Or is it “Depression linked to being poor and not affording proper food”?
Not to mention that if you’re depressed, preparing healthy food can be a huge struggle because of the effort involved in acquiring ingredients, cooking/preparing the food, and cleanup afterwards.
Also often not mentioned is the planning required before going shopping and the amount of food wasted when cooking for one. Like if getting out of the house is already such a huge chore it becomes impossible to also add planning the groceries plus if half of it is going to be wasted anyway there isn’t even any cost difference. What incentive is left except some abstract ideal to live a healthy lifestyle.
Yeah,planning is terrible. I forget to put meat out of the fridge all the time! When I remember it’s almost time to cook. About the expense difference, I’m poor in a poor country in which ironically raw and fresh food is cheaper than processed food so luckily I’m forced to cook and be healthier. I lost 18 pounds since I lost my job because I stopped buying meals and processed junk food when doing groceries. If I wasn’t broke I’d say it was a blessing in disguise.
Oh yeah for sure. I also have issues with OCD, specifically around food contamination and safety. It makes it damn near impossible to eat leftovers for me for the last few years.
I waste more food than I’d like, but I just can’t bring myself to do it. Hence falling back on getting prepackaged, single serving meals, which aren’t often healthy at all.
It’s the same cycle as if your poor, you end up having to buy the worse deals in groceries because you have to buy cheap overall, thus keeping you poor and unhealthy. Having depression causes you to be unmotivated to cook healthy and you end up eating crap, making you feel crappy, and keeping you depressed.
This is exactly it, I’m not depressed because I eat shitty processed food, I eat that shit because it’s the only thing I have the energy to deal with.
call me crazy but I find washing the dishes and vacuuming very therapeutic
If it works for you and doesn’t hurt you, then enjoy it. I struggle to even shower sometimes when I’m really depressed. Imagining going to the grocery store and everything else involved in making healthy meals is incredibly overwhelming.
Came here to say this…
If only they’d have thought of learning even the most basic facts about depression first, they could have saved themselves a lot of time and money.
But I suspect they were never looking to improve the lives of depressed people, but rather just to get on the latest buzzword-bandwagon that vilifies “ultra-processed foods” but never offers any viable alternative, let alone addresses the reasons why people consume, or even rely on it in the first place, and who benefits from making and selling it (because the answer is capitalism, and the capitalists funding these waste-of-resources hollow research projects wouldn’t fund one that points the finger back at them).
This nonsense is just as much a distraction and a shifting of responsibility from systemic to personal as plastic bans and made up “carbon footprint” are.
As a person with Dysthymia, shit like this pisses me off to no end. I’ve dealt with depression most of my life and I’ve lived many different lifestyles, super healthy and fit, eating very healthy and the complete opposite of the spectrum, binge eating, super overweight, getting destroyed by diabetes, and the one constant has always been the depression. Articles like this, as you say, are just a distraction and putting the blame on the victim. They obviously have an agenda to attack process foods and artificial sweeteners and depression is not the reason they are attacking them.
I’ve dealt with depression most of my life and I’ve lived many different lifestyles…and the one constant has always been the depression.
yup, same.
And then this shit is not only unhelpful to us, but it also makes many people (including, sadly health and care professionals) think that if we only took as good a care of ourselves as they do (they tell themselves), we wouldn’t be depressed (and, in a lot of their minds, a “drain” on them and/or society). It’s all so fucked up, but none of it is accidental.
He said that because this is an observational study – one that looked at data already gathered – they cannot say highly processed food causes depression. That said, he thinks the data is strong.
“We were able to adjust for a number of what are called confounding variables in our analysis to suggest that eating more ultra-processed foods really could increase your risk of depression.”
“Sometimes what you see when you adjust for these variables is that the models or the results get weaker. And we didn’t really see that at all,” he later said.
Yeah this is dodgy. Basically he’s saying “we cannot say something but we’ll say it anyway,”. You only need 1 confounding factor or 1 incorrect adjustment to completely break the validity of any link.
To say the link got stronger as they adjusted for different confounding factors doesn’t mean anything. It’s a specious argument.
I assume this is a correlation study? not a causation one?
