The Grounded Minds Consortium is a pioneering transdisciplinary collaboration between Deakin University, Flinders University, and key research and industry partners dedicated to revolutionising the food system to sustainably enhance mental health and wellbeing through a focus on improving the global food system.

We aim to ‘Transform the Food System to Promote Mental and Brain Health’. Our consortium leverages cutting-edge research and international reputations in microbiome science, nutritional psychiatry, agriculture, and soil ecology to bridge the missing links between soil, food, and mental and brain health in humans. Through generating research evidence and effectively translating this evidence, we act to confirm the inseparability of human and planetary health.

Our interdisciplinary collaboration aims to reframe environmental issues as deeply personal and immediate instead of distant concerns. Through a new evidence-based narrative and world-class science communication, we will reconnect people with the living world. Not as something separate, but as essential to their own and their loved ones’ mental and brain health. Our new story reframes the planetary health crisis as a profoundly human crisis, with real and personal consequences for individuals. This prompts genuine attitudinal and behaviour change.

Our holistic approach recognises that nourishing the mind begins with healing the land.

With world-leading scientific expertise and research and translation, our consortium aims to develop innovative, evidence-based solutions that enhance food systems, reduce ecosystem degradation, and improve mental and brain health.

We are seeking philanthropic investment to scale our research, implement sustainable agricultural interventions, and drive policy change that supports a food system rooted in both ecosystem and human health.

The challenge: a broken food system directly degrading mental and planetary health

We are experiencing a slow-moving global crisis, where poor diet and its consequences are now the leading cause of illness and premature death, driving heart disease, diabetes, cancer and even the most common mental disorders, depression and anxiety. Indeed, the burden of mental disorders is rising, especially among youth, with depression now a leading cause of disability worldwide. This is, in turn, linked to the industrialised foods we are eating, as well as the loss of diversity and keystone species in the human microbiome. This human biodiversity loss is increasingly manifesting in a rise in allergic conditions – such as asthma, eczema, and food allergies, auto-immune conditions including coeliac disease, type 1 diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, and multiple sclerosis, as well as emotional and neurodevelopmental disorders in children, such as anxiety, ADHD and autism.

These illnesses arise from our unsustainable, industrialised global food system, which costs the planet at least $20 trillion annually in health and environmental damage. This global system is the leading cause of biodiversity loss—over 70% of wildlife populations have declined since 1970—and the degradation of soil, the richest environment for microbial life, is rapidly and massively accelerating due to industrial farming. The use of antibiotics in industrial livestock production is contributing to biodiversity loss directly, through transmission to humans via industrialised animal foods, but also indirectly via environmental contamination. This loss of biodiversity in our food systems and environments is directly tied to the decline in human microbial diversity, underscoring the profound interconnection between humans and the planet.

Research from our consortium members positions the microbiome-gut-brain axis as a fundamental link between the microbiome of the air and earth, food and the soils its grown in, the human microbiome, and mental and brain health in people. Our consortium joins these dots and will create and convey this narrative to finally link the global data across agriculture, the food industry, the environment and climate change, and human health. It will leverage our gold-standard scientific research, global profiles and reputations, and strong science communication strategies to provide knowledge and evidence in a way that is fully accessible and useful to the community, scientists, policymakers, and international bodies, ensuring global translation and impact.

Learn more

The Grounded Minds Consortium held Soil Yourself September in 2025, which involved free online presentations exploring the connection between soil health, the microbiome, and our physical and mental wellbeing.⁠ View the replays here.