THE PSYCHOLOGIST : Soft drinks make you depressed?

Soft drinks make you depressed?

Fer Chrissake! Why is rubbish like this still being published? No hint of demographic controls. Poor people have worse health and drink more junk drinks. That is all that was going on in this "study". No causal link was shown

In a study recently published in the journal Scientific Reports, researchers found that the risk of depression was directly and proportionally correlated with the amount and frequency of consuming sugar- sweetened carbonated beverages (SSCBs). This association was independent of age, sex, and the presence or absence of preexisting diabetes in the study participants.

SSCBs are drinks with high concentrations of added sugar. High intake of SSCBs is a key factor in the global obesity epidemic and has been linked to an increased risk for cardiometabolic disease.

The negative impacts of SSCBs have been attributed to the large quantities of high-fructose corn syrup and added sugar, which increase serum triglyceride levels and dietary glycemic load, leading to insulin resistance (IR). Epidemiological studies have potentially linked metabolic disorders, IR, and depression.

Other research has confirmed that individuals with a predisposition for obesity and diabetes have a higher prevalence of depression than those with normal glucose metabolism.

Small-scale cross-sectional studies have investigated the association between SSCBs and depression. However, these studies have focused on the combined effects of SSCBs, glycemic status, and IR, with mixed results.

For the present study, a team of researchers led by Sungkyunkwan University School of Medicine in Korea used a longitudinal study approach to investigate the association between SSCB consumption and the risk of developing depressive symptoms. Their analyses were designed to eliminate the confounding impacts of glycemic status and IR, thereby elucidating the independent effects of SSBCs.

The researchers analyzed the risk of depression according to the consumption of SSCB in 87,115 working-aged Koreans who responded to Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression (CES-D) scale.

Clinical and biochemical data was collected from hospital records supplemented with a health-related behavior questionnaire. The questionnaire recorded physical activity levels, health behaviors (smoking, alcohol consumption), and educational status.

Fasting blood glucose was recorded at each follow-up session to evaluate subjects’ glycemic status, which was classified into normal glycemia, prediabetes, and diabetes mellitus (DM). This classification was based on the homeostasis model assessment-insulin resistance (HOMA-IR) model.

A semi-quantitative food frequency questionnaire (FFQ) was used to evaluate and classify subjects’ SSCB consumption, both in terms of quantity (expressed in serving sizes where one serving = 200 mL) and frequency (per week).

The participants were categorized into 5 groups by SSCB consumption based on one serving dose. The categories were: never/almost never, < 1 serving/week, 1 ≤ serving/week < 3, 3 ≤ serving/week < 5, and 5 ≤ serving/week.

The CES-D questionnaire was used to evaluate depressive symptoms per week. The questionnaire comprised 20 questions about negative/depressive feelings, with answers ranging from 0 (seldom/never) to 3 (5-7 days a week). If the total score from the CES-D questionaries was 16 or higher, the individual was classified as having depressive symptoms.

Results revealed that 28.9% (25,246) of individuals had SSCB intakes higher than one serving per week. Of these, individuals consuming more than five servings per week depicted more elevated fasting glucose, HOMA-IR, BMI, alcohol consumption, smoking, total calorie intake, education, and hypertension prevalence than other groups.

Over almost six years of follow-up, 14.9% of participants developed depressive symptoms, predominantly from high SSCB intake groups. Statistical analyses adjusted from covariates revealed a repeating trend of proportionally increasing risk of DM with increasing SSCB consumption.

These results were mirrored across sex, BMI, and glycemic status, implying that SSCBs play an independent role in triggering depression, and are not just cofactors in the development of depression along with IR and obesity as suggested by prior studies.

The authors noted that, considering the young age of the study participants (39.5 ± 6.8 years), it is postulated that the adverse effect of SSCB consumption on mental health can begin at an early age. Thus, the results may be evidence to recommend abstaining from SSCB at a young age, they conclude.

https://www.trialsitenews.com/a/study-links-consumption-of-sugar-sweetened-carbonated-beverages-to-risk-of-depression-ed4b009c

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Background

The essence of conservatism is caution. The essence of Leftism is anger

This blog is written solely by John Ray, who has a Ph.D. degree in psychology and 200+ papers published in the academic journals of the social sciences. It does occasionally comment on issues in psychology but is mainly aimed at giving a conservative psychologist's view on a broad range of topics. There are very few conservative psychologists.

The blog originated in Australia and many (but not most) posts discuss Australian matters. Australians have an unusually good awareness of events outside their own country. Australian newspapers feature news from Britain and the USA not as an afterthought but as a major part of their coverage. So Australians do tend to have a truly Western heart, which is the reason behind the old name for this blog. So events in Australia, Britain and the USA all feature frequently here, plus occasional coverage of other places, particularly Israel.

A primer in American politics for non-Americans:

SCOTUS is the Supreme Court of the United States, the highest court in the land

The "GOP" stands for "Grand Old Party" and refers to the Republican party. The GOP is at present center/Right, while the Democrats have been undergoing a steady drift Leftwards and now have policies similar to mainstream European Leftist parties.

