Conclusion
depression
CHRONIC DISEASES
In conclusion, a short term psychobiotic dietary intervention improved perceived stress in a healthy population, while eliciting specific metabolic changes in the gut microbiota. However, results should be interpreted with caution as, although improvements in stress responses were only observed within the intervention group, there were no significant differences between groups after the intervention. Nevertheless, given the fundamental influence of stress on the risk for developing other chronic diseases such as depression, these findings hold promise as potential therapeutic and preventative approaches. Thereby, using dietary and lifestyle approaches to address mental health concerns will become increasingly important and could become reflected in future dietary guidelines. Although our study provides one of the first data in the interaction between diet, microbiota and mental health, the subtle changes observed in biological outcomes and limited sample size highlights the necessity for future larger and longer duration studies to confirm the stress-alleviating effect of the psychobiotic diet. Additionally, aspects of other diets known to benefit mental health such as the MIND Diet, ketogenic diet or intermittent fasting need to be considered. Lastly, underlying microbial influences need to be investigated and future pre-clinical experiments are required to explore causality and decipher mechanistic pathways.