The association between habitual diet quality and the common mental disorders in community-dwelling adults : The Hordaland health study

Objective Recent evidence suggests a role for diet quality in the common mental disorders depression and anxiety. We aimed to investigate the association between diet quality, dietary patterns, and the common mental disorders in Norwegian adults.

Methods This cross-sectional study included 5731 population-based men and women aged 46 to 49 and 70 to 74 years. Habitual diet was assessed using a validated food frequency questionnaire, and mental health was measured using the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale.

Results After adjustments for variables including age, education, income, physical activity, smoking, and alcohol consumption, an a priori healthy diet quality score was inversely related to depression (odds ratio [OR] = 0.71, 95% confidence interval [CI] = 0.59–0.84) and anxiety (OR = 0.77, 95% CI = 0.68–0.87) in women and to depression (OR = 0.83, 95% CI = 0.70–0.99) in men. Women scoring higher on a healthy dietary pattern were less likely to be depressed (OR = 0.68, 95% CI = 0.57–0.82) or anxious (OR = 0.87, 95% CI = 0.77–0.98), whereas men were more likely to be anxious (OR = 1.19, 95% CI = 1.03–1.38). A traditional Norwegian dietary pattern was also associated with reduced depression in women (OR = 0.77, 95% CI = 0.64–0.92) and anxiety in men (OR = 0.77, 95% CI = 0.61–0.96). A western-type diet was associated with increased anxiety in men (OR = 1.27, 95% CI = 1.14–1.42) and women (OR = 1.29, 95% CI = 1.17–1.43) before final adjustment for energy intake.

Conclusions In this study, those with better quality diets were less likely to be depressed, whereas a higher intake of processed and unhealthy foods was associated with increased anxiety.

The science of our own fiction : affective experiments enacted through creative research

This paper will explore the ways in which art may be understood as an ongoing experiment that interacts with the plasticity of the body to prompt change and affect the body-environment relationship. The arts offer an approach to research that recognizes the importance of the affect in studies of perception and action, self-organization and selection. An affective approach to experimentation would connect cognitive activity to the material processes of the environment in a science of our own fiction. This connection becomes the basis of affective experiments, which aim to yield new insights by merging the creative researcher with self-affecting-experimenter. To this end, I will discuss the scientific objectives of the “rubber hand”, and the ‘mirror-box” experiments are contrasted with work by artists-turned-architects Arakawa and Gins and three of my creative projects to suggest how creative research might enact embodied change. Throughout the paper I will argue that cognitive processes such as attention, selection, decision and judgment are ripe for re-entry and experimentation through an embodied approach to acquiring knowledge that is particular to the arts.