[aquajet]

From article:

```

Others urged greater caution. Prof David Curtis, an honorary professor at University College London Genetics Institute, said: “The only foodstuffs which [this study] shows are associated with increased risk of depression are artificial sweeteners. Of course, this does not mean that an effect of artificial sweeteners is to increase depression risk – it is just that people with increased risk of developing depression tend to consume larger quantities of artificial sweeteners.”

But the authors disagree. Prof Andrew T Chan, chief of the clinical and translational epidemiology unit at Massachusetts general hospital and co-author of the research, said: “The strength of our study is that we were able to assess diet several years before the onset of depression. This minimises the likelihood that our findings are simply due to individuals with depression being more likely to choose ultra-processed foods.

```

Seems to be a correlation study to me. I also don't see any controls for other circumstances, so it can also be explained that other factors could contribute both to eating processed foods and getting depressed (ex: working long hours, having low income, relationship stress)

[retrac]

Depression impairs motivation, decreases tolerance of physical discomfort, and is also associated with impairment of planning abilities, and also has a correlation with eating disorders.

Occam's razor: the depressed can't plan and then cook a good meal for themselves, and so buy ready-to-eat processed food.

Anecdotally, when I was younger and very poor, I could not eat well unless I did everything from scratch -- several hours of work a day in the kitchen. When I got depressed, I'd try to cook while hungry, and get more and more agitated at my discomfort until I lost emotional control, and nothing got cooked. Cry. Eat instant noodles or crackers. Repeat the next day. When I finally made or got my hands on a proper hot meal with protein, my mood would noticeably improve.

My mood is still very susceptible to my diet, but these days I can afford stop-gap solutions to having no energy to cook, like just getting some reasonably healthy takeout.

[andrei_says_]

Also impulse control and relationship to instant gratification and addictive behaviors.

Processed foods are formulated to induce addictive behavior.

[ShamelessC]

Oh well in that case yeah throw out any concerns or criticisms. `retrac`'s anecdote and invocation of the law of Occam's Razor is proof that the study is iron clad.

[esafak]

"We used 2 definitions for depression:

(1) a strict definition requiring self-reported clinician–diagnosed depression and regular antidepressant use and

(2) a broad definition requiring clinical diagnosis and/or antidepressant use.

We estimated hazard ratios (HRs) and 95% CIs for depression according to quintiles of UPF intake using Cox proportional hazards models, with adjustment for known and suspected risk factors for depression, including age, total caloric intake, body mass index (BMI; calculated as weight in kilograms divided by height in meters squared), physical activity, smoking status, menopausal hormone therapy, total energy intake, alcohol, comorbidities (eg, diabetes, hypertension, dyslipidemia), median family income, social network levels, marital status, sleep duration, and pain."

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...

[nerdjon]

I know that when my mental health starts to become a problem again the first thing that goes is any desire to cook. Which often leads to gettin take out, frozen meals, or just constant snacking.

I have had basically zero desire to cook (or really do much of anything in complete honesty) for the last couple weeks and I am super thankful for "processed" things like Huel.

Edit: Also I am 100% going to reach for that frozen meal from Trader joes that gives me a brief amount of joy and makes me feel good.

[jancsika]

> I have had basically zero desire to cook (or really do much of anything in complete honesty) for the last couple weeks and I am super thankful for "processed" things like Huel.

I'd never heard of Huel. Just looking at the info on their bag of pasta bolognese:

* bag size is 721 grams but serving size is 101g!

* they put the "per day" measurement at 505g? But even there, you're be consuming 3200mg of sodium-- 139% of the daily recommended value

Honestly, eating a 101g serving sounds to me like attempting to eat 1/8 of a bag of M&Ms.

If I open that 721g bag for lunch, it's going to be gone by end of day, guaranteed. (Probably with half a baguette for dipping.)

Edit: I forgot it's for lunch and dinner in my example. So make that a whole baguette. :)

[aquajet]

Hope you feel better soon :)

But this shows that theres no eating processed food --> get depressed causation, just a correlation. Otherwise a perfectly happy person who eats a lot of tv dinners would inexplicably get sad with nothing else in their life changing.

