New Study Links Fast Food to Depression

If you’re a single couch potato with less-than-stellar eating habits, Spanish researchers have bad news for you. They studied people with this profile and found that those who ate junk food — commercial baked goods and fast food — were 51 percent more likely to develop depression.

For the study, published in Public Health Nutrition, researchers from the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria and the University of Granada observed 8,964 participants who had never been diagnosed with depression for six months. By the end of the study 493 were diagnosed with depression, or had started to use mild antidepressants.

“The more fast food you consume, the greater the risk of depression,” explained the lead author of the study, Almudena Sánchez-Villegas, about her group’s findings. But the study also revealed that eating even small quantities of junk food increases that risk.