Felice Jacka

And so, uh, I'm one of a growing number of psychiatrists that believes that the deterioration in the quality of our modern diet is largely responsible for the deterioration in our mental health.

Um, and that belief underlies a, a relatively new branch of psychiatry in about the past 10 years or so called nutritional psychiatry, and that term was coined by Professor Felice Jacka, a very well-known researcher in the field, and she's a, she's a research psychologist at the University of Deakin in Sydney, Australia.

Has done a lot of groundbreaking work in this field.

And, uh, so what is this...

It has outperformed the standard American diet repeatedly for multiple, uh, different, uh, uh, physical health conditions, and it also outperforms in several clinical trials of depression.

It outperforms the standard American diet for depression as well.

And this, uh, uh, is the best known of the, of the, uh, clinical trials of Mediterranean diet for depression conducted by, uh, Professor Felice Jacka and colleagues, found that using this MADRS scale, which is one of the depression scales, uh, the people with depression improved by on average about ten points, and that's really good.

That's really important and, and, uh, uh, groundbreaking really, this study in twenty seventeen.

And then different signals that are involved of our serotonin production, the happy hormone, that are also, um, attributed to you by our gut bugs can perform better and do their job.

I honestly think the, the first trial that we had, I think it was in around lockdown time with Professor Jacka, Felice Jacka, and she did the SMILES trials.

And we talk about it a lot in nutrition research because she showed that there were links between the Mediterranean diet and reduced rates of, um, depression, and depression being more effective than clinical therapy and interventions for depression.

So there, there is a link between how we live, how ill we are, how poorly we are, and our mental health.