[roughly]

> I also don't see any controls for other circumstances, so it can also be explained that other factors could contribute both to eating processed foods and getting depressed (ex: working long hours, having low income, relationship stress)

Of course there were controls.

Directly from the article: “Adjusting for other health, lifestyle and socioeconomic risk factors for depression…”

As noted in another comment, the paper goes into further details on the controls they used.

Honestly, this kind of thing is insulting. If you’re going to levy that kind of accusation of incompetence against someone, you at least owe it to them to read the source material before doing so.

[fshbbdssbbgdd]

It’s good of you make this correction, we need to be accurate when discussing the research at hand.

That said, it’s worth pointing out that “adjusting for” a factor isn’t quite as effective as it sounds: https://dynomight.net/control/

Having built some regression models in my time, throwing a ton of extra variables in doesn’t fill me with confidence that I am “controlling” much of anything.

[llm_nerd]

Researchers love dunking on artificial sweeteners. It is one of the guaranteed methods of getting loads of press. Press yields prestige. Given that artificial sweeteners often correlate with people with weight / health problems like diabetes for very functional reasons, it's like shooting fish in a barrel.

Paradoxically this same data source (the Nurses' Health study, which is a continuous series of questionnaires) has had a prior paper claiming "sugar-sweetened soft drinks, refined grains, and red meat" led to depression. Now that "ultra-processed foods" and artificial sweeteners are the public demon, they take centre stage for the next round. I suspect with a bit of p-hacking one can contrive whatever aha result they desire out of it.

Their argument regarding eliminating correlation seems suspect. They analyzed diet in period 1 against reported depression in period 1 and found a given correlation. They then analyzed diet in period 1 against reported depression in period 2 (apparently 4 years later) and claim to have found the same correlation, which is what he cites in defence. Yet they never state that depression in period 2 in those cases is worse than period 1, invalidating it.

The Nurses' Health Study is a really fascinating exercise and certainly holds massive use, but it also has been a source of a lot of incredibly dubious nutritional "science".

https://nurseshealthstudy.org/participants/questionnaires

The NHS II surveys were the ones they used for this "get press" study, and looking at the actual surveys it seems doubtful that they yielded the results they did.

Probably could build a lot of fun blog entries p-hacking the data from these surveys.

[jcampbell1]

What if the deep subconscious keeps track of sweetness in the mouth and nutritional requirements (conscience hunger and cravings)? Artificial sweeteners would break the biological programming and cause all sorts of problems including depression and inappropriate hunger.

Edit: I hadn’t fully thought this through, but in my experience sometimes looking at a clock causes the physical hunger sensation. I have also been painfully starving which immediately stopped after the first swallow of a chugging a coke. Artificial sweeteners would have thrown a monkey wrench in my biological machinery.

[hedora]

There is a lot of evidence that artificial^W non-caloric sweeteners are terrible.

There are correlation studies in humans showing many different health issues (weight gain, cancer, mental health issues, among others) that correct for all sorts of confounding factors.

There are experimental studies in rodents that show all of the above across multiple products.

They're known to interact poorly with certain drugs taken for mental illness, and can cause all sorts of brain-related problems in some people (such as migraines).

They're also known to screw up your gut's microbial community, and that's shown to cause depression.

(I'm not commenting on the quality of this particular study, to be clear.)

[vorpalhex]

I wonder if depression simply starts much earlier than diagnostic controls detect it.

Even though this study started years before these people were diagnosed, they may have already had depression.

[coffeeling]

The counterargument by Chan misses Curtis' point - people with higher RISK of developing depression. Depression goes hand in hand with high trait neuroticism, and both the internalizing and externalizing branches of neuroticism contain subtraits related to lower self-control (though we're mostly with the internalizing one here, I'd imagine)

[mjevans]

The correlation might still be useful as identifying how society is failing both in providing (tasty, easy, cost equivalent or better, healthy) alternative foods and how rampant a problem this is.