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Association between meatless diet and depressive episodes
- netmonk 4y ago
- sieste 4y ago
- AnonC 4y agoI found this intriguing and interesting: > Nutrient deficiencies do not explain this association. The nature of the association remains unclear, and longitudinal data are needed to clarify causal relationship.
- curiousfab 4y agoMaybe people who are vegetarians have a more compassionate way of thinking, making them more prone to depression? I.e. they're not depressed because they're vegetarians, but the other way around? Just my spontaneous thought when I read this.
- candiddevmike 4y agoReally sounds like some kind of nutritional deficiency though, specifically Vitamin B12: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7688056/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7688056/
- cinntaile 4y agoIt seems unlikely that the nutritional researchers would have missed checking for vitamin B12 deficiency?
- shever73 4y agoThat is an interesting paragraph. I wonder if it could be linked to people often choosing a meatless diet due to animal cruelty concerns. The more aware of it you are, the more you see it. A bit like veterinarians having higher rates of depression.
- dominotw 4y agoThis was done in brazil which is a very meat focused culture. Not eating meat automatically makes you an outsider or maybe people doing this are outsiders in the first place. Outsiders = depression :) > Limitations. > The cross-sectional design precluded the investigation of causal relationships.
- jasonhansel 4y agoSome have argued that meat contains compounds that, while not strictly essential nutrients, are still beneficial, like creatine. But this is pretty controversial.
- wyager 4y agoWhat they literally mean is "the model of nutrition we are using does not predict the association". This is evidence that whatever model they're using isn't complete. Nutrition science is still under rapid development, and its epistemic rigor is not yet very high. There are many reasons that plant-based diets are theorized to cause health issues that are not yet conclusively proven or disproven, such as the effects of plant fat profiles on human metabolism. Plants are certainly not chemically fungible with animals, and popular nutritional models do not incorporate many details of this.
- im3w1l 4y agoInteresting but being purely correlational is a big limitation. It seems quite plausible that people that worry and feel depressed about climate change and animal welfare would choose to go vegetarian. The diet making people depressed is quite plausible too.
- bowsamic 4y agoI'm interested in knowing what kind of data analysis technique you have that goes beyond "purely correlational"
- im3w1l 4y agoThe standard way is to do an intervention: either tell meat eaters to stop eating meat or tell vegetarians to start. Then compare with a control group. In medicine it's also advisable to use double-blinding. I'm not suggesting the authors made a mistake or anything. An association study is a good cheap starting point to see whether a closer look is warranted.
- iinnPP 4y agoI was thinking the same thing. As a former vegan(not vegetarian), the lifestyle was the result of distrust in other foods. Everything had to be organic, unprocessed, and free of all animal products. It also became difficult to continue eating out with friends and family. Our family holidays became difficult. Both of which can lead to depression. The diet is also not simple. There are rules involved in getting the consumed nutrients into your body effectively. A prime example being vitamin C and iron.
- yalogin 4y agoThis seems pointless. Did they have a motivation, a hypothesis in mind before they started on this investigation? I mea on with enough data I can show all sorts of meaningless relationships that ultimately have no bearing on each other. Why is this warrant a publication?
- stavros 4y agoPresumably, if you have enough data to show an association, it's not meaningless.
- brink 4y ago
- magpi3 4y agoWhy do you say that?
- snarfy 4y agoI believe the joke is Q: "How do you know who is a vegan at a party?" A: "They tell you"
- craggyjaggy 4y agoHow do you know someone spends most of their energy being angry at vegans? They'll tell you this joke. (And start to argue with anyone they see eating a meatless meal)
- magpi3 4y agoI tell people I'm vegetarian only when I am offered meat, which yes happens regularly. So I have no choice. Eating is social, so anyone who hangs with me for any amount of time is going to figure out I'm vegetarian.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- fegu 4y ago
- magpi3 4y agoAs a vegetarian with lots of vegetarian friends, I'll add a purely anecdotal observation: People who choose to not eat meat generally do so for a reason, and for many of my friends that reason is cruelty to animals. If a person is aware of cruelty to animals, and actually cares enough to actually change their lifestyle, then that person extends their empathy beyond their own life, beyond their own immediate sphere. For me, it is this quality that can lead to depression. If a person allows themselves to take on the suffering they see see around them, if they allow themselves to really feel it, the world seems colder and crueler and the individual feels more powerless. IOW, I do think people with very strong powers of denial about the wrongs they see around them are generally happier.
- iinnPP 4y agoAka ignorance is bliss.
- ryukoposting 4y agoIs it really ignorance? I've seen the pictures of Chickens in cages. I'm aware of the industrialized meat business. I'm aware of the shitty conditions a lot of animals are put in. It just doesn't make me feel bad about eating meat.
- timeon 4y agoSeems like it is.
- iinnPP 4y agoI would be happier not knowing how the animals are treated.
- kcplate 4y agoI am aware of all that as well and it doesn’t bother me either, because they are food and food is something I need to survive. Whether it’s higher order life or lower order life…for you to live, something else has to die.
- mihaic 4y agoGiven that this study was made in Brazil, I can't not imagine the social consequences of not eating meat (exclusion from barbeques, etc) and how those also affect mental wellbeing. I would love a cross-culture study of this, especially with India or Japan.
- whiddershins 4y agoWhy Japan?
- mihaic 4y agoMore of a curiosity given how different it is culturally and culinarily. Obesity is socially shumed more, which I'd imagine correlates negatively to health issues from a vegetarian carb-rich diet.
