Prospective Associations between Diet Quality and Mental Health in Adults

• Author / Creator

  Marozoff, Shelby

• Mental illnesses are highly prevalent in Canada and pose a significant personal, societal, and economic burden. In recent years, a relationship between diet and mental illness has emerged, highlighting diet as a potential public health target for the prevention of mental illness. This thesis assesses the relationship between diet quality and the number of physician visits for mental illness in Albertan adults.
  A prospective study was conducted with survey data from adults enrolled in Alberta’s Tomorrow Project and linked administrative health data from Alberta Health. The sociodemographic and lifestyle characteristics of individuals were compared according to categories of the number of physician visits for depression, anxiety disorders, affective disorders, and other mental illnesses. An updated Healthy Eating Index was developed for the Canadian context (HEI-C 2015) to evaluate diet quality. The relationship between HEI-C 2015 scores and the number of physician visits for mental illness was assessed. Four washout periods were used to exclude participants with physician visits for mental illness prior to baseline to assess the temporal nature of the relationship.
  Physician visits for mental illnesses were more common among those with: low household incomes, no university degree, unattached marital status, non-full-time employment, low physical activity, current smoking status, disease comorbidities, dietary supplement use, low alcohol consumption, adherence to red meat and processed meat recommendations, non-adherence to sugar recommendations, and poor diet quality.
  Diet quality, measured with the HEI-C 2015, was inversely associated with the number of physician visits for depression, affective disorders, and other mental illnesses. Results remained significant with washout periods of six months, one year, and variable washout from 2000 to cohort enrollment, but not two years.
  As the number of individuals living with mental illness is predicted to rise in Canada with a growing and aging population, preventive strategies are urgently needed. Diet has been highlighted as a potential risk factor, impacting the development and progression of mental illness. Our findings suggest that adults seeking physician care for mental illnesses differ from those not seeking care, in terms of both sociodemographic and lifestyle risk factors. Further, diet quality may be an important risk factor to consider when examining physician visits for depression, affective disorders, and other mental illnesses in this age group. The modifiable nature of diet makes it an important target in population-level primary prevention interventions of mental illness. Future research should build on these results to address gaps in the research and inform public health interventions on dietary improvement.

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Epidemiology
  • Mental illness
  • Diet quality
  • Population health

• Graduation date

  Fall 2019

• Type of Item

  Thesis

• Degree

  Master of Science

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/r3-rfbg-xf92

• License

  Permission is hereby granted to the University of Alberta Libraries to reproduce single copies of this thesis and to lend or sell such copies for private, scholarly or scientific research purposes only. Where the thesis is converted to, or otherwise made available in digital form, the University of Alberta will advise potential users of the thesis of these terms. The author reserves all other publication and other rights in association with the copyright in the thesis and, except as herein before provided, neither the thesis nor any substantial portion thereof may be printed or otherwise reproduced in any material form whatsoever without the author's prior written permission.