Researchers Alban Gaultier, PhD, and Ioana Marin appeared on Facebook Live to talk about their depression discovery and take audience questions, and I thought you might like to see it. This is really some amazing work. In a nutshell, they determined how chronic mild stress caused depression symptoms in mice, and they were able to reverse those symptoms just by feeding the mice Lactobacillus, the probiotic bacteria found in yogurt. Most exciting of all, their findings give them cause to believe that the discovery should hold true in humans as well. Nifty, huh?
I’m having trouble embedding the video, so please copy and paste the link below into your browser.
www.facebook.com/UniversityofVirginia/videos/10155146848998331/
For more on this, check out the full story. (And you’ll find more in the two previous posts on this very blog!)
I have had depression for long time. I want to stop my meds and try yogurt. can you tell me how much and when?
Thank you for your interest in the research. It would be premature to stop taking your medication. The researchers aren’t yet certain if the finding will hold true in people. They have reason for optimism, based on what they’ve seen so far, but we won’t know for sure until they test their finding in humans. The microbiome is a highly complex thing, and we’re only now beginning to understand its relationships with the rest of the body. The mice in the experiment ate far more Lactobacillus than you could hope to get out of a serving of yogurt, and there’s no way to say how much you’d need to consume — or even if it would benefit you — based on the findings so far. The researchers hope to test their findings in people soon, and that should give us more information.