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.
Our stated aim is 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 profoundly 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, policy makers, and international bodies to ensure 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.
Grounded Minds Consortium members
“We have never been more connected through technology than we are today, yet never more disconnected from nature. Life is not digital; it is a continuum that is alive, breathing, and constantly renewing. Digital systems are made from fragments such as pixels of light and units of data. When arranged together they create the appearance of continuity, but they remain separate points.
Nature is different. It moves in an unbroken flow that stretches, responds, and adapts through relationship. This disconnection is most evident in the way we now produce food. Modern agriculture has interrupted the living exchange between plant roots and soil through the microbiome. This is the ancient interface that transfers energy and information from the earth into plants, and then into animals and humans. Artificial fertilisers and pesticides were designed to accelerate production, but in doing so they disrupted the system that evolved to nourish life.
As a result we produce food that is rich in calories but poor in the diverse compounds required for health. Our soils, which should grow in vitality, have instead been losing their biological strength. Yet there is a way forward. When we restore the continuous connection between soil, plants, animals, and people, nature resumes its quiet and reliable work of renewal.
Technology can help us see this process by offering pictures and patterns that reveal change, much like art that forms an image when small pieces are viewed together. These tools can guide us, but they remain snapshots of a living world that is always in motion. Through trust, curiosity, and reconnection, we can bring human innovation into harmony with the intelligence of nature. By doing so we can restore health to our soils, improve the nourishment of our food, and strengthen the wellbeing of our communities.
This is our hope: that by rebuilding the continuous living connection that supports all life, we can create a future where people and the planet flourish together.”
Stuart McAlpine
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