NIH study finds that diet soda drinkers are more likely to be down in the dumps than regular soda drinkers, and that coffee drinkers are happier than both. More research is needed to confirm the findings.
Posted on 01/10/2013 6:17:03 PM PST by null and void
Coffee tied to a decrease in depression cases
NIH study finds that diet soda drinkers are more likely to be down in the dumps than regular soda drinkers, and that coffee drinkers are happier than both. More research is needed to confirm the findings.
Millions of people reach for an afternoon diet soda as a pick-me-up to make it through the rest of the day. But new research suggests sodas and other sugary drinks — especially artificially sweetened ones — could be related to depression.
According to the research, which will be officially released at the American Academy of Neurology's annual meeting in mid-March, people who drink four cans or more of soda daily are about 30 percent more likely to be diagnosed with depression than people who don't drink soda. Coffee drinkers are about 10 percent less likely to develop depression than people who don't drink coffee.
The National Institutes of Health study included more than 250,000 people between the ages of 50 and 71 and studied their drink consumption during 1995 and 1996. A decade later, researchers asked whether participants had been diagnosed with depression since the year 2000.
According to researchers, "the risk appeared to be greater for people who drank diet [rather] than regular soda."
"Our research suggests that cutting out or down on sweetened diet drinks or replacing them with unsweetened coffee may naturally help lower your depression risk," Honglei Chen, who led the study, said in a statement. "More research is needed to confirm these findings, and people with depression should continue to take depression medications prescribed by their doctors.
Maybe not for everyone, but certainly for me.
Neurotoxins do tend to bum a body out.
The Mountain Dew / methamphetamine association is a terrible thing.
Them Moxie drinkers are a pretty paranoid bunch too.
Where in the world did you get that picture?
If so, then bananas also cause depression. But by all means, don't ever eat grilled chicken with a glass of red wine, apple juice, tomato juice, or orange juice. You could become suicidal.
It should say “OR ELSE!” at the bottom.
Or, depression leads to overeating, overeating leads to excess weight, excess weight leads to dieting and thus consumption of diet sodas.
What sort of person drinks black coffee?
By all means ignore other peoples personal experience.
If there are hundreds of such stories, and they are not blessed by an “actual scientist”, then they are not true, right?
(Pinging the only “actual scientist” I know for his 2¢ worth)
Exactly. Drinking the diet soda keeps one from eating a sweet which one is NOT supposed to eat if one is overweight. One could be very depressed from being overweight to start with.
Interesting, but I was being treated with MAOI long before aspartame came on the scene. Maybe switch to splenda for a while just to see what other psychological maladies it can cause lol.
Well, me, for one. Three or four mugs every morning. And soda, diet or otherwise? Maybe four cans a year.
I'm the least-depressed person imaginable, but I don't attribute that to coffee.
True. Correlation is not causation.
Still, it's easy enough for someone who is depressed to switch to coffee, or even horrors!, water and see if it helps.
I've learned through bitter experience that consuming aspartame is invariably followed by worsening depression.
Some people go bananas when they hear this, some even go grilled chicken with red whine...
thank you...
Doesn’t say black coffee, just unsweetened. Though I don’t see that there research is that specific. If it were, would unsweetened coffee drinkers have got a larger boost still?
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