Depression link to processed food | Hacker News Reader

Depression link to processed food

news.bbc.co.uk

28 pointsfogus28 comments

It seems like depression is really a case of the pharma industry having everyone brainwashed. The vast majority of people believe that depression is a disease of biological origin, even though the academic research clearly shows that it's not a disease (it's a symptom, like AIDS) and in most cases this symptom is not the result of some underlying brain malfunction.

And yet we have all these people committing suicide because they can't get the help they need, and we have all these people who freak out whenever you say that depression isn't a disease. I don't understand it. I've literally never seen anything where the academic research was so clear and unambiguous, and yet completely rejected by virtually the entire general public.

How about this one: alcoholism

As opposed to physical/psychological addiction in the general case?

I've never done any research into this area so I have no what the literature says.

I haven't either, but I see this brought up frequently.

What do you mean by it is a symptom, not a disease? How is a disease even defined? Something is causing the symptoms, what is causing them?

A disease is basically a specific thing that's doing harm to the body. For example, H1N1 is a disease because it's a specific thing. AIDS, on the other hand, is not a disease because it's caused by HIV, or one of a few other things.

With depression, there are several things that can cause it: several known nutritional deficits, prescription medications, chronic illness, lack of social interaction, lack of exercise, poor diet, stress, etc. And similarly, the vast majority of people respond better to treatments that don't involve drugs.

There almost certainly are some people who do have underlying problems in their brain, but even still the depression is a symptom of whatever this disease is; calling depression itself a disease not only prevents the people without biological problems from getting care (the vast majority), but it also prevents scientists from looking for the root cause of the biological problems in the people who do have them.

It's just a name though.

Disease seems to be used to cover loads of things that IMHO aren't really diseases these days - eg alcoholism, obesity.

I think maybe it's to excuse the person of any guilt - "I can't help it! I have a disease"

"It's just a name though."

But the claim is almost always "Depression is a disease caused by a biological problem in the brain." And the solution is usually just drugs.

Sure, true. I've never believed it's as simple as that - people get depressed for a ton of different reasons, and the 'cures' are as wide and varying. Surely most people think this?

I think calling something a disease, or as with obesity in america, an epidemic, serves to alarm people and local governments and does a lot more good than harm.

Also, I don't know what root cause you're looking for beyond correcting the imbalances in serotonin, norepinephrine and dopamine.

I'm not sure if fixing the modern world's tendency towards crowding, emotional isolation, biologically toxic environments and stress is really in the jurisdiction of my physician.

Can you supply some links to this "academic research [that is] so clear and unambiguous"? I came to a similar conclusion years ago and would be interested in retracing your steps.

As for the not-understanding-it part, how is it hard to understand? It's effective marketing. The industry doesn't make money by people getting better, it makes money by getting (their) drugs into them. Humans are a vehicle for the delivery of their product. (So now are pets. The opening of the pet market for antidepressants is so classic a move that it will surely be studied in business schools.)

The vegetable oil industry did the same thing, ingeniously, against dairy fat. Remember those decades of propaganda about how butter and cream mean cholestorol which means heart attacks which mean death? It was an industry contrivance. The original studies it was based on were shamelessly cherry-picked. The campaign leveraged the widespread public fear that derived from the heart-attack epidemic of the 1950s and 60s. (Edit: I learned this from a CBC Ideas episode a few years ago.)

"Can you supply some links to this "academic research [that is] so clear and unambiguous"? I came to a similar conclusion years ago and would be interested in retracing your steps."

Just Google treatment for depression.

Are you being sarcastic? http://www.google.com/search?q=treatment+for+depression is a mire of orthodox SEO'd junk.

It's an interesting one.

On the one hand, I'm not shocked that taking all the nutrients out of food makes them less good for us.

On the other hand, we don't have a mechanism nailed down, and I'm wary of the correlation here - particularly because it's telling me something I'd like to believe.

Hopefully this will lead to more research - and possibly to ways of processing food that don't remove whatever the vital nutrients are.

Not to mention that knowing what causes this might be very useful - particularly if we can make it available in pill form :->

Correlation /= causation, which the article didn't really make note of. Does the actual research suggest causation, or merely a link?

Actually, it does make note of it:

Although the researchers cannot totally rule out the possibility that people with depression may eat a less healthy diet they believe it is unlikely to be the reason for the findings because there was no association with diet and previous diagnosis of depression.

I tend to eat unhealthier when I am feeling down. Of course, when I resolve an issue with a bug that has been given me trouble, I usually celebrate with unhealthy food as well. Many people have habits that are based on unhealthy food as a reward mechanism.

I think they looked more to people who eat processed foods as part of their normal diet and not people who eat processed foods as a reward.

It would be good to know how much processed food within some recurring time frame - say weekly - the people with recurring depression ate.

there's a correlation between depression and food, but there are also correlations between food and socio economic status. So being low income might also be contributing to mental health (which isn't addressed in the article at all; though they do point out that if there are a lot of takeaway joints near by then the problem is exacerbated...might those areas also be lower income?).

I'd need to read the article again but I think the study was done on civil employees. I don't know how broad the pay range is for civil employees nor if the authors sampled the full range.

The thing to keep in mind is that Western science made a dichotomy between the mind and body for religious reasons. In reality, they are completely interrelated. Eating unhealthy food will eventually affect your mind: right now it's just not predictable how or to what extent.

I was interested that income level was not considered as part of the potential correlation effect. Perhaps they imply that education level approximates this, but we do know that income level is relevant because of the higher "at checkout" cost of actual food. One correlation effect would be the higher income advantage in obtaining and regularly consuming fresh foods and what I suspect would be lower depression rates in general among more affluent participants (this is my postulate, not addressed in the study as far as I can tell).

Note: I'm not saying that poor people are all sad and rich people are all happy. My real world experiences run to the contrary in significant ways. I'm just suggesting that amongst these civil servants, there could be an economic feasibility bias that impacts the correlation and would further suggest against causation.

EDIT: corrected poor grammar.

A really interesting headline study a couple years back was with fish oil and juvenile delinquents. The kids fed fish oil had something like half the recidivism rate of the control group.

The implication here is that omega 3 fatty acid deficiencies are causing brain malfunction and criminal behavior.

But we already know that there are several nutritional deficiencies that can cause depression.

And we also know that one of the greatest mediating variables is social interaction, and presumably people who eat homemade meals are more likely to eat with their friends and family.

So I'd say that this fits very well with all of the previous research.

Does anyone know of any estimates of rates of depression say, 75-100-150 years ago? Depression seems to be a disease of civilization, but as far as I know it's not clear if it's rooted in something chemical (as this article suggests) or psychological (we simply have trouble finding meaning in the sorts of lives we live today).

Another question is when was depression first classified to the scope at which it is today. We can't know if its rising or falling over an extended period of time without such info.

I wonder if they controlled for socioeconomic biases. High fast food intake is correlated to a bunch of other things.

It's really depressing to come back from a hamburger (with fries) and read this article on hacker news.

I see about 5 of these articles a week. Whats the point? Are any of us going to change our behavior based on slight correlations reported in non scientific journals? Do the social and life sciences really experience breakthroughs every week? Or are these articles just fluff?

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