It seems plausible the opposite is true, that depressed people are more likely to eat easy sweet foods.
This has and presents problems.
The good news: it is using data from the Nurses Study. That’s hard data to beat because it’s got a great collection method going back years and years.
Bad news: it’s only covering four years. Bad news: it defines ultra processed foods as, among other things. having lots of calories. But spends a whole lot of time blaming drinks with artificial sweeteners. The one thing artificial sweeteners aren’t is calorie dense.
Either way it will give us something to argue about for a few years.
I have personally noticed that my hunger is worse when drinking sugar-free soda.
quitting it made sticking to a calorie deficit easier.
after I had these results I googled about it and apparently it’s known possible side-effect for women and overweight people
so if anything the sugar free stuff is at least not all that no-brainer choice people make it out to be
it’s still a no-brainer to switch from normal soda to sugarfree: the calories in normal soda is literally just sugar which is the absolute worst form they could take, whereas in food you’re likely to get at least half of the calories in the form of fat/protein/larger carbohydrates.
Plus when you eat the calories instead of drinking them it makes you feel fuller, and there’s at least a chance you’ll get some more fibre in your diet.
that’s not as easy, sugar in itself is not “the worst”.
It’s no-Brainer to switch to plain carbonated water, I wouldn’t say it’s a no brainer to switch to sugar free, that depends on how much soda you drink and how badly the sugar-free one affects your hunger, to me it’s a lot, so if I would want a can of coke I would probably better of sticking to the normal one since I don’t drink it often and it won’t throw off my hunger to a crazy degree.
Though to be fair you might not have the context of how much diet soda hrows my hunger off, it’s so bad for me I can easily eat my 800 calorie high protein chicken-wrap 2 hours after the previous one if I drink a diet soda with it, while without the diet soda I can go for hours without feeling hungry
The tricky part with artificial sweeteners is that they only really help when you control for other caloric intake — which people generally don’t in everyday life.
Replacing a 200-calorie sugary drink with a zero-calorie artificial-sweetener-filled drink has unintended consequences in practice. It affects your hunger response which can cause you to eat back those calories and then some. There have been studies showing this both in rats and in humans.
Artificial sweeteners are also far from healthy in isolation.
As with many things related to health and diet, you need to be careful and realistic when considering what the real alternative is, especially when factoring in human psychology.
Personally, I had great success when I tracked all my food and drink intake, and once I had a strict calorie “budget” I found it very easy to cut out shitty food — because at that point the cost of empty calories was smaller, less satisfying meals, which was tangible and relatively immediate. In that context, artificial sweeteners worked for me because I had the tools to control those unintended consequences.
In any case: seltzer with a teensy bit of lemon juice beats everything. :) I’m very happy with my purchase of a home carbonator.
“What we found is that consuming high amounts of ultra-processed foods could increase your risk of developing depression by up to 50%,” said Raaj Mehta, MD, MPH, one of the study’s authors and a gastroenterologist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.
Obligatory: Fuck Nestlé (P&G, Unilever, etc.)
You know nothing is stopping people from eating these foods in moderation. You don’t have to go out and eat a family sized bag of chips by yourself in a single sitting.
Consuming large amounts of any food in a single sitting would be bad for you.
Eating disorders exist, company cantines exist, poverty exists. Not everyone has free choice in exactly how much processed stuff they eat.
Everyone has a say in what they eat.
A ten ounce bad of doritos at my local super market is $6
I can get a pound of chicken breast for $4 and a pound if fresh green beans for $2.50
I can buy a bunch of celery, baby carrots and a low calorie dip for the same price
Unprocessed food is far more expensive. Very few people don’t have access either.
I’d you are getting fat at work, Jesus Christ, have a modicum of self restraint.
Family sized bags of chips are also a comfort food and very appealing when depressed.
They are cheap enough and filling enough and interesting enough that you can find yourself munching through them as you try and distract yourself from whatever.
It’s quite easy to set up a vicious circle of depressed -> eat crap -> depression.
And it is very difficult to break out of it
But again that is not the companies fault that is making them. Tens if not hundreds of millions of people enjoy those foods responsibly every day.
It’s the depressed person who has an issue and needs to seek mental health care
