Can Fermented Foods Boost Mental Health?

This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Do six glasses of kombucha a day keep the psychiatrist away?

Hi everyone, and welcome back to the Brain Food vlog. I'm Dr Drew Ramsey. I'm on the editorial board of Medscape Psychiatry and an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Columbia University. I'm also the founder of the Brain Food Clinic.

These days I'm eating a lot more fermented foods and talking about them more often with my patients. That's partly due to a great study from Wastyk and colleagues at Stanford School Medicine, titled "Gut-Microbiota-Targeted Diets Modulate Human Immune Status," which was published last year in the journal Cell.

All of us in mental health are increasingly thinking about inflammation and the microbiome, and how those impact brain health and mental health. This is an important study for us to consider in that regard, so I wanted to make sure you heard about it.

Fibers vs Fermentation

Over 17 weeks, investigators conducted a two-arm intervention. In one arm, they took individuals from eating about 21.5 g of fiber a day all the way up to 45 g of fiber a day. In the other arm, they increased the amount of fermented foods that individuals were eating, including things like kombucha, kefir, yogurt, and kimchi. At the beginning of the study, these individuals were eating about 0.4 servings of fermented foods per day, which they increased all the way up to 6.3 servings of food a day.