Diet and Depression

Comment:

Mondays are always hard, especially after a nice relaxing holiday or weekend it can be rather depressing to have to return to the normal routine. With Blue Monday nearly upon us is there evidence to show that diet help to overcome it?

Research:

Although there is plenty of evidence to show that there is a correlation between diet and depression, such as the fact that a diet in fast foods will increase your chances whilst a Mediterranean diet will decrease your chances of depression. Even so researchers worry that the studies that turn out this evidence lack causality.

Almundena Sanchez-Villegas who co-wrote about this topic in the BMC Journal says, “It is difficult to be sure that the diet is responsible for depression – it could be that depressed people make bad food choices. Other study problems include ‘confounders’ which may influence dietary habits, such as marital status, exercise, alcohol (or smoking), medical conditions and social networks. Or simply genetics.”

So if you look into the topic more there is support for the idea of looking at the link between diet and depression in the same way that the link between diet and cardiovascular risk are looked at. 

This is because depression can be seen as similar to cardiovascular disease in many ways. So like diet and cardiovascular disease, the studies that need to be undertaken for diet and depression need to be more long term, randomised clinical studies. Once these have been carried out we will be able to see the full impact that diet can have on depression. 

Original article can be found here: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/01/130102205517.htm