As I write this less than 72 hours before my first trip to the Mediterranean, I thought, “What can I write about?” “How can I connect my time in Greece to mental health?”
Ancient Greece came to mind and how people living during those times viewed and managed their mental health.
I also considered writing about the power that nature can have on the mind. I mean, how could it not? (See below.)
I’ll save those for another time. For this trip, I decided to write about the Mediterranean diet and depression.
What’s the Mediterranean Diet?
What’s the Mediterranean diet? The Mediterranean diet comes from countries’ cuisines along the Mediterranean sea, including Greece, Turkey, and Italy. The Mediterranean diet, which gained popularity in the 1990s, includes staples like fruits and vegetables, whole grains, seafood, nuts and legumes, and olive oil (a BIG emphasis on olive oil).
What to Know About the Mediterranean Diet and Depression
I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again: Until recently, I NEVER considered more off-the-beaten-path methods to treat my OCD, anxiety, and depression.
For more than a decade, it was an evolving door of medication, doctors—all kinds of them—and relatively little progress.
It wasn’t until I started doing exposure response therapy (ERP) that I started to feel better. I’d still consider that pretty mainstream, though.
As I started down to try to understand different and more natural ways I could use to manage my mental health, I came across controlled breathing, adaptogens, ikigai, mushroom coffee, and a lot more.
However, what really stuck out to me was the impact that diet can have on our brains. More specifically, I was surprised to see how powerful the Mediterranean diet seemed.
So, I started reading. Here’s what I found:
According to a study published in 2019 by Molecular Psychiatry, a diet low in saturated fat, sugar, and processed foods can reduce the risk of depression by 24% over a 12-year period. These are all characteristics of the Mediterranean diet.
Additionally, four longitudinal studies, i.e., researchers examining the same people to look for any changes over a period of time, found that a lower inflammatory index was associated with lower depression.
I’ll admit. I had no idea what that meant, so I kept reading.
Some of the food we eat causes inflammation in our bodies, affecting our brains—parts of the brain that impact how happy or sad we feel.
How is this connected to the Mediterranean diet? Because some studies point to the fact that staples of the Mediterranean diet may not cause this brain-altering inflammation.
Here’s proof:
One study found that reduced depression was connected with an increase when sticking to the Mediterranean diet and consuming more nuts and vegetables.
Additionally, mental health improved when eating more vegetables and legumes consumption. Other studies have found that increasing the amount of omega-3 fatty acid we eat while decreasing the amount of omega-6 fatty acid could improve mental health.
TL;DR: People who ate more nuts, vegetables, legumes, and omega-3 felt better.
Pretty cool, right?
I think so.
Here’s one more study to support the idea that there’s a real link between the Mediterranean diet and depression:
The study looked at the impact of a dietary program based on the Mediterranean diet to treat symptoms related to major depressive episodes (aka clinical depression).
What did it find? The group who ate the Mediterranean diet showed significantly greater improvements on Montgomery–Åsberg Depression Rating Scale (MADRS) than the social support control group. (For reference, MADRS is a test that “rates” the severity of someone’s depression.)
TL;DR: People who ate the Mediterranean diet felt better.
Again, pretty neat, right?
Obviously, there’s quite a bit more work and research to do before the scientific community can definitively say that a Mediterranean diet can improve depression.
That said, based on all the proof we have about the impact diet can have on other diseases and conditions—namely, cancer—it’s not hard to imagine a future study that supplies all the proof in the world that the Mediterranean diet can improve depression and other mental illnesses.