Food And Mood: A Dietary Approach to Treating Depression

Abstract

Providing dietary advice that targets specific health outcomes can be a daunting task given the plethora of often-conflicting advice available in the mainstream and even medical literature. As a psychiatrist, I am specifically interested in how dietary interventions might target mood, particularly depression, a leading cause of disability worldwide. Presented herein is the available research targeting depression with dietary interventions. I will provide a brief introduction on what led me toward an interest in diet and nutrition, discuss the evidence base demonstrating improvements in depression with specific dietary interventions, and provide a discussion on the subset of patients suffering from a type of depression that appears to be in large part a systemic inflammatory condition and the dietary implications for treatment in this group.