Pivotal ongoing research from Deakin University’s Food and Mood Centre is showing a clear link between diet and mental health, particularly medical disorders such as anxiety and depression.

Centre director Distinguished Professor Felice Jacka OAM was recognised in June with the 2026 L’Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science International Awards as Laureate for Asia and the Pacific, acknowledging decades of ground-breaking research into the link between diet quality and common mental health conditions, and establishing the emerging field of nutritional psychiatry. 

Professor Jacka’s work has conclusively found that what people eat is not only a risk factor for heart disease or diabetes, but is also a powerful and modifiable determinant of depression, anxiety and brain health that is now influencing clinical psychiatry guidelines. 

She said the centre has run two large studies recently showing that nutrition and exercise guided by dieticians and exercise physiologists was as effective as psychological support.

“Simply speaking, diet and exercise support was as effective as psychotherapy delivered by clinical psychologists in alleviating depression,” she said.

“It’s not that you say, `Okay, well eat a salad rather than having antidepressants’.”

“It’s very much about getting the foundations right because everything else will work better once you do that.”

“Adrienne O’Neil in our team led the very important CALM trial, which was published in one of the Lancet journals a couple of years ago. More recently, we have the large Australia-wide HARMON-E trial, which is submitted and under review at the BMJ as we speak, that looked at how diet and exercise compare to cognitive behavioural therapy delivered by clinical psychologists, doing it in the way that it’s called a non-inferiority trial.”

“It’s not trying to determine whether diet and exercise support delivered by allied health professionals is better than CBT delivered by clinical psychologists — but rather, we know with our mental health workforce limitations in Australia and in many Western settings that we don’t have enough clinicians, we don’t have enough psychologists, psychiatrists, and many people are on long waiting lists.”

“While they’re waiting, is a GP going to be doing their patient any less than a favour by suggesting that they go and see a dietitian and/or exercise physiologist?”

“What we showed was that they were equivalent in helping to alleviate depressive symptoms.”

Nutritional psychiatry training for GPs

Professor Jacka has worked with the Royal College of General Practitioners and the Royal Australian New Zealand College of Psychiatrists to develop accredited training in nutritional psychiatry to help fill gaps in GP knowledge.

“It’s really set up to address the fact that we know from global surveys that less than 1% of health professionals such as psychiatrists, psychologists, doctors, feel that they are well qualified in nutrition,” she said.

“We know that common mental disorders — depression and anxiety — are the primary reason that people present to GP clinics in the main, even if the presentation is apparently for something else, generally there’s a common mental disorder sitting behind it.”

“And yet it’s very, very rarely prioritised or put into practice, even though it’s in the clinical guidelines. 

“This is simply because practitioners don’t have the knowledge at their fingertips. So what our training does is it supports practitioners to be able to actually put those guidelines into practice.”

Food systems need to change

Professor Jacka is lobbying for radical changes to the global food system, explaining that the dominance of the industrial food and agricultural industries has created a food system that promotes physical and mental ill health, premature death and biodiversity loss.

“We’re working on global policy. We’re working with the global burden of disease study to get the diet-depression pairing into the global burden of disease, which will allow any area jurisdiction to be able to calculate the amount of the burden that’s related to common mental disorders, and how much of that can be alleviated if you improve diet at the population level,” she said.

“Half of all mental disorders start before the age of 14, and so many of the risk factors are things that are not readily modifiable. Your genetics and early life trauma and poverty and life stress, these are all risk factors for mental disorders that are difficult to change.”

“The fact that diet is modifiable and affects a hundred percent of the population makes it a very important target for prevention because in young people we know in Australia and similar in the UK and the US, they’re eating on average seven serves of junk food a day. Because of the way our environments have changed, young people’s diets are really appalling, and it’s not just kids from deprived backgrounds, this is everywhere.”

“It’s all tied together. The loss of biodiversity in soil and air and above the ground due to industrial farming is linked to the loss of microbial biodiversity in humans, which is linked to chronic disease, both physical and mental.”

Simple food choices can make a huge difference

Professor Jacka said the overall message about what to eat to stay mentally as well as physically fit is simple, and fermented foods such as yoghurt, kefir, kombucha, sauerkraut, kimchi, miso and tempeh are key.

“What we actually need to eat to optimise all of those things is very simple, which is diets that are heavy in plants,” she said.

“A diversity in plants, avoiding industrial foods, and I would say also including some fermented foods. That’s something that we’re looking at in great detail.”

“Fermented foods, which are part of traditional diets all over the world, they’re very easy to make, and they seem to be very important for health, but we need to do more research there.”

“That would be my recommendation. You don’t have to be a vegan, you don’t have to have any sort of particular fancy organic diet. A diet that’s good for your heart is good for your brain, it can be very simple.”

The Nutritional Psychiatrist said she was incredibly honoured for the acknowledgement of the research body of work, as the UNESCO Award gives her the opportunity to share their findings with the wider international community.

“It gives me more of a platform, which is really useful to me because at heart I would say I’m probably as much an activist as I am a scientist,” Professor Jacka said.

“Our free online course on food and mood, which we developed in 2019, has thus far enrolled over 95,000 students from every country in the world.”

“Science is a mechanism for generating evidence to improve the world. I mean, that’s the point. You’re doing it to help people and to make the world a better place.”

Nance Haxton was a journalist at the ABC for nearly 20 years. She’s also worked as an Advocate at the Disability Royal Commission helping people with disabilities tell their stories and as a senior reporter for the National Indigenous Radio Service. 

In that time she’s won a range of Australian and international honours, including two Walkley Awards, and three New York Festivals Radio Awards trophies.

Now freelancing as The Wandering Journo, Nance is independently producing podcasts including her personal audio slice of Australia “Streets of Your Town”.