Brain Changer

How diet can save your mental health – cutting-edge science from an expert

FAB Comment:

The author of this book - Professor Felice Jacka - is one of the world's leading experts on the links between diet and mental health, and founder of the International Society for Nutrition in Psychiatry Research.

Her pioneering 'SMILES' trial was the first randomised controlled trial to show significant benefits for mood and wellbeing in adults with depression from an intervention that involved helping them to change their diets, rather than the use of nutritional supplements. See:

• Nutritional upgrade: Changes to diet may address depression: Study
• Jacka et al 2017 - A randomised controlled trial of dietary improvement for adults with major depression

Since then, further studies have confirmed that dietary changes can indeed improve mood and mental wellbeing, and that this applies in people with or without clinical-level depression, anxiety or other mental health diagnoses. See:

• Healthy diet can ease symptoms of depression
• Firth et al 2019 - The effects of dietary improvement on symptoms of depression and anxiety

In this highly accessible book, Felice Jacka explains why 'dietary and lifestyle' approaches to improve nutrition and general health need to become more widely adopted by both psychiatry and general medicine. 

Abundant evidence now links modern, western-type diets - rich in 'ultra-processed' foods - with mental as well as physical ill-health.

Importantly, she also provides the general reader with evidence-based information they can use to help themselves and those they care for to make positive changes to their own diet and lifestyle. 

While firmly grounded in the latest science - which shows poweful links between the gut, brain and immune system - the book is illustrated with personal stories that show how some relatively simple (and low cost) changes to diet and lifestyle can improve mood, behaviour, sleep and general wellbeing. 

For anyone interested in finding out more about the links between food and mood - from a personal or professional perspective - should find this book both inspiring and informative.

"This is a fascinating book by a leading researcher, covering one of the most exciting areas of modern nutritional research about how our diet can impact our gut and brain health. The combination of personal stories and cutting-edge science is a real winner."
- Dr Michael Mosley, author and TV presenter

A combination of Professor Felice Jacka's love of food and her own experience of depression and anxiety as a young woman led her to question whether what we put in our mouths everyday affects more than our waistline.

Felice set out on a journey of discovery to change the status quo and uncover the truth through rigorous science. Beginning her PhD in 2005, she examined the association between women's diets and their mental health, focusing on depression and anxiety.

She soon discovered - you feel how you eat. It is Professor Jacka's ground-breaking research that has now changed the way we think about mental and brain health in relation to diet.

Brain Changer explains how and why we should consider our food as the basis of our mental and brain health throughout our lives.

It includes a selection of recipes and meal plans featuring ingredients beneficial to mental health. It also includes the simple, practical solutions we can use to help prevent mental health problems in the first place and offers strategies for treating these problems if they do arise.

This is not a diet book to help you on the weight scales. This is a guide to good habits to save your brain and to optimise your mental health through what you eat at every stage of life.