Chris Shugart
The Depression-Fighting Pigment
Depression sucks and the drugs used to treat it can be harsh. But now, researchers have found a new way to battle it naturally.
Sometimes, when you're feeling down in the dumps or depressed, you need a "win" to reverse course. Any win will do. You need to feel the rush of accomplishing something – in the gym, at work, or socially. Or maybe you just need some good news for once. If we feel defeated, we get depressed. A win helps lift us back up.
In this way, humans are kinda like lab mice on the wrong end of a study. Researchers often study depression by using the Chronic Social Defeat Stress (CSDS) model. They take a wee little mouse and toss it into a cage with big, aggressive mice. The little guy is exposed to repeated bouts of social stress: he gets bullied and humiliated. The big mice call him names; the cute girl mice laugh. He gets picked last for kickball.
Sure enough, after ten days, the mouse is depressed. Then, researchers treat the mouse with some kind of intervention and try to cure his depression. Or they just chop him up and see how the stress affected his body or brain. Yeah, it sucks to be lab mouse.
That's exactly what happened in the study below, and its implications could be a big win for depressed mice and humans. The cool part? The treatment isn't a drug, but a healthy antioxidant: lycopene.
The Study
Researchers put some unfortunate male mice through the CSDS model until they were stressed out and really sad about it. How do scientists know when a mouse is depressed? Good question. Depressed mice (and people) withdraw socially, they're anxious, and they show signs of anhedonia – the inability to feel pleasure from activities that are normally fun, like eating good food, engaging in hobbies, and having sex.
The researchers then force-fed the mice lycopene dissolved in corn oil. Lycopene is the red pigment found mainly in tomatoes, known for its many health benefits.
What happened? Well, the mice treated with lycopene exhibited significant improvements in social interaction and increased interest in pleasurable activities, indicating a reversal of depression-like behaviors.
At the molecular level, lycopene administration enhanced synaptic plasticity and upregulated the BDNF–TrkB signaling pathway in the hippocampus, suggesting that lycopene's antidepressant effects may be mediated through these mechanisms. This suggests that lycopene has the potential to be a natural antidepressant.
Of course, "more research is needed," as they always say. Future studies would look at lycopene's effects on depressed female mice and then humans. However, scientists think this study opens the doors to future depression treatment. Getting plenty of lycopene in your daily diet could even help prevent depression-like symptoms.
The Only Problem
The mice in the study were given a crap-load of lycopene. The human equivalent would be about 1.62 mg/kg. That means a 150-pound person would need 110 mg daily.
A raw tomato has only 5-6 mg, and tomatoes must be heat processed (cooked) to make the lycopene bioavailable. Tomato paste (cooked and concentrated tomatoes) contains 42 mg of lycopene per 100-gram serving. Tomato sauce has about 21 mg. Consuming these products with fat also enhances lycopene absorption.
To possibly help alleviate depression, a person would likely need to consume a lot of cooked tomato products AND take a supplement to get an effective dose. Usually, you need 30 mg or so of supplemental lycopene to reap its health benefits, which include warding off prostate cancer and benign prostatic hypertrophy (BPH) and reducing the risk of cardiovascular disease.
You can find lycopene supplements of varying dosages at health food stores. Likewise, Biotest P-Well Prostate Support (Buy at Amazon) contains 30mg of lycopene per serving. Add a few tomato-paste-based dishes to your weekly menu, and you can get pretty close to the amount of lycopene used in the study.
Reference
- Xu, et al. Lycopene Alleviates Depression-Like Behavior in Chronic Social Defeat Stress-Induced Mice by Promoting Synaptic Plasticity via the BDNF–TrkB Pathway, Food Science and Nutrition, 22 January 2025.
