High-fat diet may be the road to depression

A high-fat diet may cause changes in brain that lead to anxiety and depression, a new study has warned.

French researchers in experiments with mice found that increased body weight and high blood sugar as a result of consuming a high-fat diet may cause anxiety and depressive symptoms and measurable changes in the brain. The beneficial effects of an antidepressant were blunted in mice fed a high-fat diet, researchers found.

"When treating depression, in general there is no predictor of treatment resistance." said Dr Bruno Guiard, from the University of Paris-Sud and senior author of the study.
"So if we consider metabolic disorders as a putative treatment resistance predictor, this should encourage psychiatrists to put in place a personalised treatment with antidepressant drugs that do not further destabilise metabolism." he said.

The study found that taking mice off a high-fat diet completely reversed the animals' metabolic impairments and lessened their anxious symptoms.

"This finding reinforces the idea that the normalisation of metabolic parameters may give a better chance of achieving remission, particularly in depressed patients with type 2 diabetes," said Guiard. The study was published in the British Journal of Pharmacology.