Soft Drinks Probably Aren’t Making You Depressed

Why soda/pop/soft drinks probably aren’t causing depression.

Fun fact: Fanta was created by Nazis in the 1940s during the second world war because they couldn’t get Coke imported from the US. Photo by Joe Hepburn on Unsplash

As someone who has been depressed, I always find headlines about depression fascinating. There’s a long-standing tendency for the media to present depression as some sort of simple problem that can be caused by one or two other simple issues. It’s really remarkable, because we know that depression is painfully complicated and probably multi-factorial.

Which brings us to this week’s wacky science in the media. According to the headlines, the latest cause of depression is likely to be soft drinks. A new study has shown that fizzy delicious drinks — soda, pop, soft drinks, etc depending on where you live — negatively impact people’s gut microbiome and thus make them depressed.

It was a depressing thing to read about while I drank my daily Pepsi Max.

Luckily for all of us, the headlines are incredibly misleading. There is a scientific study showing some association between soft drinks and depression, but the evidence is very weak.

Let’s look at the data.

The Science

The new study that has everyone so worked up is a paper recently published in JAMA Psychiatry. The authors took an existing cross-sectional…