Depression link to processed food

[ccharles000]

Eating a diet high in processed food increases the risk of depression, research suggests.

What is more, people who ate plenty of vegetables, fruit and fish actually had a lower risk of depression, the University College London team found.

Data on diet among 3,500 middle-aged civil servants was compared with depression five years later, the British Journal of Psychiatry reported.

The team said the study was the first to look at the UK diet and depression.

They split the participants into two types of diet - those who ate a diet largely based on whole foods, which includes lots of fruit, vegetables and fish, and those who ate a mainly processed food diet, such as sweetened desserts, fried food, processed meat, refined grains and high-fat dairy products.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8334353.stm

[PSPS]

1. Maybe it's the other way around

I know when I'm depressed, I'm less likely to go to the trouble of making a healthy feast for myself. Instead, I gravitate toward something that's less work. Depression tends to do that -- it takes the wind out of your sails.

[kickysnana]

16. +1

[laughingliberal]

18. That was my thought nt

[optimator]

2. psychiatry once again failing at correlation

these dumb fucks have no idea what science is.

[Mimosa]

4. ITA it's the basic which came first chicken or egg dilemna. n/t

[depakid]

6. That was a profoundly ignorant thing to say....

[Aragorn]

19. synchronicity

we read it in residency - but that is apparently rare. An acausal connecting principle.

[avaistheone1]

3. Salmon and the omega 3's are supposed to be good for depression too.

[rooboy]

5. Highly recommend the book "Potatoes not Prozac"...

which has a lot of good info about the relationship between food and depression. Helped me heaps - I hardly have any processed foods anymore, and avoid aspartame (i.e. nutrasweet, etc) like the plague.

[Confusious]

8. I eat veggies, salads, some meat

Still had depression, panic attacks and OCD.

[Lorien]

23. Me too. Like Micheal Pollan says "Eat real foods, not too much, mostly plants"

another good book on the subject is "The Ultramind solution" by Mark Hyman, M.D. I'm sure much of the information is similar to "potatoes not Prozac". Many health professionals are now seeing just how destructive convenience foods are to the human body-ESPECIALLY toxins like Don Rumsfeld's aspartame.

[bobbolink]

24. Potatoes are just WONDERFUL for hypoglycemics and diabetics, too, right?

:crazy:

This one-size-fits-all ordering people around is a big part of causing depression, IMO.

[HamdenRice]

7. A real medical researcher did a "self experiment" by eating only White Castle & went insane

I have a friend who's a doctor and one of her favorite topics is "self experimentation." These are experiments where the doctor/researcher can't get funding, and so experiments on himself or herself. She even once gave me a hilarious book about several of the greatest self experiments of all time (don't ask).

Anyway, one of the more infamous self experiments in medical nutrition history is some guy who decided to eat just White Castle hamburgers for a month. (He had several elderly widower patients who couldn't cook, were eating just fast foods, especially WC, and who seemed delusional.)

After a while, the doctor himself was psychotic, and the experiment ended. Turns out that the specific way WC cooks hamburgers (steam) destroys most vitamins, and the result is severe effects on mental well being.

So this conclusion is not unexpected.

[Confusious]

9. Sounds like an urban legend.... eom

[Odin2005]

14. ACK! My favorite: the scientist who drank bacteria and gave himself an ulcer.

The result? The demolishing of the "stress causes ulcers" dogma.

[HamdenRice]

21. I wish I could find that book! My favorite was dengue fever (?)

I remember reading one of the chapters and laughing out loud because the doctor who was self experimenting had to drink some sort of black vomit from a sick patient!

The scientist who gave himself the ucler iirc, isolated the bacteria from the stomachs of patients and/or cadavers.

On edit, it was Dengue which is spread by mosquitos. I'll try to find out.

[snooper2]

22. That's just stupid...

Oh, and I worked for White Castle for two years and that was roughly 80% of my diet :)

Chicken rings came out for the first time when I was there...Um YUMMY..chicken rings and cheese :)

and the best milkshakes in the World...and double cheeseburgers with bacon...extra onions...no pickle

now I'm getting hungry; may have to settle for a Krystal Burger or 10 later :rofl:

[Stevepol]

10. I agree with the conclusion, but I don't think this sort of correlation after the fact proves it.

Those people, to take only one quibble, who are into health food and making healthy food choices are obviously not among the group most likely to suffer from depression. These people are already using their minds in a healthy and constructive way. The whole point of depression is that the individual suffering from depression is not able to use the mind in a healthy and constructive way. Whether the mind alone can lift a person out of these depressive states is a debatable question but if a person already is using the mind in such a way he or she is obviously less likely to be affected by depressive thinking. So which group, those already using the mind in such a way or those who show no signs of using the mind this way, would be most likely to be depressed?

On the other hand, it seems clear to me that diet is an essential part of anybody's mood and mood generates thinking (also can work the other way). It's just that correlating this after the fact doesn't prove anything. You'd have to find a group of people with bad dietary habits and take a group out of that group and start them on dietary changes of a healthy kind and make no other intervention than that, then see if the dietary changes alone have some effect.

[madrchsod]

11. the thought of living in england makes me depressed

i can`t imagine 3500 english civil servants are all that happy with their lot in life.....

[conscious evolution]

12. I can believe this

As some here may know,I am part of a very large hippy family.And as such we like to do 'things' that can play hell with seritonin levels.
Fortunatle,we have a Dr of Pharmacy,a phsychiatrist,an endocrinologist and a general medicine Doctor in our family.They have learned that eating foods that are high in B vitamins(especially B-12) and Omega-3's help the body create and maintain seritonin levels in the brain.

[Union Yes]

13. Corporate food filled with ChemiKILLS kills us. I wonder if Conagra, ADM ceo's eat the..

"food" their corporations produce.

Not likely.

[Odin2005]

15. Or maybe if you are depressed you are too down to do much healthy cooking?

And thus eat more processed foods? I know when I'm feeling down I'm not in the mood to cook.

[Shagbark Hickory]

17. Oh. *That* depression.

[surrealAmerican]

20. LOL

I read the headline as having something to do with the economy too.

[Name removed]

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