The INFINITE Study found that a person's dietary pattern can significantly impact their mental health. The research discovered that making changes to diet helped to improve mental health.
MARK TRAVERS: Recent trends in research have alluded to the possibility that our diets and our psyches are far more connected than we once believed.
Adam Sud, the lead researcher of The INFINITE Study, has dedicated his career to understanding the relationship between nutrition and mental health. The study, which found that a person’s dietary pattern can significantly impact their mental health, was born out of Sud’s own struggles with addiction and mental health issues. He discovered that making changes to his diet helped improve his mental health, and he now hopes to help others do the same…
The INFINITE Study was the first controlled trial to investigate the impact of nutrition and nutrition education on early addiction recovery outcomes within a treatment center setting. Standard treatment for substance use disorders rarely incorporates a dietary intervention.
The purpose of this research was to explore how nutrition influences early recovery outcomes. Participants self-selected into the 10-week treatment (whole food, plant-based diet) or control group (standard treatment center diet). Both received weekly nutrition education lessons to complement the diet.
“We found that at 10 weeks, the treatment group experienced statistically significant increases in resilience and self-esteem compared to the control group. This is valuable as these two variables are powerful factors in recovery and the findings may make a plant-based diet advantageous in recovery,” Sud explained.
Given that the treatment group of the study, who were all required to follow a whole food, plant-based diet, did not report negative outcomes for even a single variable, Sud and his team hope that more effort will be put into understanding when and how diet-based treatment programs can have beneficial effects on the recovery process of those with substance use disorders…
Sud points out that other studies that actually did consider which came first (diet or depression) found that a decline in mental health typically occurs before adopting a vegetarian diet. And, when vegans, vegetarians, and semi-vegetarians are separately analyzed in meta-analyses, vegans and vegetarian diets don’t appear to be significantly associated with depression. SOURCE…
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