Is there an antidepressant diet? How can you can eat to lower the risk for depression by one-third, and improve cognition similarly?
The antidepressant diet comes from Felice Jacka, MD, director of the Food and Mood Center of the International Society for Nutritional Psychiatry Research.
Dr. Jacka notes that a healthy diet fights inflammation, a cause and consequence of depression, according to the Carlat psychiatry report. A diet rich in nutrients that the brain needs, like magnesium, folate, and B vitamins.
Healthy foods also improve brain plasticity, or the ability to change your brain. “Brain-derived neuroprotective factor (BDNF) levels rise with a healthy diet, an effect that we also see with antidepressants and aerobic exercise. Diet has well-documented effects on the hippocampus, which is involved in memory and depression. High-fat and high-sugar diets can impair hippocampal-dependent memory in as little as 5 days. The hippocampus shrinks with age, but according to our human study, as much as 60% of that atrophy may be related to the quality of one’s diet,” she notes in the Carlat Report.
So what is a healthy diet that may help depression? I’ll write on that in a future blog.
Kenneth S. Arfa, MD 