeding when tested in large randomized controlled trials.

• Sensitivity to mental health issues vary across the lifespan and between individuals and is influenced by genetic background, cultural setting and the environment. Nutritional needs also differ across the lifespan. To provide dietary recommendations for improving mental health, a major challenge is to advance knowledge from population-based observations towards personalized nutrition.