Category: Depression

People eating this way are less likely to suffer from depression and other mental health problems.

People who eat intuitively have a lower chance of developing mental health problems, research finds.

Eating intuitively means eating based on hunger and fullness.

Dieting or restricting food intake is the opposite of intuitive eating.

Everyone is probably an intuitive eater when they are born.

But, over the years, the effects of social conditioning change how some people view food.

People learn that wasting food is bad, that certain tasty foods should be avoided, along with a host of other rules.

Unfortunately, these rules can paradoxically make people desire the banned foods more.

Some end up eating to excess because of the restrictions they have placed on themselves.

The conclusions come from a study of 1,491 adolescents who were tracked over 8 years, between the ages of around 14 to 22.

They were all asked questions like:

• do you stop eating when you are full?
• do you trust your body to tell you how much to eat?
• do you eat everything on your plate, even when no longer hungry?

The idea was to see whether the young people were trusting their own internal bodily states or following some external guidelines.

The results showed that intuitive eaters tend to trust their own body so they stop when they are full, rather than when the plate is empty.

Intuitive eaters, it emerged, experienced fewer depressive symptoms, more satisfaction with their body, higher self-esteem, less binge eating and fewer extreme or unhealthy weight control behaviours.

People with the intuitive food behaviours were 74 percent less likely to binge eat.

Dr Vivienne Hazzard, the study’s first author, said:

“The fact that these results came from such a diverse sample suggests that the benefits of intuitive eating seem to cut across racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic lines.”

The study was published in the Eating and Weight Disorders – Studies on Anorexia, Bulimia and Obesity (Hazzard et al., 2020).

Is a common ingredient in your meals leading to depression?

A high-fat diet can cause depression, research reveals.

The fatty acids enter the brain through the bloodstream and accumulate in the hypothalamus.

There they affect critical brain signals that are linked to depression.

It helps to explain why scientists have found that depression and obesity are often seen together.

For the study, mice were fed a high-fat diet, made up of 60 percent saturated and unsaturated fats.

The results showed that the mice began to demonstrate depressive behaviour after three weeks.

Professor George Baillie, who led the study, said:

“This is the first time anyone has observed the direct effects a high fat diet can have on the signaling areas of the brain related to depression.

This research may begin to explain how and why obesity is linked with depression and how we can potentially better treat patients with these conditions.

We often use fatty food to comfort ourselves as it tastes really good, however in the long term, this is likely to affect one’s mood in a negative way.”

Examination of their brains revealed that the fats had built up in the hypothalamus.

The hypothalamus is an area of the brain that causes levels of cortisol — the ‘stress hormone’ — to rise in the body.

Normally the hormone reduces once a threat passes, but in people with depression, their cortisol levels can remain high.

Higher levels of cortisol are linked to depression.

This may help to explain why people who are obese do not respond as well to antidepressant medication.

Professor Baillie continued:

“We all know that a reduction in fatty food intake can lead to many health benefits, but our research suggests that it also promotes a happier disposition.

Further to that, understanding the types of fats, such as palmitic acid, which are likely to enter the brain and affect key regions and signaling will give people more information about how their diet can potentially affect their mental health.”

The study was published in the journal Translational Psychiatry (Vagena et al., 2019).

Mental health problems can lead to a vicious circle that badly damages relationships.

Women who are depressed lose their ability to read emotions and this damages their relationship, research finds.

Women’s depression also causes their husbands to become less empathic.

The loss of ’empathic accuracy’ on both sides erodes the relationship, leading to more depression — and so the vicious circle continues.

The conclusions come from a study of 50 couples who had been together for an average of five years.

Couples recorded how their relationship was going over a period of three weeks.

The results showed that when a woman was depressed, she was worse at reading her partner’s emotions.

Depression had no effect on men’s empathic accuracy.

However, when women became less empathic, their partner also became less empathic — so mutual understanding was lost in both directions.

The study’s authors write:

“…women’s depressive symptoms are associated with poorer interpersonal perception—both their own and their partners’.

This impairment is specific to negative feelings…empathic accuracy is an interpersonal mechanism that underlies the association between depressive symptoms and interpersonal stress.”

This shows the extremely damaging effect of women’s depression on a relationship.

Women become less empathic when depressed, and this damages the relationship.

Dr Reuma Gadassi, the study’s first author, explained that the effect spreads from women to men:

“It’s called the partner effect.

Women’s depression affects their own accuracy.

But it also affected their partner’s accuracy”

Dr Gadassi said this had important implications for treatment:

“…you can’t understand depression without taking account of gender.

Bringing only the depressed woman into therapy is not enough.

You really have to have both partners in the room.”

The study was published in the journal Psychological Science (Gadassi et al., 2011).