Personalized Nutrition for Depression: Impact on the Unholy Trinity

Major depressive disorder (MDD) is a chronic affective disorder that has a strong neuroinflammatory component underpinning its etiology. Recent studies indicate that MDD is also associated with changes in the gut microbiota and that the latter is mainly modulated by diet. Microbiota-based personalized nutrition aims to provide an individual-specific diet that will yield the maximum benefit from a given diet since the gut microbiota is accounted for the variations that individuals present in response to a given food. In this review, we present and discuss 5 possible outcomes of using microbiota-based personalized nutrition. Harnessing this approach is essential to design more accurate therapies to prevent and treat MDD or to even help in drug metabolism, especially in the case of antidepressants.