Does Your Diet Really Make A Difference?
Today’s topic is a broad one that I will pare down – diet.
Changing one’s diet or eating in a certain way can affect your mood. One of my favorite studies is the SMILES trial done by Felice N. Jacka at the Institute for Nutrition and Psychiatry Research. What they did is show that over 12 weeks, people who followed a general health diet (this was based on Mediterranean diet principles) had as good of a response in treating depression as those on Zoloft and other selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs).
Small Diet Changes = Big Results
This isn’t a big intervention. Sometimes functional medicine brings really huge dietary changes and leverages the power of food as medicine in really monumental ways. This one is relatively simple:
- Limiting or eliminating processed foods
- Increasing healthy, wild-caught fish
- Using quality olive oil
- Increasing leafy green vegetables
- Eating mostly plants
The results of this study were groundbreaking: more people felt better with these simple dietary changes compared with the group taking an SSRI.
The Support You Need
There are a lot of changes we can make, and a lot of times dietary changes can feel overwhelming. It’s easy to get into habits and ruts when we’re busy and changes to diet often need support. We started Insight Integrative Health to identify which changes may be helpful for you and provide the support you need in order to make them.
Schedule your free consultation here.
