Or is it “Depression linked to being poor and not affording proper food”?
Came here to say this…
If only they’d have thought of learning even the most basic facts about depression first, they could have saved themselves a lot of time and money.
But I suspect they were never looking to improve the lives of depressed people, but rather just to get on the latest buzzword-bandwagon that vilifies “ultra-processed foods” but never offers any viable alternative, let alone addresses the reasons why people consume, or even rely on it in the first place, and who benefits from making and selling it (because the answer is capitalism, and the capitalists funding these waste-of-resources hollow research projects wouldn’t fund one that points the finger back at them).
This nonsense is just as much a distraction and a shifting of responsibility from systemic to personal as plastic bans and made up “carbon footprint” are.
He said that because this is an observational study – one that looked at data already gathered – they cannot say highly processed food causes depression. That said, he thinks the data is strong.
“We were able to adjust for a number of what are called confounding variables in our analysis to suggest that eating more ultra-processed foods really could increase your risk of depression.”
“Sometimes what you see when you adjust for these variables is that the models or the results get weaker. And we didn’t really see that at all,” he later said.
Yeah this is dodgy. Basically he’s saying “we cannot say something but we’ll say it anyway,”. You only need 1 confounding factor or 1 incorrect adjustment to completely break the validity of any link.
To say the link got stronger as they adjusted for different confounding factors doesn’t mean anything. It’s a specious argument.
“proper food” is actually very cheap - from a nutritional point of view, beans and rice are a complete meal. other cheap examples include peanut butter with whole wheat bread, hummus and pita bread, tortillas and refried beans (or a pinto bean and corn salad) - even a simple tofu stir fry is nutritionally complete.
it’s true that some of the ingredients take time to prepare but that’s just a sacrifice you have to make to eat cheap and healthy food.
jokes on them i cant even afford processed foods.
“What we found is that consuming high amounts of ultra-processed foods could increase your risk of developing depression by up to 50%”
and
“He said that … they cannot say highly processed food causes depression”
Those statements sound contradictory (Or do they mean that it ‘could’ be 50% or 0%? But if so, why say anything at all)
He can’t say it definitely because, even though the observational results are convincing, you’d want to produce biological/neurological evidence to be able to make the claim with certainty.
Sure. Then imho if he can’t say it definitively, he should not make the first claim (slipping in weasel words like ‘could’ and ‘up to’ serve as a lazy catch-all disclaimer in that case.)
