How Diet Influences Anxiety

Welcome to the Brain Food blog for Medscape Psychiatry. I am Dr Drew Ramsey, assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Columbia University in New York City.

Last month, we reviewed the literature on how diet and nutrition can be used to augment our current treatments for depression. Today, I want to discuss how nutritional psychiatry—the use of nutrition and food—influences anxiety disorders.

Anxiety disorders are the most commonly diagnosed mental health disorder. Of note, we do not have the same robust set of data that we have with depression. There are no randomized controlled trials that look at the effects of foods, nutrition, or specific nutritional supplements on anxiety disorders in general or specific anxiety disorders.

In this video blog, I will go over the growing and quite interesting data that do exist. Then I will talk about how we use food to help patients with anxiety disorders in our clinic in New York City.

First, the Data

In 2009, data about nutrition and anxiety emerged from Felice Jacka's group, which looked at the Hordaland data set, a large epidemiologic data set in Scandinavia.^[1,2]There were two notable findings. The first was that overall dietary pattern does correlate with anxiety: Specifically, increased consumption of Western foods, or a more modern dietary pattern, correlated with an elevated risk for anxiety disorder by about 25%-29%.