Fermented Food Linked to Better Mental Health

Sharon Moore January 29, 2015

Numerous studies suggest that our gut health is linked to our mental health. Now, new research suggests that fermented food partly explains the link between traditional dietary practices and positive mental health.

For the study, a team of researchers from Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, looked at the influence of fermented food and beverages. They examined the history and application of fermentation “as a means to provide palatability, nutritional value, preservative, and medicinal properties.” This is an ancient practice that continues to the present day, they state.

In recent years, researchers have discovered many ways in which consuming fermented products affects our intestinal microbiota. For example, fermentation-enriched bioactive peptides, derived from whey milk protein, may have anti-inflammatory effects and reduce high blood pressure. They argued that fermented food partly explains the link between traditional dietary practices and positive mental health.

The link could manifest itself directly through gut-to-brain communication, they say, or indirectly through beneficial bodily changes such as improved glycaemic control antioxidant and anti-inflammatory activity, or reduction of intestinal permeability.

According to the researchers, a further mechanism of action may be the influence of fermented food on endotoxins called lipopolysaccharide (LPS), which are microbes found to be particularly important in depression. Lab tests on rodents and human volunteers show that even small increases in LPS levels can trigger depressive symptoms.

However, the authors caution that not all forms of fermented foods are helpful. For example, some pickled vegetables can grow fungi that increase the production of N-nitroso compounds, which have possible cancer-causing properties.

The treatment of mental health issues is currently taking place in a food environment that includes many foods at odds with our evolutionary past, such as grains and high levels of sugar. These foods “are not only undermining optimal nutritional status, they have untold effects on the microbiome and ultimately the brain,” warn the experts.

They conclude that further research should “continue to illuminate the ways in which the clay fermentation pots of our ancestors might be connected to the emerging discipline of nutritional psychiatry.”

Source of this article: Fermented Food Linked to Mental Health