The MooDFOOD project: Prevention of depression through nutritional strategies

MooDFOOD is a ‘Multi‐country cOllaborative project on the rOle of Diet, Food‐related behaviour, and Obesity in the prevention of Depression’. Depression is one of the most prevalent, severe and disabling disorders in the European Union (EU) and places a heavy burden on individuals and families. A large proportion of the EU population is overweight, which increases depression risk. Targeting food‐related behaviours and nutritional status of people prone to overweight and obesity offers opportunities to prevent depression. The MooDFOOD consortium combines expertise in nutrition, consumer behaviour, psychiatry and preventive health psychology and uses a unique integrative approach. Existing high quality data from longitudinal prospective European cohort studies will be combined with new data from surveys, short‐term experiments and a long‐term preventive intervention study. This approach will provide insight into the causality of the link between diet and depression, and underlying pathways; it will also identify which modifications related to diet and dietary behaviour lead to beneficial changes in depression risk and lower the environmental burden of the diet. Knowledge of all these aspects will be used to develop novel nutritional strategies to prevent depression. In close collaboration with stakeholders and experts, MooDFOOD will transform the identified nutritional strategies into guidelines and practical tools to guide policy at EU and Member State levels. Promotion of the findings through extensive European networks will help to lower the risk of depression and contribute to overall health of all EU citizens.