“Chronic consumption of high-fat food and obesity induce plasticity-related changes in reward circuitry that are associated with a depressive-like phenotype,” says a study appearing in the International Journal of Obesity. The study looked at the development of anxiety and depressive-like behavior, as well as biochemical alterations in brain reward circuitry, in mice fed a high-fat diet for 12 weeks.
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Scientific American
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Mad in America hosts blogs by a diverse group of writers. These posts are designed to serve as a public forum for a discussion—broadly speaking—of psychiatry and its treatments. The opinions expressed are the writers’ own.
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The scientific american article says the mice were put on a high fat AND high sugar diet and then the mice got obese and they showed depression-like symptoms. So we have some correlation, but no proof for the conclusion of the study. The causes could be anything. I would get depressed, if I were forced to eat crappy food and got really really fat within 12 weeks. Your muscles, bones and your brain are not adapted to the additional weight. You even might conclude that you will feel even worse in another 12 weeks or die soon. This study is as bad as many pharma funded studies criticized on this website…
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I enjoy the research that is posted on this site. However humans and mice are very different in terms of diet. What possible inference could be made from mice to humans?
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I’m skeptical that this is more pseudo-$cience as usual. Anywhere there’s a lot of money at stake, I tend to be skeptical, and weight loss is a multibillion-dollar industry.
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