Depression Linked to Ultra-Processed Foods, Artificial Sweeteners

Or is it “Depression linked to being poor and not affording proper food”?

Not to mention that if you're depressed, preparing healthy food can be a huge struggle because of the effort involved in acquiring ingredients, cooking/preparing the food, and cleanup afterwards.
- Also often not mentioned is the planning required before going shopping and the amount of food wasted when cooking for one. Like if getting out of the house is already such a huge chore it becomes impossible to also add planning the groceries plus if half of it is going to be wasted anyway there isn't even any cost difference. What incentive is left except some abstract ideal to live a healthy lifestyle.
- It's the same cycle as if your poor, you end up having to buy the worse deals in groceries because you have to buy cheap overall, thus keeping you poor and unhealthy. Having depression causes you to be unmotivated to cook healthy and you end up eating crap, making you feel crappy, and keeping you depressed.
- This is exactly it, I'm not depressed because I eat shitty processed food, I eat that shit because it's the only thing I have the energy to deal with.
- call me crazy but I find washing the dishes and vacuuming very therapeutic
- I'm depressed, heating up frozen nuggies right now
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.
- As a person with Dysthymia, shit like this pisses me off to no end. I've dealt with depression most of my life and I've lived many different lifestyles, super healthy and fit, eating very healthy and the complete opposite of the spectrum, binge eating, super overweight, getting destroyed by diabetes, and the one constant has always been the depression. Articles like this, as you say, are just a distraction and putting the blame on the victim. They obviously have an agenda to attack process foods and artificial sweeteners and depression is not the reason they are attacking them.
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.
I imagine there's a number of confounding variables, yes.

I assume this is a correlation study? not a causation one?

It seems plausible the opposite is true, that depressed people are more likely to eat easy sweet foods.

Or even that if you're depressed, you only have the energy to eat pre-processed foods.
That's exactly the first thing that crossed my mind. Whenever I get a depressive episode, the last thing I want to do is cook. So the least effort, quickest meal is the meal I have. And meals like that are generally processed, terrible foods.

This has and presents problems.

The good news: it is using data from the Nurses Study. That's hard data to beat because it's got a great collection method going back years and years.

Bad news: it's only covering four years. Bad news: it defines ultra processed foods as, among other things. having lots of calories. But spends a whole lot of time blaming drinks with artificial sweeteners. The one thing artificial sweeteners aren't is calorie dense.

Either way it will give us something to argue about for a few years.

The one thing artificial sweeteners aren’t is calorie dense.
Depends if HFCS counts as "artificial," I suppose.
I have personally noticed that my hunger is worse when drinking sugar-free soda.
quitting it made sticking to a calorie deficit easier.
after I had these results I googled about it and apparently it's known possible side-effect for women and overweight people
so if anything the sugar free stuff is at least not all that no-brainer choice people make it out to be
- it's still a no-brainer to switch from normal soda to sugarfree: the calories in normal soda is literally just sugar which is the absolute worst form they could take, whereas in food you're likely to get at least half of the calories in the form of fat/protein/larger carbohydrates.
  Plus when you eat the calories instead of drinking them it makes you feel fuller, and there's at least a chance you'll get some more fibre in your diet.

“What we found is that consuming high amounts of ultra-processed foods could increase your risk of developing depression by up to 50%,” said Raaj Mehta, MD, MPH, one of the study’s authors and a gastroenterologist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.

Obligatory: Fuck Nestlé (P&G, Unilever, etc.)

those water thieves
You know nothing is stopping people from eating these foods in moderation. You don't have to go out and eat a family sized bag of chips by yourself in a single sitting.
Consuming large amounts of any food in a single sitting would be bad for you.
- I had no idea. Thanks for the update.
- Eating disorders exist, company cantines exist, poverty exists. Not everyone has free choice in exactly how much processed stuff they eat.
- Family sized bags of chips are also a comfort food and very appealing when depressed.
  They are cheap enough and filling enough and interesting enough that you can find yourself munching through them as you try and distract yourself from whatever.
  It's quite easy to set up a vicious circle of depressed -> eat crap -> depression.
  And it is very difficult to break out of it

Why?

"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.)

jokes on them i cant even afford processed foods.

Can’t wait for this study to be buried and it’s republished with “corrected” findings

Remember sugar how they later said it was fat?