HEALTHLINE – It’s well-established that diet plays a fundamental role in health and well-being.
But as time goes on, we’re learning more about diet’s important role in social, emotional, and mental health specifically.
Keep reading to learn more about the relationship between diet and mental health, specific dietary patterns that may improve mental health, and steps you can take to support a healthy mental state.
Historically, mental health conditions have been treated with psychiatric therapies like counseling, medication, and sometimes hospitalization.
Today, an emerging field called nutritional psychiatry emphasizes how diet and nutrition affect the way people feel mentally. It aims to support the treatment of mental health conditions with diet and lifestyle changes.
Your food choices may affect your brain through the gastrointestinal system — commonly referred to as “the gut” — because it’s closely connected to the brain.
The gut is home to trillions of living microbes that have many functions in the body, such as synthesizing neurotransmitters that send chemical messages to the brain to regulate sleep, pain, appetite, mood, and emotion.
In fact, there’s such an intricate network of interactions between the two that the gut has been nicknamed the “second brainTrusted Source.” Formally, the relationship between the two is called the gut-brain connection or gut-brain axis.
Some research suggests that the foods we eat influence the health of gut microbe colonies, which subsequently influence our brains and, thus, our mental and emotional health …
