Does This “Healthy” Diet Cause Anxiety and Depression?

Dear Natural Health Solutions Reader,

This diet has been pushed relentlessly as “healthy” for decades.

Mainstream nutrition writers push it.

Doctors often recommend it.

And industrial food conglomerates promote it from behind the scenes, because — as commonly practiced — it’s full of cheap, high-profit carbohydrates.

The idea that vegetarian diet equals disease-free is now deeply embedded in American culture.

A stricter version of vegetarianism, known as veganism — which requires abstaining from all animal-based foods, including eggs and milk — has become commonly associated with healthy living as well.

An estimated U.S. 8 million adults are vegetarian. One million are vegan.

I’ll concede that it’s not difficult to find research backing the idea that a vegetarian diet is generally healthful.

I find most of the studies on this issue questionable, however.

People who choose to become vegetarians generally choose to engage in many healthful behaviors including regular exercise, eating abundant fruits and vegetables, getting appropriate preventive health care, not smoking, and so on.

Filtering out such “confounders” is tricky — in fact, some researchers claim it is basically impossible.

So it’s interesting that, even given vegetarians’ typically healthy habits, some recent research suggests that those who follow the diet tend to have a greater incidence of mental problems.

A 2012 German study¹ concluded that:

“Whether compared with a control group of nonvegetarians matched for important socio-demographic characteristics, or with nonvegetarians in general, vegetarians show elevated prevalence rates of diverse mental disorders.”

The study found that vegetarians were 145 percent more likely than meat eaters to suffer from depressive conditions and 100 percent more likely to have anxiety disorders.

And in 2014, an Australian study found that vegetarians reported being “less optimistic about the future” than meat eaters.²

More to the point, vegetarians were 18 percent more likely to report episodes of depression, and 28 percent more likely to report panic attacks and anxiety.

None of this is surprising. As I’ve stated before in these pages, animal foods made us human. When a few primates figured out how to get more fish, eggs, and animals to eat, their brains grew exponentially — which is why a human brain, on the basis of body weight, is 15 times larger than a gorilla’s.

Animal foods provide a variety of micronutrients that contribute to brain and mental health, including:

• B vitamins, which are precursors to glutamate. Keeping glutamate — a vital neurotransmitter — above base line levels is essential for avoiding depression

• Zinc and iron, minerals abundant in meat and often deficient in depressives

• Tryptophan, a precursor to serotonin, dubbed by some as the “feel good” hormone.

Now, it’s possible — as the German researchers emphasized — that vegetarian diets don’t cause depression. It may be that people who are naturally prone to depression gravitate to vegetarian diets as a way to address their poor mental and/or physical health.

I’d say that yes, that’s possible.

But it’s also possible that rejecting nutritional needs crafted by well over a million years of hominid evolution can lead to a dysfunctional brain and dysfunctional moods.

Most likely? Both of these are true.

And that means depressives who seek release from their dour moods via vegetarianism or veganism are only making the situation worse.

Bottom line: We deny evolutionary imperatives at our peril. Meat, cheese, eggs, poultry, pork, and fish (and their nutrient-rich organs) are essential parts of a diet that leads to robust physical and mental health. They are essential parts of a healthy diet.

If, for whatever reason, you feel compelled to avoid meat, I urge you to at least be a lacto-ovo vegetarian — that is, one who eats eggs and dairy products. I think it’s possible for most people to construct a generally healthy diet this way.

Vegans, on the other hand, will eventually encounter serious nutrient deficiencies (whether this happens in weeks, months, or years depends on a variety of factors). I recommend avoiding this diet.

Brad Lemley
Editor, Natural Health Solutions

Citations

1. Michalak J, Zhang XC, Jacobi F. Vegetarian diet and mental disorders: results from a representative community survey. Int J Behav Nutr Phys Act. 2012.
2. Available at: http://www.sbs.com/news/article/2014/11/25/vegetarians-healthy-unhappy-study. Accessed December 6, 2015.