SWSLHD and Bowral's Health - 48

A meaty question when it comes to mental health

24th Oct 2011 Catherine Hanrahan   all articles by this author

Medical Observer

PEOPLE who don’t eat much red meat may be susceptible to mental disorders such as depression, but eating too much red meat has a similar effect, research shows.

Researchers from Deakin University showed that among 1000 randomly selected women, those who ate both less, and more, red meat than recommended by Australian dietary guidelines, were twice as likely to have major depression or dysthymia.

The results, presented at last week’s conference, remained significant after adjusting for overall healthy diet.

Similarly, women who ate less than the recommended amount of red meat were 15 times more likely to have bipolar disorder, and those eating more were eight times more likely to have bipolar disorder.

Women who ate less red meat were also nearly twice as likely to have an anxiety disorder.

Lead author Dr Felice Jacka, NHMRC research fellow at the Barwon Psychiatric Research Unit at Geelong Hospital and Deakin University, said recognition of the role diet played in mental health was low.

“It’s certainly not part of any clinical guidelines or recommended clinical practice at this point but we think it should be based on the clinical consistency of the evidence,” she said.

Comments:

Docmus
26th Oct 2011
8:31pm

Interesting observation but you have to wonder about the reliability of the study. Is 1000 women enough to conclude anything when the number of actual bipolar cases will be pretty small? How can the women be randomly selected when a substantial number will surely decline to take part in long quizzes about diet and mental health history? The confounding variables in this study would be almost insurmountable.

 

FeliceN
26th Oct 2011
8:56pm

Hi Docmus
I wish to clarify - unfortunately my quote on this study was taken out of context. We have previously published both cross-sectional and prospective studies of the link between diet quality and mental health, and this is what I referred to as clinical consistency of the evidence (ie. regarding diet quality, not red meat). This particular report on red meat (whilst assessing confounding by other factors) did have very small numbers of BD cases and I have urged caution in over-interpreting our findings. They are very preliminary and need to be replicated before any recommendations can be made.