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Current Canway Youth Research In Progress

  • Writer: Andre
    Andre
  • Feb 17, 2024
  • 2 min read

It has long been suggested that dietary fiber contributes to healthy gut bacteria and that these in turn contribute to an improved mental state. This inspired us to design a study to test this hypothesis. The idea was to survey a number of youths between 16 and 22 and quantify their dietary fiber intake as well as degree of anxiety, depression, and severity of impacts for those likely to be suffering from depression.


To get the project started we used questionnaires, previously published under peer review and proven to be valid. In addition to using “validated” questionnaires, a common concern in science is to protect  privacy, so the surveys were designed to prevent individual identification.


Based on the questionnaires, we constructed a survey that Canway Youth volunteers recruited volunteers for (thanks!) and was also distributed electronically, resulting in 161 valid responses (for short you may hear people say N=161).


Results


The correlation between “Depression Score” and “Fiber Score” is shown in the figure below.    We found an inverse relationship between fiber intake scores and depression scores for those who say depression makes their life very or extremely difficult with an R-square is 0.12.


We did NOT, however,  find a statistically valid relationship between fiber intake and prevention of anxiety or depression (R square =< 0.01).



One  key step in good science is to perform statistical analysis to measure the significance of the observed relationship. In our case this was done with statistical calculators G*Power & ANOVA, confirming this result was statistically significant.  The detailed analysis and individual relevant scores are  summarized in the tables below.




It does appear that for those likely to be suffering from depression, eating lots of fiber may make their symptoms less crippling. But we are VERY FAR from putting that forward as a certainty, and definitely NOT as a medical recommendation. Moving forward, we still need exploration of factors such as different types of fibers, fat, sugar etc. and possible mediation analysis to look at microbiome impacts from diet.


So Now What?


Even though our survey analysis is not conclusive to support  the idea that eating lots of fiber could prevent anxiety and depression, it did  show some support for a negative correlation between fiber intake and how crippling depression symptoms may be, with ~10% of the effect accounted for the  amount of regular fiber intake.  Further research would be required to confirm the findings and expand the study in order to come up with dietary recommendations for youth mental health.


Note: validated questionnaires used:


 
 
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