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Comment by aszantu | Hacker News Reader

Not meaning to demean anyone's hard work with psychology, but last year I changed my diet and my depression went away almost completely. From routinely wishing to be dead -> to walking a part of the camino trail in europe and being able to hold a job. Turns out, that all symptoms return when I eat carbs or fiber. But even after the depression gone away there are still some issues in thinking and moving slowly, which could be addressed by therapy. But I'm kinda mad that no doctor ever told me about diet and gut-brain connection.

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You might want to get some tests done on your gut microbiome. Fiber is really important for long term health. Inability to digest fiber is often indicative of gut flora issues.

This. Dietary fiber is important to positive gut health (flax is a good place to start if you're interested). While cutting carbs and fiber in the short term may have some positive impact (maybe the OP was cutting out a lot of processed fiber/carbs) I can't imagine this is good in the long run. I'm, personally, surprised the conflated war on "carbs" is still a thing. You can't eat fruits and vegetables without carb intake. Not many people are going to claim the fiber and carbs in Kale is harming them detrimentally. Carbs are not the devil certain fad diets claim. The finger should be pointed at the type of food first by asking a question like: is it whole or processed. But lumping them all together is just spreading a lot of misinformation unfortunately.

What tests would you recommend, and what can be done if they show a problem?

Gojiman has some good information about this on his YouTube channel:

https://youtu.be/4VeRuSk76hE

If the tests do turn up any issues the treatment depends specifically on what the issues are.

Not sure why you're being downvoted. There's research indicating links between gut bacteria and (among others) mental health:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4662178/

And of course one's gut bacteria culture heavily depends on what one eats.

Not downvoting as it’s still an interesting comment bringing personal insight.

This is an article about a different approach to detect/diagnose depression, and the first comment reads a lot like “this weird trick I used to beat depression”.

The “Not meaning to demean anyone's hard work with psychology, but” really doesn’t help. They found a way to beat their depression, what does it have to do with other people’s hard work in psychology ?

Well, the article and the research it discusses is exclusively focussed on language.

Of course, there are more factors to depression beyond just language. Your body's internal chemistry is also going to factor in.

You say cutting carbs and fibers from your diet helped you. It might help some other people as well. For yet another group of people with depression, such a change might not help at all.

There's no magic solution and there are many, many possible causes for why a person is suffering from depression.

My impression (from my wife who is in med school) is specific diet recommendations are very challenging to properly research and quantify for doctors. Sure we know certain things behave certain ways and some things are objectively bad, but it can be hard to recommend a scientifically back diet.

With the proper knowledge, it's relatively easy to identify diet deficiencies (e.g. low iron, calcium, or vitamin D levels) but it can be a lot harder to pinpoint excess as the body generally does a good job ridding itself of too much of something.

Effects of diets can also take years and years to study. Look at Keto. Lots of people are claiming to see great results from it. I've tried it myself and have seen the positive effects.

The problem is nobody knows what the long term effects of Keto will be. They look great in the short-term, like "curing" diabetes, but the long term results aren't so clear. There's a chance that a Keto diet (or any diet) could be placing significant unseen stress on the body.

If you want to run your own experiment try Whole 30.

Depression can be a symptom of Celiac disease and the effects you've seen from your diet change would be consistent with that...have you been tested for Celiac? Did/do you have any of the other symptoms associated with that condition?

If you haven't been tested, you should have your doctor get you the blood test since knowing for sure may point to other things (e.g. beer) that you should stay away from and may inform other medical decisions.

I have a similar experience. When I start eating carbs (including fiber) I start feeling sad, desperate, inactive etc. I did not stop eating carbs though because I like experimenting with food (I spend months eating different diets) and I don't think not eating carbs is healthy (even though it makes me feel bad). So I still eat e.g. broccoli. Whenever I eat any carb, I experience an inflammatory response which I can tell from my skin being inflated, and I feel ants and needles on my skin. [1] I did see doctor for these symptoms and since they're very mild they usually say "meh, it's probably nothing". But I do correlate it with eating carbs (e.g. I do not get the same response when I eat chicken breast, or it's milder when I eat avocado).

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formication

You could try some probiotics to see of it helps. Yogurt is particularly easy to integrate into a daily regimen if you don't want the pill forms, although the pills often have a broader variety of bacteria. See if that improves your carb sensitivity.

You should start paying close attention to the carbs. Also Cruciferois veggies can be rough on the stomach (bloating, gad). Just see hat you observe. Carbs get stored readily as muscle glycogen, so maybe something in that process is causing issues for you.

Same for me. Cutting carbs, dairy, and alcohol and I FEEL AMAZING. I think vitamin D supplementation is also a big factor for me.