- loceng 4y agoProperly designed studies for food need to be done in every single population to determine what genetic lineage differences there may be.
- hasitseth 4y agoWhat the study misses is that the participants Brazilians are likely to meat-eaters who were denied meet. Try run the study in places like India with partial vegetarians. If denied meat, they are not likely to have similar outcomes.
- bamboozled 4y agoI went through a very serious episode of depression when I was a vegetarian. I was so, so down and had many thoughts which might be not far off suicidal. Something like a nervous breakdown and existential crisis rolled into one. I read somewhere that I might be deficient in certain things and I should check my diet. The depression could be my body telling me something is missing. I started to reintroduce whey protein (I was avoiding dairy because cows welfare) and chicken back into my diet, then fish. I was desperate to get out of this state of mind. I can’t say for certain this was the cure but it worked for me (sadly) because it would be nice if I didn’t feel like I needed to eat meat.
- iinnPP 4y agoCan you go over how you were getting iron into your system? A lot of people get this wrong. If you would rather not share, maybe investigate yourself and see if that is enough to try your goals again.
- bamboozled 4y agoEating a lot of greens, nuts, tofu etc etc, a balanced diet, but maybe not balanced enough. I wasn't eating red meat for a while, I stayed with chicken and fish, which I don't believe are great sources of iron, then I started to feel better. I got back into red meat later on, maybe 6 months later. I think I was eating a balanced diet, but not good enough. I did try vegetarian again for a few years at a later stage. This time, I was working from home and cooking a LOT of curries with legumes etc, I seemed to feel good and I was monitoring my mental health closely. I made sure to do a bit more protein. I would've just ate meat again if I didn't feel well but I never ended up depressed like before. The experiment ended however when I moved to another country where it was just too hard to cook and prepare vegetarian again, so I don't have much more to add unfortunately. Maybe eating vegetarian is ok if one has a lot of time for it?
- sheerun 4y agoI can highly recommend vegetarian imitations of meat products, in fact the Polish Go Vege brand often tastes better than real thing, which I earlier thought was not possible to do. I am in no way associated, just a fan. Here is list of products they sell: https://pliki.portalspozywczy.pl/i/13/48/44/134844_r0_940.jpg https://pliki.portalspozywczy.pl/i/13/48/44/134844_r0_940.jp...
- abledon 4y ago> The association between meatless diet and presence of depressive episodes was expressed as a prevalence ratio (PR), determined by Poisson regression adjusted for... PRs ranging from 2.05 (95%CI 1.00–4.18) in the crude model to 2.37 (95%CI 1.24–4.51) in the fully adjusted model. science direct needs some ELI5 graph tool where you could plug in these arcane results. e.g. for this particular study they use the Poisson distribution https://www.reddit.com/r/askmath/comments/1mqdwb/eli5_the_poisson_distribution_and_why_it_is_not/ https://www.reddit.com/r/askmath/comments/1mqdwb/eli5_the_po... , a bit to unpack there for the uninitiated in statistics.
- nialse 4y agoAgreed. Also, the crude CI is almost crossing 1 and the width (and PR) seems to increase when controlling for other things. This may suggest that those other things may be of more significant interest than the main effect the authors are modeling.
- heroiccocoa 4y agoCorrelation is not causation, especially not in nutrition where it's so hard to control for hidden factors. There exist randomized controlled trials that show the exact opposite of this association, see https://nutritionj.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1475-2891-11-9 https://nutritionj.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1475-2.... I consider these RCTs to be much higher quality evidence than other types of study designs such as the in the OP.
- Footkerchief 4y agoAnother study finds: > [...] neuroticism was related to more positive attitudes toward animals and speciesism. This association was driven by the withdrawal aspect of the neuroticism trait. [...] This pattern suggests that people who feel more anxious, passive, and withdrawn may also tend to have somewhat more positive and less hierarchical attitudes toward animals. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08927936.2022.2084996 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08927936.2022.2...
- tombh 4y agoHow would one conduct a similar study on meat diets? We'd have to find vegetarians and give them meat?
- parasti 4y agoAs a vegetarian of eight years, I can say that a meatless diet did not have any effect on my depressive episodes. I had them before I stopped eating meat, and I had them after. So based on my one person anecdata this is correlation (maybe a depressed person tries a lifestyle change to help themselves out of depression) but not causation.
- superb-owl 4y agoThe study was done in Brasil, which has a very meat-intensive food culture (IIUC). I imagine that skews the results.
- globalnode 4y agoi cant access the article, anyone know where they got their funding?
- Overtonwindow 4y agoI’m surprised there wasn’t a mention of Vegetarian and vegan being more of a fad. There seems to be a lot of people who go vegetarian or vegan not for any serious moral, or health issues, but because it interesting?
- andrewfromx 4y agoIf you break this down into "light" and "darkness" and define darkness as just the absence of any light you can see where the depression comes from. Think of a lantern in a dark room. You are in the center of the room (the star below) the half way point between the lantern and the end of the room. So any step you take toward the positive direction, you are now surrounded with MORE darkness. + / [+3] / [+2] / [+1] * \ [-1] \ [-2] \ [-3] - i.e. start caring about animals and that's great, that's positive, but woah, at +1 you have more darkness now than at the zero point. Matias explains this well at 8:06 mark: https://vimeo.com/664874546 https://vimeo.com/664874546
- hombre_fatal 4y agoI wonder how much of this is due to social ostracism. Even on HN, it's hard for people to hide their snide for those who avoid meat.