Depressed? Maybe It’s Your Diet Source: news.bbc.co.uk
LONDON, ENGLAND, November 6, 2009: A University of London study of 3,500 middle-aged civil servants found that people who ate vegetables, fruit and fish had a lower risk of depression. The study 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. After accounting for factors such as gender, age, education, physical activity, smoking habits and chronic diseases, they found a significant difference in future depression risk with the different diets. Those who ate the most whole foods had a 26% lower risk of future depression than those who at the least whole foods. By contrast people with a diet high in processed food had a 58% higher risk of depression. Margaret Edwards, head of strategy at the mental health charity SANE, said, “Physical and mental health are closely related, so we should not be too surprised by these results, but we hope there will be further research which may help us to understand more fully the relationship between diet and mental health.”
