School of Psychology, Swansea University, Swansea SA2 8PP, Wales, United Kingdom.
School of Psychology, Swansea University, Swansea SA2 8PP, Wales, United Kingdom.
Physiol Behav. 2022 Dec 1;257:113964. doi: 10.1016/j.physbeh.2022.113964. Epub 2022 Sep 18.
A Mediterranean style diet (i.e., high in fruit, vegetables, fish, pulses, and wholegrains) is said to benefit psychological health. Many low-level interoceptive processes, such as those involved in the 'gut-brain' axis, are suggested to play a mechanistic role in in this relationship. However, interoceptive sensations in other domains, and at higher hierarchical levels of abstraction, have hitherto been overlooked. One domain often studied in relation to psychological health is cardioception. Therefore, we examined whether the Mediterranean diet was associated with first-order perceptual and second-order metacognitive cardioception.
Participants completed the Heartbeat Detection Task, the Heartbeat Counting Task, and the EPIC-Norfolk Food Frequency Questionnaire from which diet was quantified.
Adherence to a Mediterranean style diet was associated with higher cardioceptive accuracy (i.e., perceptual performance) across both tasks. In addition, those consuming a Mediterranean diet had a better ability to detect errors in first order perceptual performance, and a lower prediction error (the magnitude of the difference between accuracy and confidence).
These findings indicated that deepening our understanding of how interoceptive processes beyond the 'gut-brain' axis are shaped by diet could deepen our understanding of the link between diet and mental health and wellbeing.
地中海式饮食（即高水果、蔬菜、鱼类、豆类和全麦）据称有益于心理健康。许多低级的内感受过程，如涉及“肠脑”轴的过程，被认为在这种关系中起着机械作用。然而，其他领域的内感受感觉，以及更高层次的抽象水平，迄今仍被忽视。一个经常与心理健康相关的领域是心脏感知。因此，我们研究了地中海饮食是否与一阶感知和二阶元认知心脏感知有关。
参与者完成了心跳检测任务、心跳计数任务和 EPIC-Norfolk 食物频率问卷，通过问卷确定了饮食情况。
地中海式饮食的依从性与两项任务中的更高的心脏感知准确性（即感知表现）相关。此外，那些遵循地中海饮食的人在第一阶感知表现的错误检测方面有更好的能力，并且预测误差（准确性和信心之间的差异幅度）更低。
这些发现表明，加深我们对超越“肠脑”轴的内感受过程如何受到饮食影响的理解，可以加深我们对饮食与心理健康和幸福感之间联系的理解。