Sometimes that helps, but also consider whether cutting all those food sources is actually putting you into a caloric deficit, and that's having the positive effects you see (assuming you don't have a lactose intolerance of course).

Caloric restriction reduces inflammation, and chronic inflammation is a big problem in the first world.

> putting you into a caloric deficit

No? I still eat the same amount of calories (~3000 calories a day, I'm a male who works put regularly). There are more than enough non-carb sources to get calories from (lean meats (chicken breast, turkey breast, pork), sea food, avocado, nuts)

> There are more than enough non-carb sources to get calories

Sure, I just meant that most people are too quick to attribute causation when they notice a correlation. Sounds like you track your calories, so that could rule out caloric restriction.

That’s possible, I definitely shoot for low inflammation. I think it’s the foods themselves though because I’ve done calorie restriction with less optimal foods and if I have sugar my joints will hurt the next day.

No doctor would suggest "eliminating" fiber, a low fiber diet puts you at risk for developing a bunch of diseases. A no fiber diet sounds downright dangerous.

The composition of the elimination diet almost certainly has nothing to do with the resolution of symptoms, just the feeling of being in complete control. We know that people report a wide range of foods as "bad," and one person's "bad" foods are another person's "good" foods, so any particular suggestions are going to be useless. Its been my observation its entirely about perception, not anything to do with the foods they consider "bad," most people I know with extreme diets that have cured all sorts of illnesses actually eat foods that are on their "bad" list because they don't realize it can fit into their "bad" category.

here's the thing though, i've experienced the literal opposite of what you're talking about: adding fiber to my diet helped with mitigating my depression.

i think a lot of this kind of diet related advice is anecdotal and very person-specific. we should absolutely ask people to experiment with their diet more, but depending on the extent of their depression and the amount of flexibility they have in their lives (someone who works two jobs a day might find it difficult to find the energy to change their cooking/eating habits), this could be quite difficult for them

and its totally possible that a significant fraction (possibly even the majority) of people suffering from depression will see no major benefits to changing their diets.

No fiber? How do you poop??

But what do you eat? Mostly fat and protein?

Think about hunter gatherers during the Paleolithic period. Nuts, meat, fat, eggs, bone marrow, liver, berries etc.

100g Almonds carbohydrate 22g (and lots of paleo friendly fat and protein)

100g strawberries carbohydrate 8g (basically the rest of the weight is water)

These are hardly "not eating carbohydrates".

Also, considering any product of modern agriculture "paleolithic" is inaccurate. The almonds and strawberries differ greatly from the wild varieties available to primitive hunter-gatherers - largely because they have drastically increased carbohydrates - but even the chickens/turkeys/cows producing meat and eggs are very different from undomesticated animals.

Even kale and broccoli didn't exist before about 4000 years go.

Still better that consuming bread, sugar and alcohol. I didn't write that you should consume 100% prehistoric food.

But on that list are great sources for fiber and carbs, namely berries and nuts. So going by the assumptions that we should eat like the early humans did, it makes no sense to avoid fiber and carbs.

With respect, how should I think about them? Just dream up whatever I want? Okay. My Paleolithic people ate mostly fish, and supplemented with breadfruit and coconuts. Is that right? You don't have any idea, because you weren't there.

Also, WHICH Paleolithic people? I must imagine that those people ate varied diets that were contingent on their locality. People on the tundra would maybe not be eating so many nuts.

Encouraging people to construct their diet by imagining the past is a useless exercise.

You do not have to positively identify what they ate so much as identify what they did not eat. They did not eat canned food, microwave meals or McDonalds or soda/chips.

Does that help?

Or broccoli, cauliflower, kale, cabbage, etc.

Or any fruits or vegetables you can buy in any modern restaurants or stores.

Or meat from any domesticated animal.

Not sure that helps, frankly.

There was no single "Paleolithic diet," different peoples in different geologic areas ate different things in differing amounts.

Even if there was, the foods that existed in Paleolithic times no longer exist due to both natural genetic changes combined with selective breeding.

I wanted to try the paleo diet, but the supermarket was always sold out of mammoth, saber-tooth, and aurochs meat.

They would dig up roots and tubers as well.

What did you change in your diet?

Changing a diet seems like a hard thing to do while you are suffering from depression.

Diet changer here, the first rule of diet, before you even look at what you eat, is that you need to eat. I started eating breakfast consistently. Often eating filling food like leftovers.

I don't think this is necessarily true. For me, eating anything makes me slightly feel worse, either it's feeling a little tired or something else. That's why sometimes, I eat 2 meals a day and get all my calories (~3000 calories) in two meals.

And I feel at my best when I eat at most once a day (with regular fast days). When I eat all day I feel gross and sluggish.

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