Course: Food and Mood: Improving Mental Health Through Diet and Nutrition

Congratulations on completing Food and Mood. We hope you enjoyed learning about how the foods we eat affect our mental and brain health, the mechanisms of action between our gut …

There are a number of factors that support successful dietary behaviour change to incorporate the ModiMed diet. In our final week, we unpacked the randomised controlled trial (the SMILES trial) …

There a many ways to seek and plan for opportunities to make small but effective changes to diet behaviour. Let’s summarise a few practical steps for optimising diet for better …

Changing behaviours requires motivation and readiness. To change a dietary behaviour, whether it’s your own or someone else’s, everyone needs to be willing, able and ready. When determining readiness to …

An individual approach helps to create a dietary strategy that’s realistic and manageable. When it comes to optimising dietary intake and improving dietary behaviours, it’s important to have positive realistic …

The ModiMedDiet focused on positive change The dietary group of the SMILES trial received seven individual sessions with an accredited dietitian. (You can find supporting resources in the supplementary materials …

It’s a common belief that healthy diets are more expensive. The perceived high cost is one of the most common barriers to healthy eating. Unfortunately, food marketing encourages this perception …

With so much information available, it’s important to evaluate your choices. In Week 1 we discussed how human eating behaviours are influenced by many biological, personal, environmental, economic and social …

The ModiMed Diet was based on a high consumption of vegetables, wholegrain and fruits. As discussed in the previous step, the ModiMed diet recommendations were based on consumption of 12 …

The SMILES trial was the first study in the world to demonstrate that making dietary changes can be effective in improving the mental health of individuals with clinically diagnosed depression. …

The SMILES trial used the ModiMed diet, based on the traditional Mediterranean diet. The traditional Mediterranean diet is one of the most researched dietary styles, consistently demonstrating numerous health benefits, …

Recent studies show that changing dietary behaviour and improving diet quality can also improve mental health outcomes. A recent review examined the impact of dietary change on depression and anxiety …

Current research shows that some nutraceutical and dietary supplements could help manage mental health. Nutraceuticals are usually defined as foods or food components with the functional capacity to prevent or …

The gut microbiota is influenced by a range of physical and environmental factors. As we discussed in the Step 2.8 previously, our gut microbiota is highly individualised in its composition …

Welcome back to Week 3 of Food and Mood. In Week 1, we covered the foundation concepts of food and mood. We then built on this knowledge in Week 2 …