Or is it “Depression linked to being poor and not affording proper food”?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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
“What we found is that consuming high amounts of ultra-processed foods could increase your risk of developing depression by up to 50%”
and
“He said that … they cannot say highly processed food causes depression”
Those statements sound contradictory (Or do they mean that it ‘could’ be 50% or 0%? But if so, why say anything at all)
He can’t say it definitely because, even though the observational results are convincing, you’d want to produce biological/neurological evidence to be able to make the claim with certainty.
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.
