Ultra-processed foods are energy-dense and ready-to-eat food items including things like processed breakfast meats, packaged snacks, and ice cream as well as artificially sweetened drinks.
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.
Yeah,planning is terrible. I forget to put meat out of the fridge all the time! When I remember it’s almost time to cook. About the expense difference, I’m poor in a poor country in which ironically raw and fresh food is cheaper than processed food so luckily I’m forced to cook and be healthier. I lost 18 pounds since I lost my job because I stopped buying meals and processed junk food when doing groceries. If I wasn’t broke I’d say it was a blessing in disguise.
Before I got student assistance I had to work while studying as well, I had to pay for the more expensive prepared food because I didn’t have the time to plan a meal, cook it and clean up and all that, even if my depression + undiagnosed ADD combo would have allowed it. People don’t know that being poor is expensive in ways they wouldn’t think about. This is in a rich country as well, getting fresh ingredients typically is cheaper here too but people forget that the cost of preparation might not be affordable to some.
Oh man, it’s so hard cooking for one. Pretty much every meal I make is a week’s worth because it’s just me and it’s so much easier to cook multiple servings at once.
Oh yeah for sure. I also have issues with OCD, specifically around food contamination and safety. It makes it damn near impossible to eat leftovers for me for the last few years.
I waste more food than I’d like, but I just can’t bring myself to do it. Hence falling back on getting prepackaged, single serving meals, which aren’t often healthy at all.
how about freezing leftovers? if you have an even remotely new freezer it should work just dandy without much quality degradation.
relatedly is frozen ingredients, especially stuff like peas that you can just stir into your meal and let that reheat them. Very easy way to add some nutrients to your diet.
The problem is that OCD is irrational. Once something has been opened, I literally can’t eat it again without my brain going into an obsession about getting food poisoning or something.
My brain will be like, “I dunno, what if the power went out while you weren’t home. Or while you were asleep? Who knows if the food is still good?”
I literally can’t keep anything around that requires temperature control, so I mostly get what I’m going to eat that day. It’s really frustrating and exhausting.
I won’t pretend to understand what you go through but I’m strongly sympathetic.
Question: from your perspective, would taking a course or two about food safety, so that a person thoroughly understands the science behind food spoiling and becoming toxic, would that help in any way with some of the thoughts/fears about eating leftovers? I fully expect you to say no, and I would definitely believe you. But I’m still curious about your perspective.
I took several in college, which made the issue much worse tbh. Now I know for sure that if x food product can spoil in a time frame that I’ll not be around to verify that my refrigerator was working the whole time, then I just can’t do it.
That fucking sucks dude I was able to get out of the depressive rut, with like massive amounts of help, wouldn’t know what I had done if I had developed OCD as well.
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.
Yep. I recall working all day serving tables, feeling sick, and I could only afford the blister pack of 2 generic benadryl for $3.99 at the gas station until I got some more tips. There were many little things like that that added up.
If it works for you and doesn’t hurt you, then enjoy it. I struggle to even shower sometimes when I’m really depressed. Imagining going to the grocery store and everything else involved in making healthy meals is incredibly overwhelming.
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.
I’ve dealt with depression most of my life and I’ve lived many different lifestyles…and the one constant has always been the depression.
yup, same.
And then this shit is not only unhelpful to us, but it also makes many people (including, sadly health and care professionals) think that if we only took as good a care of ourselves as they do (they tell themselves), we wouldn’t be depressed (and, in a lot of their minds, a “drain” on them and/or society). It’s all so fucked up, but none of it is accidental.
Oh man, I just had this conversation with my mom last weekend. The same “if you just stop X, then maybe you won’t be so depressed”. This time is was thinking about government and societal issues. I don’t know how to get to understand that so much of what I “think” or “worry” about it just who I am and I can’t stop, in the same way she can’t just stop thinking about her children. It’s just me and yeah, it is probably affecting my depression in some ways, but there’s just some things I have to hurt.
That sucks, those conversations are so frustrating, and sadly I don’t know how you get others to understand, there are so many layers of socialisation, indoctrination, propaganda that contribute to that kind of thinking (where unless we are a happy smiley worker cog selling our labour to produce profit for others without complaining, there’s not only something wrong with us, but we’re also harming the system they’ve been manipulated to defend), it’s almost impressive how efficient the system is at keeping us down and divided.
it’s almost impressive how efficient the system is at keeping us down and divided.
It’s such a sad realization. So much of our society, no matter where you live, is designed to do this. And we’re constantly being manipulated. I have a degree in graphic design and I worked in advertising for a couple years out of college. It was the job I hated most, especially when it really hit me how much of it was just manipulating people in different ways. The most minor creative decision on any given project was made to catch the viewer in some way and it’s depressing how prevalent this is in the world.
It really is so fucking bleak isn’t it (I had a short stint in sales as my first proper job, and like you, I hated it but it opened my eyes to a lot)…
I guess the one positive in realising these things is that with it comes the realisation that the issues we face are deliberate and systemic, which hopefully leads to understanding that the solution then must also be systemic, and the more people realise that, the more chance we have at actually reaching the tipping point where enough of us band together to achieve it.
Lol, that’s exactly what I was saying to my Mom about why I think about those things. Because I feel like if more people did, real change could be enacted. It’s that important to me and why I deal with the hurt it brings me. I mean, that’s the whole point of marches and protests; to bring awareness to those issues that need more people to be aware of.
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.
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.
