Mediterranean Diet Cures Depression!?

S

spreadthewordcg

New member
Hey guys, first off I would like to say hello. I am new to the forum and i have already read a great deal. Secondly I just came across a very interesting article that i thought i would share with the forum. This article talks about a study taken by doctors in Spain. They studied the effects of the Mediterranean diet and one of the overwhelming effects was a decrease in depression by 60%...which i thought was incredible. Here is the website....BBC News.


EDIT: Replaced your spam site with real news site about the same thing.
 
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So first of all, good on the researchers, it seems like they might be on to something.

Now, you're not really interpreting the results correctly, the diet didn't result in a 60% reduction in depression, it resulted in a 30% lower chance of developing depression.

As the researchers themselves point out (and good on BBC for including it instead of going for the sensationalism) way more research is needed before anything can be said and used in both treatment and preventment.

Now, if you go for a less "easily red" news report on the research it becomes clear that they haven't done primary prevention trials, they need to reproduce the results in other population groups (we're talking 10000 Spaniards here so for all we know it might be the longtitude) and they didn't account for cultural effects in the study so..

I'd say, this is very interesting, let us do more research and pin down what is causing this, then lets synthesize it and put it in a pill.
 
Oh, boy. That looks really questionable to me.
They found that those with the highest adherence to the MDP were more than 30% less likely to develop depression.
Click to expand...
Could it be that the ones who went off the diet did so because they were depressed, and not the other way around?
 
One of the things I noticed is that the Mediterranean diet is high in fishies and low in processed foods - i.e. I did not see bread, pasta etc. on their list of things in the Med diet.

It would certainly be interesting to see studies done where they were varying components of the diet deliberately rather than just making correlations about how closely someone adhered. If they adhered 95% but ate more red meat? More spam? More cottage cheese?

Still, it re-affirms my love of olive oil ;)
 
Well the researchers themselves are pretty clear about this basically just meaning "there is something here we should figure out, lets do more research" so I'd blame the news media for any sensationalizing of the subject :)
 
And nothing researches like more than a study which reveals they should be given more funding to do more research, right!? :D
 
Well... I'll admit to having seen some researchers doing some hmm... well at least wastefull research to earn an income, but they actually do notice that they need cohort studies from other cultures etc. in the conclusion of the study, so either they're going "someone pick this up" or they're going "pay for me to travel the world"... I wouldn't know ;)
 
Yeah well, that's the price of research ;) I mean if there wasn't something in it for the researchers, how many would bother ;)

Still, the research does look interesting - even if they are getting paid to travel the world :D
 
I suspect that the fact that these people were able to afford a healthy mediteranean diet has more to do with it than the fact that this particular food is what they were eating.

Having a choice about your environment makes you less frustrated with it.
 
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