According to study results released on Wednesday, eating a lot of ultra-processed foods may increase your risk of depression.
A lot of salt, sugar, hydrogenated fats, and additives are included in ultraprocessed foods. In addition to classic junk food items like chips and soda, they also include a large number of ready-to-eat meals, yogurts, and packaged bread.
Over 31,000 women between the ages of 42 and 62 were examined for their eating patterns and levels of mental health for the study, which was published in the journal JAMA Open Network. The participants were primarily white and came from the Nurses’ Health Study II, a long-running observational study group.
The researchers discovered that women who had nine servings or more of ultra-processed food per day had a 50% higher risk of developing depression than those who consumed no more than four servings daily. The study discovered that consuming large amounts of foods and beverages with artificial sweeteners had a particularly detrimental effect.
According to Melissa Lane, a postdoctoral researcher at the Food & Mood Centre at Deakin University in Victoria, Australia, the new study “supports other observational studies throughout the globe that have found higher intakes of ultra-processed food are linked with a higher risk of developing depression.”
The researchers began the study before the individuals reported any symptoms of sadness and then followed them over time, which sets it unique from prior studies that have related eating ultra-processed foods to mental health. This made it easier for them to link a person’s diet to their likelihood of getting depression. It is challenging to generalize the findings to everyone because the study only included a small number of nonwhite women and no men.
It’s still unknown why there is a connection between ultra-processed meals and sadness, according to Lane, who was not involved in the current research.
Determining which condition came first—the depression or the diet—can often be challenging.
“We don’t have a lot of energy when we are feeling depressed,” said Susan Albers, a clinical psychologist at the Cleveland Clinic who was not involved in the new study. “So it’s easy to reach for those foods when we are low energy and don’t have the motivation to cook or to go grocery shopping — just open a package and they are ready to go.”
Albers noted that other studies have proven the contrary to be true: eating whole meals, rich in key nutrients such as fiber, vitamins, and minerals, is connected to excellent mental health. However, because the study was not a clinical trial, it cannot prove that consuming ultra-processed foods causes depression.
There are some hints as to how ultra-processed food may impact the gut, which has been demonstrated to be strongly related to the brain, she continued.
According to research co-author Dr. Andrew Chan, the director of the clinical & translational epidemiology department at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, “there is emerging proof that ultra-processed food could actually disrupt the normal gut microbiome.”
Chan added that people who consume these foods frequently typically have guts that are more pro-inflammatory, which may lead to the production of chemicals by the gut microbiome that affect depression risk.
Albers stated that artificial sweeteners are one further explanation for the connection between ultra-processed foods and sadness. According to her, artificial sweeteners may trigger a condition known as purinergic transmission, in which the brain fails to produce the proper quantity of the chemical ATP. To transmit signals between neurons, ATP interacts with other molecules in the brain, including the so-called “feel good” neurotransmitters serotonin and dopamine. One of the reasons why specialists believe ultra-processed meals may be connected to depression is because this disruption leads to inflammation in the brain.
Researchers may be able to treat patients who suffer from depression if they can someday demonstrate that eating foods with a high level of processing increases the chance of developing the illness.
For those who suffer from depression, Chan added, “This may be a particularly crucial idea because it may be a relatively simple way to prevent both depression and longer-term problems that may be more challenging to deal with.”