A new clinical study from down under exploring the link between diet and depression was released this week, and its findings all point to one conclusion: The healthier your diet, the less likely you are to develop depression. And, if you are depressed, a better diet can help…
A healthy, high quality diet like the Mediterranean Diet (ingredients shown
above) can help ward off or alleviate symptoms of depression…
One of the studies, by a team at Western Sydney University in Australia, data-mined 16 different studies with a total of 46,000 participants. The result was a strong association between diet and depression. The better the diet, the better the mood. Oddly, though, the study found this effect occurred in women, but not in men.
“One explanation is that, because we were looking into the effects of diet on symptoms of depression in the general population, where the rates of depression are higher among women, the change was much more visible,”study Lead Author Dr. Joseph First told The New Daily. “It’s also possible that we don’t understand how diet interacts with mental health, which could be due to genuine biological differences. [But the] main message is that just reducing your junk food and increasing your intake of high-nutrient foods is enough to boost your mood.”
Psychiatry Professor Michael Berk, a depression expert at Deakin University called the healthy diet study ‘a message of hope’ to depression sufferers and those prone to develop depression: ““[The paper] says that diet, like physical activity and smoking, is a modifiable risk factor. We [now] know that, if you eat a healthy diet, you reduce your chance of developing depression by 30 per cent.”
My take…
It just makes sense. We already know that eating certain high-quality foods high in antioxidants can help slow the progression of diseases like Alzheimer’s and simple dementia. Even Red Wine (in moderation) has been shown to help in that regard. And Chocolate and Leafy Greens have been found to boost cognition. So it seems like good old common sense that a healthy diet high in antioxidants (like the Med Diet) should be just the thing to help counter or ward off depression.
There’s that Mediterranean Diet, cropping up again…
~ Maggie J.