Health: study connects gut microbiome with depression/Story: Shella Rae, The Brave

Health Corner: study connects gut microbiome with depression, anxiety in obese Like everyone, people with type 2 diabetes and obesity suffer from depression and anxiety, but perhaps even more so. Harvard Medical School researchers at Joslin Diabetes Center now have demonstrated a surprising potential contributor to these negative feelings – and that is the bacteria in the gut microbiome. Studying mice that become obese when put on a high-fat diet, the scientists found the mice showed significantly more signs of anxiety, depression and obsessive behavior than animals on standard diets.  “But all of these behaviors are reversed or improved when antibiotics that change the gut microbiome were given with the high fat diet,” said C. Ronald Kahn, co-head of the Section on Integrative Physiology and Metabolism at Joslin and the Mary K. Iacocca Professor of Medicine at HMS. “As endocrinologists, we often hear people say that they feel differently when they’ve eaten different foods,” notes Kahn, who is senior author on a paper describing the research in Molecular Psychiatry.  “What this study says is that many things in your diet might affect the way your brain functions, but one of those things is the way diet changes the gut bacteria or microbes. Your diet isn't always necessarily just making your blood sugar higher or lower; it's also changing a lot of signals coming from gut microbes and these signals make it all the way to the brain.” https://hms.harvard.edu/news/something-you-ate?utm_medium=Social&utm_campaign=Chan Story: Shella Rae, The Brave. By Kevin Henkes