FUELLING EMOTION
GEELONG researchers are leading groundbreaking investigations that could help tackle two of society’s greatest challenges — mental health and obesity.
The team at Deakin University’s Food and Mood Centre is increasingly being turned to by their international peers as the lead in the field of nutritional psychiatry.
The centre, headed up by Professor Felice Jacka, was born from a website of a similar concept she created as an evidence-based resource for the general public.
Established at the end of 2016, the Ryrie St research centre — located at the rear of Kitchener House — grew from three staff to 20 in just 12 months.
AFLW star and former Vixens netballer Dr Erin Hoare is a postdoctoral researcher at the centre, which is almost exclusively led by women — a unique composition in the field of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM).
And there’s appetite for their work.
Earlier this year Dr Hoare went to Europe to spread the word of their findings at various research centres including the University of Cambridge.
Until now, the majority of the research conducted around food and mood internationally has centred on animal studies but, thanks to community participation, the groundbreaking Geelong unit is collecting data from humans.
The team is currently undertaking a comprehensive program of research comprising about 20 studies that investigate how nutrition interacts with depression and psychosis. The aim is to establish how diet can be best used to prevent and treat mental health disorders.
The work has attracted international attention from industry peers and media alike, prompting coverage in prominent US publications The Wall St Journal and The Atlantic.
But the Geelong region has quietly been carving its name into the international narrative around nutrition and mental health for several years. Prof Jacka’s PhD, published in 2010, looked at data from more than 1000 women in the world-recognised Geelong Osteoporosis Study, which commenced in the early 1990s.
She conducted detailed psychiatric interview assessments — while also looking at factors such as education, income and body weight — to conclude that women who had healthier diets were less likely to have depression or anxiety.
“The results were published on the front page of the American Journal of Psychiatry, so that was really helpful in moving the field forward … It was big news at the time,” Prof Jacka said.
Further investigation revealed a relationship between the food consumed by pregnant women, and their child’s health and behaviour in the early years of life.
“We looked at data from 23,000 Norwegian women … and found if (mothers) were having more junk and processed foods, the children had more anger and tantrums and aggressive behaviours,” Prof Jacka said.
The food children consumed in their formative years, subsequent studies have found, is equally important.
Those having too much junk and processed foods, or not enough nutrient-dense foods, experienced worry, sadness and nightmares — all markers of vulnerability for mental health problems later in life.
The work of Deakin’s Food and Mood Centre is being undertaken with an important big picture in mind.
They might be acting locally, but they’re thinking globally — motivated by the knowledge that unhealthy diet remains the leading cause of early death in middle- and high-income countries, and mental health disorders account for the leading global burden of disability.
In 2011, the World Health Organisation held an emergency meeting in New York and declared that by 2030 the obesity crisis was going to cost the global community more than $30 trillion — a burden no economy can afford to bear.
“Overweight” now kills more people than “underweight” across the world, with even developing countries experiencing a rapid increase in the incidence and prevalence of obesity and all the diseases that go with it.
“It is the largest public emergency, health-wise, that we have faced but because it’s happened very slowly, the obesity epidemic. No one has done anything about it,” Prof Jacka said. “We have to tackle the food environment and big business to get changes and this can only be done by governments, they’re the only ones with the power.”
Despite being told for decades to avoid processed foods and eat fresh produce to support function — public health messages to date have, on the whole, failed to get through.
“We’re still in a situation where less than 5 per cent of Australian adults and less than half a per cent of Australian children are getting their recommended intake of vegetables and legumes,” Prof Jacka said.
It’s believed messages around the risk of obesity, heart disease and cancer have failed to shift people’s behaviour because they are only potential, future consequences.
But the publication of Geelong’s food and mood findings, Prof Jacka said, could hold the key.
“If you let people know that food is relevant for their ability to learn and remember tomorrow, and their ability to feel happy and well tomorrow … we hope that this will have more of an impact on their behaviour,” she said.
It’s hoped the findings of research conducted at the centre will inform public policy and help reshape the currently “toxic” food environment.
The team has already been asked for policy recommendations by the Victorian Opposition mental health spokeswoman, but Prof Jacka — founder and president of the International Society for Nutritional Psychiatry Research — would like to present the document to both parties for consideration before the election.
“The influence of the food environment is such that it’s very difficult for people to avoid triggers to eat these foods. They’re very addictive, they interact with the reward system in the brain,” she said.
“It’s like have a crack den on every corner and expecting cocaine addicts to not go there.”
The team’s key recommendations will include calls for: A TAX on sugar-sweetened beverages, the primary source of sugar in the Australian diet; A MEDICARE ITEM for dietitians so that people with mental illnesses can access a dietitian in the same way that they can access a psychologist; THE INCLUSION of dietitians in all mental health care teams.; A REVISION of the food environment in hospitals and community-based settings; and THE TRAINING of more dietitians. The current rate is estimated at just one dietitian for every 10,000 Australians.
The key to meaningful and lasting change, Prof Jacka insists, is targeting the next generation and creating healthy habits early.
“We have to make sure that all schools are setting the right tone, giving the right indicators about what’s normal. You shouldn’t be able to buy soft drinks and sweets and party pies and pizzas in schools,” she said.
“If you think about food as petrol, you wouldn’t put dirty, sandy, watered-down petrol into a Porsche and expect it to work well. So why do we think that it’s OK to give children Coca Cola, chips and a donut for lunch?
“We need every school to have access to a kitchen garden and a cooking program that allows them to grow and prepare their food and enjoy it.”
It’s hoped effective nutrition treatments discovered in the Geelong studies will form part of the coordinated treatment of mental disorders, half of which start before the age of 14.
“Many of the risk factors for mental disorders are not readily amenable to treatment or intervention. Things like family history and genetics, early life trauma, social disadvantage — these are all difficult things to change. But we saw very clear relationships between the quality of young people’s diets and their risk or the presence of depressive symptoms,” Prof Jacka said.
A detailed economic evaluation of the centre’s Smiles trial — which showed you could treat depression using a dietary approach — also found it to be highly cost-effective.
“People who got the dietary support compared with the social support … cost $3000 less,” Prof Jacka said.
The internationally recognised centre has grand plans for its expanding operations, with hopes of securing funding in the next five years for a stand-alone Food and Mood Centre in central Geelong.
The planned centre of excellence for nutritional psychiatry research would have clinical spaces to see patients, spaces to train clinicians, commercial kitchens to run cooking workshops for individuals, schools and businesses, along with laboratories and office space.
“That’s what we’re hoping for. We need donations from the public to achieve that dream but that’s the aim over the next five years,” Prof Jacka said. For more information, or to participate in a trial, visit foodandmoodcentre.com.au