Professor Jacka is Director of the Food and Mood Centre and founder and president of the International Society for Nutritional Psychiatry Research (ISNPR). She is an NHMRC Career Development Fellow at Deakin University, within the IMPACT SRC at the School of Medicine.
The strong link between diet and mental health is now well established, but Professor Felice Jacka and her team at the Deakin University-based Food & Mood Centre aim to go further by creating healthy eating strategies that may help to minimise the impacts of mental issues such as depression.
Prof. Jacka is credited as both the founder and a world-leading expert in the relatively new research field of nutritional psychiatry. She is also founder and president of the International Society for Nutritional Psychiatry Research (ISNPR), and a National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) Career Development Research Fellow.
She arrived at the intersection of nutrition and psychiatry via a “circuitous” route. “I was studying psychology and decided that I was more interested in statistics and research than in being a psychologist,” Prof. Jacka says. “I volunteered as a research assistant when I was studying my undergraduate degree, and then went on to secure funding to do research and a PhD.”
Armed with her PhD in Psychiatric Epidemiology from the University of Melbourne, she joined Deakin University’s School of Medicine in 2010 as Professor of Nutritional Psychiatry.
Her subsequent research has included the first studies to identify the associations between diet quality and mental health across many different countries and age groups, including establishing maternal and childhood diet as a predictor of children’s emotional health. Her PhD study, establishing the link between diet quality and clinical depressive and anxiety disorders, was featured on the front cover of the American Journal of Psychiatry and nominated the most important study in psychiatric research in 2010 by Medscape Psychiatry.
Prof. Jacka also led the internationally recognised SMILEs Trial, a 2012-2015 study into dietary improvement as a treatment for clinical depression.
The results of the randomised controlled trial, completed in 2017 and published in the international journal BMC Medicine, showed that participants in a group who received dietary intervention – support, education and nutritional counselling – had a significantly greater reduction in depressive symptoms over a three-month period than a control group. This study has been highly influential, being cited hundreds of times and reported in major media around the world, including the New York Times, TIME Magazine and many others. The findings of her team’s research now influence policy and clinical practice, including being reflected in clinical psychiatric guidelines.
If the link seems obvious now, it wasn’t always so. “I formulated my PhD hypothesis because I was quite sure that there was a link between nutrition and mental health, even though this was considered a bit ‘out there’ at the time,” she says.
“My studies over a decade have repeatedly supported that idea. The SMILEs trial was the first to show that improving diet in people with a major depressive disorder can have a positive impact on their depressive illness. It has been very influential and is now replicated.
“I hope my work will inspire individuals and families to prioritise a healthier way of eating to protect their brain and mental health over their lifespan, as well as influencing clinical practice for people affected by mental health problems.”
Prof. Jacka is also a published author with books including Brain Changer, which explains why food should be considered as the basis of mental and brain health, and children’s book There’s a Zoo in my Poo, to teach children the basics of gut health and good nutrition.
She hopes the research undertaken by the Food & Mood Centre will also help inform new awareness around the impact of highly industrialised, profit-driven food systems. “Poor diet is now the leading cause of illness and early death across the globe,” she says. “The cost of the industrialised food system to both global health and the environment is so massive that it will be the equivalent to the annual GDP of China by 2030. Yet we have no policies in place to improve things.”
Prof. Jacka advises prospective students hoping to enter the field to “be brave” and “think outside the box”.
“Read widely and think deeply. See the big picture. Be guided by your passion to make a difference. Any other motivation won’t be enough to sustain you over the years of hard work necessary to survive in research. And remember that high grades are your ticket to the world. There are no shortcuts.”
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