Food and Mood: How Diet Affects Depression (Mental Health Guru)
Diet
My friend is a vegan and insists my depression will be better if I go on an exclusive diet. Is she right?
No she isn’t. There is no evidence that exclusive diets help depression, and some of these diets are worryingly low in certain nutrients. The best dietary advice is to look after you generally.
Food is a basic human requirement and can give us pleasure and comfort.
• Make sure you are getting good nutrition.
• Avoid too much junk food.
• Enjoy what you are eating.
• Don’t stuff yourself.
• Give yourself an occasional treat.
• Avoid faddy diets at all costs.
• If your appetite is poor, try eating little and often or ‘grazing’.
What other alternative remedies can help depression? What about vitamins and health foods?
There are many herbal and vitamin supplements on sale. The health food industry is enormous, and makes all sorts of wonderful claims for its products that are mostly unsubstantiated. Unless you are seriously ill and malnourished from some physical illnesssuch as major bowel surgery or as a result of being on an extremely exclusive diet, there is no evidence at all that any health food supplements will treat depression.
That may sound rather a crushing thing to say, but these foods and vitamins are not cheap and your money can be better spent on something that can give you or others pleasure.
Vitamins and health foods absolutely do not treat depression but, of course, there are situations where some of them can be helpful to your general health. Middle-aged women are sensible to take a calcium supplement for their bone health, such as cod liver oil capsules. People who have been heavy drinkers may need thiamine, one of the B groups of vitamins. Iron deficiency anaemia can make you tired and low, and will respond to iron supplements (but note that many multivitamin preparations do not have enough iron in to be useful).
Vegan diets can be healthy but you have to be quite careful to get enough calories, iron and vitamins A and D included. Every vegan must take a B12 supplement to prevent spinal cord degeneration. A good source is Marmite, which is made from yeast and therefore is not an animal product. There is some evidence that there is not enough selenium, a trace element, in UK-grown vegetables, and a supplement of this may help prevent some cancers, but there is no evidence about its relationship to depression.
There is no clear evidence that zinc supplementation helps depression.
