Junk food for thought… September 29, 2018
Posted by WorldbyStorm in Uncategorized.trackback
Eating junk food increases the risk of becoming depressed, a study has found, prompting calls for doctors to routinely give dietary advice to patients as part of their treatment for depression.In contrast, those who follow a traditional Mediterranean diet are much less likely to develop depression because the fish, fruit, nuts and vegetables that diet involves help protect against Britain’s commonest mental health problem, the research suggests.Published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry, the findings have come from an analysis by researchers from Britain, Spain and Australia who examined 41 previous studies on the links between diet and depression.
This doesn’t entirely surprise me, or many of us I’ll bet.
I was in a shop the other day looking for some food to make up a meal. I’m no great cook but I can do the basics – but what struck me was that everything, bar the sausages and bacon (arguably), was pre-processed and pre-packaged. So there were burgers with buns and barbecue chicken pre-cooked, or whatever, in plastic wrappers, but nothing at all along the lines of even packaged fresh meat. And forget about it entirely if you’re a vegetarian. It was a weird experience, there was no choice. And it makes the very term convenience store seem wildly inappropriate.
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Does eating a lot of take-aways, pre-prepared and processed food make you depressed or do the depressed tend to eat more of that stuff? Cause or effect? I suppose I should read the article but a lot of this diet research is iffy, even in proper scientific journals (and rubbish elsewhere).
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It’s a bit of both I’d think. And I’d agree a lot of diet research is very iffy. Thing is that highly processed foods aren’t nutritionally or emotionally (I use the term advisedly) filling.
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Of course, to eat a Mediterranean diet if you’re single you need: the money to afford the ingredients, transport to get to a big supermarket that stocks such stuff if you don’t live within walking distance of one, a fully equipped kitchen to prepare it all in, the time to cook it all, and the enthusiasm (not readily available if you suffer from depression) after a hard day’s work to drag out pots and pans and chopping boards and flip through your recipes. Or, as Alex Andreou said: “[Jamie] Oliver observes: “The poorest families in this country choose the most expensive way to hydrate and feed their families. The ready meals, the convenience foods.” If only he could travel back in time and advise the homeless me of 2009 how to replace a Tesco Value lasagne or Tesco Value chicken curry, both under £1, with something healthy that I can buy from the King’s Cross Tesco Metro (the only supermarket within walking distance) and cook in a microwave (the only cooking apparatus at my disposal).”
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That’s fair enough. I think an outright Mediterranean diet is probably tricky and it’s unreasonable to expect people without access to full kitchens to align with same. Still, there’s ways and means of moving in that direction. Fruit, salad, etc, even a bit more in a diet is a good thing. There’s a happier middle ground for those who can’t get all the way.
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Yes, there’s the enthusiasm for cooking – and the enthusiasm for eating anything in the first place.
These days my appetite is really low, and sometimes I eat a little junk food because it’s tasty but not *that* tasty – while everything else I got doesn’t feel tasty enough to bother eating, but I know I need to eat *something*.
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“Sugar… is a blood-soaked product that has brought havoc to millions and environmental devastation to large parts of the planet, premature death to the poorest populations in many parts of the world and huge health costs for societies from the United States to India.”
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