Yeah,planning is terrible. I forget to put meat out of the fridge all the time! When I remember it’s almost time to cook. About the expense difference, I’m poor in a poor country in which ironically raw and fresh food is cheaper than processed food so luckily I’m forced to cook and be healthier. I lost 18 pounds since I lost my job because I stopped buying meals and processed junk food when doing groceries. If I wasn’t broke I’d say it was a blessing in disguise.
Before I got student assistance I had to work while studying as well, I had to pay for the more expensive prepared food because I didn’t have the time to plan a meal, cook it and clean up and all that, even if my depression + undiagnosed ADD combo would have allowed it. People don’t know that being poor is expensive in ways they wouldn’t think about. This is in a rich country as well, getting fresh ingredients typically is cheaper here too but people forget that the cost of preparation might not be affordable to some.
Oh man, it’s so hard cooking for one. Pretty much every meal I make is a week’s worth because it’s just me and it’s so much easier to cook multiple servings at once.
Oh yeah for sure. I also have issues with OCD, specifically around food contamination and safety. It makes it damn near impossible to eat leftovers for me for the last few years.
I waste more food than I’d like, but I just can’t bring myself to do it. Hence falling back on getting prepackaged, single serving meals, which aren’t often healthy at all.
how about freezing leftovers? if you have an even remotely new freezer it should work just dandy without much quality degradation.
relatedly is frozen ingredients, especially stuff like peas that you can just stir into your meal and let that reheat them. Very easy way to add some nutrients to your diet.
The problem is that OCD is irrational. Once something has been opened, I literally can’t eat it again without my brain going into an obsession about getting food poisoning or something.
My brain will be like, “I dunno, what if the power went out while you weren’t home. Or while you were asleep? Who knows if the food is still good?”
I literally can’t keep anything around that requires temperature control, so I mostly get what I’m going to eat that day. It’s really frustrating and exhausting.
I won’t pretend to understand what you go through but I’m strongly sympathetic.
Question: from your perspective, would taking a course or two about food safety, so that a person thoroughly understands the science behind food spoiling and becoming toxic, would that help in any way with some of the thoughts/fears about eating leftovers? I fully expect you to say no, and I would definitely believe you. But I’m still curious about your perspective.
I took several in college, which made the issue much worse tbh. Now I know for sure that if x food product can spoil in a time frame that I’ll not be around to verify that my refrigerator was working the whole time, then I just can’t do it.
That fucking sucks dude I was able to get out of the depressive rut, with like massive amounts of help, wouldn’t know what I had done if I had developed OCD as well.
Yeah OCD is a bitch. Along with bipolar I and PTSD, my life is an absolute nightmare at times.
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.
Yep. I recall working all day serving tables, feeling sick, and I could only afford the blister pack of 2 generic benadryl for $3.99 at the gas station until I got some more tips. There were many little things like that that added up.
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.
That’s correct, and also it’s a vicious cycle because poor diets enforce depression on a biological level as well.
call me crazy but I find washing the dishes and vacuuming very therapeutic
If it works for you and doesn’t hurt you, then enjoy it. I struggle to even shower sometimes when I’m really depressed. Imagining going to the grocery store and everything else involved in making healthy meals is incredibly overwhelming.
to each their own. i’m sorry you’re struggling with depression.
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.
yup, same.
And then this shit is not only unhelpful to us, but it also makes many people (including, sadly health and care professionals) think that if we only took as good a care of ourselves as they do (they tell themselves), we wouldn’t be depressed (and, in a lot of their minds, a “drain” on them and/or society). It’s all so fucked up, but none of it is accidental.
Oh man, I just had this conversation with my mom last weekend. The same “if you just stop X, then maybe you won’t be so depressed”. This time is was thinking about government and societal issues. I don’t know how to get to understand that so much of what I “think” or “worry” about it just who I am and I can’t stop, in the same way she can’t just stop thinking about her children. It’s just me and yeah, it is probably affecting my depression in some ways, but there’s just some things I have to hurt.
That sucks, those conversations are so frustrating, and sadly I don’t know how you get others to understand, there are so many layers of socialisation, indoctrination, propaganda that contribute to that kind of thinking (where unless we are a happy smiley worker cog selling our labour to produce profit for others without complaining, there’s not only something wrong with us, but we’re also harming the system they’ve been manipulated to defend), it’s almost impressive how efficient the system is at keeping us down and divided.
It’s such a sad realization. So much of our society, no matter where you live, is designed to do this. And we’re constantly being manipulated. I have a degree in graphic design and I worked in advertising for a couple years out of college. It was the job I hated most, especially when it really hit me how much of it was just manipulating people in different ways. The most minor creative decision on any given project was made to catch the viewer in some way and it’s depressing how prevalent this is in the world.
It really is so fucking bleak isn’t it (I had a short stint in sales as my first proper job, and like you, I hated it but it opened my eyes to a lot)…
I guess the one positive in realising these things is that with it comes the realisation that the issues we face are deliberate and systemic, which hopefully leads to understanding that the solution then must also be systemic, and the more people realise that, the more chance we have at actually reaching the tipping point where enough of us band together to achieve it.
Lol, that’s exactly what I was saying to my Mom about why I think about those things. Because I feel like if more people did, real change could be enacted. It’s that important to me and why I deal with the hurt it brings me. I mean, that’s the whole point of marches and protests; to bring awareness to those issues that need more people to be aware of.
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.
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I imagine there’s a number of confounding variables, yes.