

Depression link to processed food - epo
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8334353.stm

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tokenadult
As usual, it's important to point out that this was not an experimental study
design (there was no random assignment to treatment and control groups). Peter
Norvig's online article about what to look for in research studies

<http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html>

suggests other issues to examine here.

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mkross
I was going to mumble something about correlation != causation, but I decided
to track down the paper first
(<http://bjp.rcpsych.org/cgi/content/full/195/5/408>). The authors didn't
explicitly decide that diet caused depression, but they did note that the data
seems to invalidate the idea that depression caused bad diets.

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gohat
I've done a lot of writing and analysis in health sciences. My very strong
intuition is that there is a study flaw here of one form or another.

What this seems to say, to me, is that people who choose to eat healthy also
tend to be less depressed than those who choose to not eat healthy.

Population bias may be a problem here - that eating unhealthy may not
necessarily cause depression, but rather those who are eating unhealthy are
also likely to be suffering from depression.

There is limited data on diet and its impact on health in general - except in
obvious cases of frank deficiency.

This could be like saying "People who go jogging daily tend to be happier in
general." You could say that jogging then causes happiness. Or you could say
that people who tend to jog are demographically likely to also do happy
inducing things.

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lsb
They're accounting for gender, age, education, and physical activity, but are
they also taking into account things like free time and stress level and
salary? If I need shove junk food into my face between my day job and my night
job, of course I'll be more depressed than if my butler (or non-working
spouse) makes me a parsnip soup after my 10-4 shift.

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vidar
You can argue about this study all you want but I dont think anyone wants to
stand up for processed food in general. Eat fresh.

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jrockway
The shareholders of food processing companies like it. The reason we have so
many processed foods is that traditional "whole food" businesses are not good
businesses to invest in. The population is not growing and people do not need
to eat more calories, so that means that your revenue is not going to grow
year over year, because the US basically needs the same amount of food every
year. This means that you have to make money by using less raw material and
charging more for it; hence, processed foods.

(Sure, Store A may steal sales form Store B in the short term, but in the long
term, the industry will not grow.)

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yuhong
Yea, I know. Dividends are a much better idea in this case than relying on
stock price growth.

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aces
causality always reminds me of this graph where it was proven ;-) that single
women cause acid rain.

[http://www.demotivate.info/wp-
content/uploads/2008/08/behang...](http://www.demotivate.info/wp-
content/uploads/2008/08/behanger-acid-rain-vs-singles-by-gender.jpg)

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haberman
This is exactly the kind of study I think of when I read an article like this:
[http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/12/13/101213fa_fact_...](http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/12/13/101213fa_fact_lehrer)

I've started tuning out every study that purports to "link" two things,
particularly if the claimed effect is cancer or the claimed cause is chic to
hate on.

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PonyGumbo
Interesting, but from November 2009.

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silentbicycle
Has human physiology completely changed in the last thirteen months? Does 2009
food have _absolutely nothing_ in common with 2011 food?

2009 is hardly ancient history.

~~~
kirubakaran
You are right, but I think s/he just means that this is not "news".

