Depression and Links to Diet Quality

• Author(s) / Creator(s)

  • Sapkovskaja, Jelena

• Background: Depression is a common condition. One in five Canadians will experience a mental health condition such as depression, anxiety or bipolar disorder in his/her lifetime. It has been claimed that diet quality is associated with depression. We sought to investigate the evidence for this claim in the Canadian population.
  Objectives: The aim of this study was to: (a) establish how fruit and vegetable consumption patterns by Canadians in 2016, based on the CCHS Annual Component 2015-16 relate to the state of self-reported mental health of individuals. Particular interest is dedicated to: (a) estimating whether fruit and vegetable intake is related to self-reported mental health (depression); (b) determining whether and to what extent there is an association between fruit and vegetable intake and life satisfaction (proxy of subjective well-being); (c) estimating whether there is an association between fruit and vegetable intake, self-reported mental health, and life satisfaction/well-being and whether this relationship is uni-directional or bi-directional.
  Design: The present study has a cross-sectional design using data from the Statistics Canada Canadian Community Health Survey – Annual Component 2015-16. Our final sample size included 25,063 participants.
  Methods: Frequency of fruit and vegetable intake was cross-tabulated with demographic and health variables to describe differences between certain age groups, sexes, and comparisons between education and income level, household food security status, physical activity levels,
  BMI, perceived general health, perceived mental health, satisfaction with life, sleeping, smoking and drinking behaviour of the respondents. Pearson’s correlation coefficients were used to test the strength of the association between dependent and independent variables. To test further test the relationship between diet and mental health and diet and satisfaction with life, linear and maximum likelihood regressions were run. In total, five regression models were then evaluated.
  Results: The data revealed that fruit and vegetable consumption in the Canadian population in 2016 was very low (mean=3.81). The pattern of association between fruit and vegetable intake and depression indicated that this relationship is bi-directional. Examination of the other socio-
  demographic and health characteristics revealed that all of them were significant predictors of depression. Drinking was found not to be associated with satisfaction with life or fruit and vegetable consumption.
  Conclusions: The data from this study suggested that dietary patterns, as represented by fruit and vegetable self-reported intake, of Canadians remain a public health concern. That it is linked to depression and life satisfaction suggests a need to focus on improving dietary quality to reduce depression and increase life satisfaction. Health promotion techniques/effective nutrition education programmes can be better targeted towards certain groups of individuals, such as people who suffer from depression, who might benefit based on the results of this study.

• Date created

  2021-01-01

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Depression
  • mental health
  • diet
  • fruit and vegetable

• Type of Item

  Report

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/r3-wxcp-gj88

• License

  Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International