High inflammatory diet found to increase likelihood of depression, new study finds
CTV
A new study published in the Journal of Affective Disorders found a correlation between a highly inflammatory diet and the risk for depression.
A new study published in the Journal of Affective Disorders has found a correlation between a highly inflammatory diet and an increased risk for depression.
And the researchers state their findings will have an impact on public health, as it’s an indication that a controlled diet could potentially help those with depression or prevent the illness in the first place.
The participants included 30,627 individuals from the U.S. who had been studied in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), a program of studies designed to assess the health and nutritional status of adults and children in the United States from 2007 to 2018.
The study aimed to assess the association between the dietary inflammatory index (DII), which is a scoring algorithm designed to estimate how diet impacts inflammation in the body and health outcomes as a result, to the cross-sectional study of NHANES.
The participants were asked questions regarding which foods they consume as their diet, and were given a score based on their dietary inflammation, and also rated for depression.
Based off this data, the researchers found what is called a J-shaped relationship, which is defined, according to academics, as a non-linear relationship between two variables and appears as a curve that initially falls, but then rises to become higher than the starting point, between DII and depression.
Meaning, at a set point, the amount of inflammation within the body appeared to exceed the body's capacity.