The ideological identity of both parties has however been very fluid -- almost reversing itself over time. In the mid 19th century, the GOP was the party of big government and concern for minorities while the Democrats advertised themselves as "The party of the white man" -- an orientation that lasted into the mid 20th century in the South. The Democrats are still obsessed with race but have now flipped into support for discrimination AGAINST whites.

Was Pope Urban VIII the first Warmist? Below we see him refusing to look through Galileo's telescope. People tend to refuse to consider evidence— if what they might discover contradicts what they believe.

Global warming

Calibrated in whole degrees. Larger graph here

Climate scientist Lennart Bengtsson said. “The warming we have had the last 100 years is so small that if we didn’t have meteorologists and climatologists to measure it we wouldn’t have noticed it at all.”

The term "Fascism" is mostly used by the Left as a brainless term of abuse. But when they do make a serious attempt to define it, they produce very complex and elaborate definitions -- e.g. here and here. In fact, Fascism is simply extreme socialism plus nationalism. But great gyrations are needed to avoid mentioning the first part of that recipe, of course.

Two examples of Leftist racism below (much more here and here):

Beatrice Webb, a founder of the London School of Economics and the Fabian Society, and married to a Labour MP, mused in 1922 on whether when English children were "dying from lack of milk", one should extend "the charitable impulse" to Russian and Chinese children who, if saved this year, might anyway die next. Besides, she continued, there was "the larger question of whether those races are desirable inhabitants" and "obviously" one wouldn't "spend one's available income" on "a Central African negro".

Hugh Dalton, offered the Colonial Office during Attlee's 1945-51 Labour government, turned it down because "I had a horrid vision of pullulating, poverty stricken, diseased nigger communities, for whom one can do nothing in the short run and who, the more one tries to help them, are querulous and ungrateful."

Defensible and indefensible usages of the term "racism"

The book, The authoritarian personality, authored by T.W. Adorno et al. in 1950, has been massively popular among psychologists. It claims that a set of ideas that were popular in the "Progressive"-dominated America of the prewar era were "authoritarian". Leftist regimes always are authoritarian so that claim was not a big problem. What was quite amazing however is that Adorno et al. identified such ideas as "conservative". They were in fact simply popular ideas of the day but ones that had been most heavily promoted by the Left right up until the then-recent WWII. See here for details of prewar "Progressive" thinking.

R.I.P. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet deposed a law-defying Marxist President at the express and desperate invitation of the Chilean parliament. He pioneered the free-market reforms which Reagan and Thatcher later unleashed to world-changing effect. That he used far-Leftist methods to suppress far-Leftist violence is reasonable if not ideal. The Leftist view that they should have a monopoly of violence and that others should follow the law is a total absurdity which shows only that their hate overcomes their reason

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a war criminal. Both British and American codebreakers had cracked the Japanese naval code so FDR knew what was coming at Pearl Harbor. But for his own political reasons he warned no-one there. So responsibility for the civilian and military deaths at Pearl Harbor lies with FDR as well as with the Japanese. The huge firepower available at Pearl Harbor, both aboard ship and on land, could have largely neutered the attack. Can you imagine 8 battleships and various lesser craft firing all their AA batteries as the Japanese came in? The Japanese naval airforce would have been annihilated and the war would have been over before it began.

FDR prolonged the Depression. He certainly didn't cure it.

WWII did NOT end the Great Depression. It just concealed it. It in fact made living standards worse

Joe McCarthy was eventually proved right after the fall of the Soviet Union. To accuse anyone of McCarthyism is to accuse them of accuracy!

The KKK was intimately associated with the Democratic party. They ATTACKED Republicans!

People who mention differences in black vs. white IQ are these days almost universally howled down and subjected to the most extreme abuse. I am a psychometrician, however, so I feel obliged to defend the scientific truth of the matter:

The average African adult has about the same IQ as an average white 11-year-old and African Americans (who are partly white in ancestry) average out at a mental age of 14. The American Psychological Association is generally Left-leaning but it is the world's most prestigious body of academic psychologists. And even they have had to concede that sort of gap (one SD) in black vs. white average IQ. 11-year olds can do a lot of things but they also have their limits and there are times when such limits need to be allowed for.

America's uncivil war was caused by trade protectionism. The slavery issue was just camouflage, as Abraham Lincoln himself admitted. See also here

Did William Zantzinger kill poor Hattie Carroll?

Did Bismarck predict where WWI would start or was it just a "free" translation by Churchill?

Leftist psychologists have an amusingly simplistic conception of military organizations and military men. They seem to base it on occasions they have seen troops marching together on parade rather than any real knowledge of military men and the military life. They think that military men are "rigid" -- automatons who are unable to adjust to new challenges or think for themselves. What is incomprehensible to them is that being kadaver gehorsam (to use the extreme Prussian term for following orders) actually requires great flexibility -- enough flexibility to put your own ideas and wishes aside and do something very difficult. Ask any soldier if all commands are easy to obey.

A good article on Leftist hate

The real history of social Darwinism

Some personal memoirs

Memoir highlights

THE PSYCHOLOGIST

Soft drinks make you depressed?

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