A recent report recommends the all-good Mediterranean diet, an eating regimen which is rich in vegetables, fruits, nuts, whole grains and fish, as people who adopt such eating habits are less likely to be depressed, says a new report.
The finding has been published in the October issue of Archives of General Psychiatry, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.
To reach the conclusion, Almudena Sánchez-Villegas, B.Pharm., Ph.D., of University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria and Clinic of the University of Navarra, Pamplona, Spain, and colleagues studied 10,094 healthy Spanish participants who completed an initial questionnaire between 1999 and 2005.
Participants reported their dietary intake on a food frequency questionnaire, and the researchers calculated their adherence to the Mediterranean diet based on nine components (high ratio of monounsaturated fatty acids to saturated fatty acids; moderate intake of alcohol and dairy products; low intake of meat; and high intake of legumes, fruit and nuts, cereals, vegetables and fish).
After a median (midpoint) of 4.4 years of follow-up, 480 new cases of depression were identified, including 156 in men and 324 in women. Individuals who followed the Mediterranean diet most closely had a greater than 30 percent reduction in the risk of depression than whose who had the lowest Mediterranean diet scores.
The association did not change when the results were adjusted for other markers of a healthy lifestyle, including marital status and use of seatbelts.