A new clinical trial offers the strongest evidence yet that probiotics can help improve your mood by making you feel less negative. Researchers from the University of Oxford Trial recruited 88 healthy volunteers. Approximately one-half of these participants were male, and the mean age of these participants was 22 years with a healthy BMI. As you can imagine, the findings provide very interesting insights. Experts are quick to emphasize that probiotics should not be considered a replacement for other treatments for mental health conditions.
While this study was limited to generally healthy adults, it does suggest a possible connection between probiotic intake and decreased feelings of negativity. While participants did report mood improvements, researchers said more studies are needed to understand these effects better.
Insights from Experts
In an interview, Lisa Durette, MD, chair of psychiatry at the Kirk Kerkorian School of Medicine at the University of Nevada Las Vegas, noted that this is what made the findings so impactful. She explained, “A lot of patients experience this emotional blunting phenomenon on antidepressants. They do not allow them to feel the highs and the lows like I was able to when I was off medication. However, there was no blunting found with these probiotics, and I personally found this interesting.
Durette noted that upon entering an art therapy session, the treatments for depression and anxiety have existed for decades. These approaches aren’t effective for all students. We definitely know that treatments for depression and anxiety have been around for decades, but they don’t work for everyone. This new finding points to pursuing other avenues like probiotics.
Understanding Mood Measurement
The research team used a variety of psychological questionnaires to measure mood shifts in participants. These types of questionnaires focused on dividing people’s emotional experiences into clear-cut boxes, like stress, irritability, anxiety, or depressive symptoms. Despite well-meaning intentions, one key drawback of this approach is its inability to address the depth of human emotions. One research expert highlighted what the major disadvantage of psychological self-assessments is. They try to reduce the complexity of human emotion into very specific boxes, which is just too reductive. In contrast, asking, on any given day, how happy or sad are you feeling today? would more completely encompass a shift from one mood to another.
Katerina Johnson, PhD and the study’s first author, pointed out the novel approach utilized in this research. She continued, “This is the first research project to use daily mood monitoring to measure probiotics’ effects, and even by the full month-long study period, their bad mood is still improving.”
Cautionary Perspective
Despite the promising findings, experts urge caution regarding the use of probiotics as a treatment option for mental health conditions. Christoph Thaiss, PhD, an assistant professor of pathology at Stanford University and co-author of the study, cautioned that probiotics should not be considered an alternative to standard treatments. He mentioned the review’s conclusion is unequivocal in its findings. Probiotics cannot prevent or treat mental illness on their own. Finally, probiotics should be viewed as one component of a larger strategy than a magic bullet.
Yet research in this area is still in its infancy. All this justifies knowing that probiotics are indeed lifting mood, but they need to be used as the complementary approach closely rather than the primary one.
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