Brain Changer: The Good Mental Health Diet by Felice Jacka

Author:Felice Jacka [Jacka, Felice]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781760785420
Google: 7MF2DwAAQBAJ
Amazon: B07K9LZPNL
Goodreads: 42653041
Publisher: Macmillan Australia
Published: 2019-02-26T00:00:00+00:00

Eating healthily needn’t be expensive

Now I’m going to tell you something else that is nearly as important as the findings of the study itself, and that’s the results of the economic evaluation of the study. This is termed the ‘cost-effectiveness’, and these evaluations were done by health economists who were on the study team. They considered ‘societal costs’, which included the cost of delivering the interventions (i.e. the wages of the research assistants and the dietitians), as well as the cost of food, and travel costs to and from the study centre. Health-sector costs took into account the costs of medications and medical services, and absenteeism and presenteesim from paid and unpaid duties, such as paid work and domestic duties.

Again, we were all surprised by the results. Compared with the social support group, average health-sector costs for the dietary support group were $856 lower, and average societal costs were $2591 lower. These differences were driven by lower costs arising from fewer allied and other health professional visits and lower costs of unpaid productivity. In other words, people in the dietary support group saw health practitioners less often during the study and lost less time from their unpaid roles (that is, domestic duties, volunteering, child care and the like). Accordingly, the conclusion was that our approach was ‘likely cost-effective as an adjunctive treatment for depression from both health sector and societal perspectives’.

Now this is very important for a key reason – if you want to change policies, you need to change the mind of politicians. And to do this, you need to show them that they can save money by adopting your recommendations. Our findings suggested that people being treated for depression using a dietary approach experienced a benefit to their overall health, evidenced by fewer trips to health professionals and less time when they couldn’t undertake their daily duties. And this points to another critical point: having depression increases the risk of heart disease, obesity and metabolic syndrome, while these conditions – in turn – increase the risk of depression. In other words, depression and common, chronic health conditions are very often ‘comorbid’ (meaning that they co-occur) but are also mutually reinforcing. If we can successfully take a dietary approach to treating depression, it’s very likely to have a benefit for all the other chronic diseases that we know are so common and that present such an enormous challenge to society and the public purse.

There’s one final point I’d like to make about our SMILES study, as it’s one we’re often asked about. There’s a common belief that to eat a healthy diet, you have to spend more money than that needed to eat an unhealthy diet. I’m not saying that that’s not the case in countries such as the United States, where their food system is fundamentally changed (broken, I would say) and where ‘food deserts and swamps’ are common (these are areas where fast-food outlets are plentiful, with their extremely cheap, upsized burgers, fries and soda, and where fresh food is hard to get and more expensive).

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