United Kingdom: A new study has found that eating greater amounts of ultraprocessed food and drinks, especially artificially sweetened items, may lead to the development of depression in women.
Ultraprocessed foods include prepackaged soups, sauces, frozen pizza, ready-to-eat meals, and pleasure foods such as hot dogs, sausages, French fries, sodas, store-bought cookies, cakes, candies, doughnuts, and ice cream, as well as many more foods and drinks containing artificial sweeteners.
The study co-author Dr. Andrew T. Chan, a Daniel K. Podolsky professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and professor of immunology and infectious diseases at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston, commented that “our study focused on the link between foods and the subsequent risk of developing a new episode of depression.”
The study, published in the journal JAMA Network Open, examined the diets of nearly 32,000 middle-aged women who are part of the Nurses’ Health Study II, a longitudinal look at women’s health.
According to Mr. Chan, there is also a link between ultraprocessed food and disruption of the gut microbiome. “This is an important potential mechanism linking ultraprocessed food to depression since there is emerging evidence that microbes in the gut have been linked with mood through their role in metabolising and producing proteins that have activity in the brain,” the co-author further noted.
“The research suggests an association between consumption of ultra-processed foods and depression, with an about 50 percent higher risk for those consuming 9 portions (per day) or more (the top 20 percent) compared to those consuming 4 portions or less,” Mr. Gunter Kuhnle, a professor of food and nutritional science at the University of Reading in the UK, said in a statement.
The study is observational, which means that researchers can only find an association between the onset of depression and the intake of ultraprocessed foods. Therefore, the study cannot account for the possibility of a phenomenon known as “reverse causality,” Dr. David Katz, a specialist in preventive and lifestyle medicine who founded the nonprofit True Health Initiative, noted.
“It’s also possible that depression and a higher intake of ‘junk’ and ‘comfort’ foods feed on each other,” Dr. Katz added.
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