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Health Professional Webinar 2023

On Wednesday November 29th, we were delighted to have Dr Matt Cooke present a webinar on a very interesting topic ‘Microbiota and the Gut-Brain Axis: The role of psychobiotics in influencing cognition and emotional well-being’.

Matt was fantastic both from a presenting point of view and content provided to our audience. We had a great attendance and fabulous questions asked. Matt has kindly provided answers to questions we were unfortunately able to get to during the webinar.

Did many of these studies control for dietary differences between groups?

Those studies that measured dietary intake, included differences in diet within their statistical analysis. However, a large proportion of studies did not capture dietary/nutritional intake information.

Has there been any studies looking at prebiotics with resistant starches on mental health?

While there have been several studies looking at the impact of resistant starches on the microbiome and other health related outcomes, there is limited research on the gut-brain axis and mental health. Most of the research to date has been conducted in animal models, with few studies conducted in humans.

What is next for your research on this topic, do you have future work in this area looking at some of the future directions you suggested?

Yes, we do. Our preliminary analysis into the impact of a ‘stressful environment’ on the microbiome, cognition and emotional well-being is indicating significant shifts in the microbiota composition; with changes in certain bacteria species associated with cognitive performance and mental well-being. Interestingly, diet appeared to influence these associations. Thus, our future work is to use diet to potentially modulate these bacteria to improve cognition and mental well-being.

Additional health professional resources on current probiotic and intestinal health research, CPD, and other blog post, can also be found on our website.