Life habits of postmenopausal women: Association of menopause symptom intensity and food consumption by degree of food processing

Ultra-Processed Food Consumption and Mental Health: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Observational Studies

“…Eleven studies modelled ultra-processed food consumption as the exposure variable and mental disorder parameters as the outcome [17][18][19]21,[23][24][25][26]30,48,50], with the remaining six modelling associations in the opposite direction [20,22,[27][28][29]31].…”

“…Of the 11 studies that treated ultra-processed food consumption as the exposure variable, 8 coded ultra-processed food intake categorically (dichotomous [21,25,26], tertiles [18,24] and quartiles [19,48,50], with the lowest category being the reference group and referring to lowest consumption). The remaining three studies coded ultra-processed food consumption continuously [17,23,30].…”

“…Eleven studies reported average ultra-processed food consumption, and various methods were used, with some studies using more than one approach. These methods included energy per day [19,24,28,30,48,50]; grams per day [28,48,49]; the proportion of total food intake [23,31]; mean frequency of consumption score [17]; servings per day [50]; intake in the past week [27]; and grams per kilocalories [18] (see Table S2 for a detailed summary of the ultra-processed food exposure and outcome variables and average ultraprocessed food consumption). However, the average intake of ultra-processed food was most commonly expressed as a percentage of total energy, which had a mean value of 32% and ranged from 17.3% to 54.9% [19,28,48,50].…”

“…Five cross-sectional studies [18,19,21,24,25] were included in a meta-analysis that examined associations between ultra-processed food intake and symptoms of the common mental disorders, depression and anxiety (n = 185,773) (see Tables 1 and S2 for study characteristics and variable details). Results showed that greater ultra-processed food consumption was associated with higher odds of depressive and anxiety symptoms (odds ratio: 1.53, 95%CI 1.43 to 1.63, p < 0.001, I 2 = 8.9%) (see Figure 1 for forest plot).…”

“…However, the meta-analysis assessing associations of ultra-processed food consumption with mental disorders was limited only to depression and by the number of studies available for inclusion at the time of publication (n = 2). Several additional studies have since been published assessing the link between ultra-processed food consumption and depression as well as other mental disorders [17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31]. The need for an updated review is further exacerbated by the fact that ultra-processed foods have become increasingly ubiquitous for many food systems globally [13], thus understanding any relationship with mental disorders is critical for understanding the health implications of this trend.…”