The big idea
The fruit, vegetables and wholegrains which our grandmothers would readily recognise as food have been displaced with highly processed sweet, salty and fatty foods.
Is big business sending us mad?
It’s the tantalising question flowing logically from studies linking what we eat with how we think.
Felice Jacka, of Deakin University, a pioneer in this mushrooming field, explains in The Conversation that we are only now starting to realise the effects on mental health of profound changes to our diet over the past half century.
The fruit, vegetables and wholegrains which our grandmothers would readily recognise as food have been displaced with highly processed sweet, salty and fatty foods. These products of the global food industry not only appeal to our evolutionary preferences but are somewhat addictive. Cue obesity epidemic.
On the bright side, you could say our range of guilty pleasures is expanding. The trouble is, as we discover more about the effects of different foods on our health, the part that’s expanding along with our waists is not the pleasure part but the guilty part.
We now know obesity increases the risk of depression and dementia. People who eat more unhealthy and junk foods are at increased risk of depression. And hypertension, high cholesterol, type 2 diabetes, elevated blood pressure and high BMI are all risk factors for dementia, as well as being associated with unhealthy diets.
Until very recently the idea that what you put in your mouth could affect your mental health was scoffed at. But now, “the mind-body dichotomy that has informed much psychiatric practice throughout history is beginning to appear artificial and redundant” writes Dr Jacka, who is also president of the International Society for Nutritional Psychiatry Research.
As yet, the research has established only an association between diet and mental illness, not cause and effect. But there may turn out to be more to “gut feeling” than we thought, because gut bacteria influences brain chemistry and development, and is in turn influenced by diet. Comfort food is losing its comfort, unless your grandmother made it.