There is of course a routine they go through - check for certain vitamin levels that seem to be related to depression/lack of depression. Are they causing the depression? Or do they become depleted because the person is depressed? The automatic assumption is that they're causing the depression. Are they the only nutrients involved? Who knows?



Then they go from there, basing the food choices on other factors they consider to be good/bad for you. So they probably specified in their search of their nutritional databases that they wanted it to find foods which met their obligatory low calorie, low fat, high fiber, low sodium, and low cholesterol criteria, telling it to look for those nutrients in whole grains, fish and seafood, fruit and vegetable products, because that would criteria would only give them "healthy" foods, and automatically filter out "bad" foods, including all those that just happen to be even better sources of those nutrients.


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I just noticed this from the article:




Focusing on the green leafy veggies list - I'd never heard of Cavalho nero before, so I googled. Turns out it's actually a type of kale, with a much darker, somewhat different shaped leaf, often called black kale or lacinato kale. This is a leafy green that even working in a large grocery store for the last 7-1/2 years, I'd never even seen that kind of kale until maybe a year or two ago, and it's still only available at a premium price, and on a very limited basis.

So before naming this mysterious cavalho nero to the must-eat list, did they even bother to try to figure out what it actually was? Or did they just see it on their nutrient list, and say BINGO - we have a winner! (A winner that will have people desperately searching for this mysterious green, and if they can't find it, they'll blame the fact that they're still depressed on not being able to find this particular green to eat in huge quantities)



[I acknowledge that even though it's new to me, it's entirely possible that it's well known by that name in the UK, and that perhaps much more readily available there too.]


Furthermore, is the list of green leafies limited to kale, collards, and cavalho nero? Surely there's more than 3 species of green leafy veggies out there - what about spinach, mustard greens, turnip greens, dandelion greens, chard, and the plethora of lettuces and herbs out there? Another factor is that most of those green leafies really only grow in the cool weather of spring or early fall, but bolt to seed in hot summer weather, and die off in freezing weather. They blame seasonal depression at least in part on the short days of winter, and yet the only way to obtain those leafy vegetables in the middle of winter, is if they're shipped in from far away locations in the opposite hemisphere, which happen to have the seasonal conditions necessary to grow them at the time of year when you need those nutrients in the your hemisphere. How much of the necessary nutrients will be lost during all that shipping time?


Really irks me that they spend so much time trying to pin all kinds of health conditions on specific, nutrients, but then when they tell you where to obtain those nutrients, they filter out anything that doesn't meet their other arbitrary health criteria, then somehow expect you to obtain the few out of season foods they mention. (seasonal foods which by the way were NEVER available out of season 100 years ago, because transportation from seasonal growing areas would have taken several weeks. Not that they really needed out of season foods back then, because seasonal depression was an anomaly, instead of the norm.) Good luck actually absorbing whatever nutrients are still left in the greens that are shipped in from half-way across the world in the dead of winter too, because dietary fats are required to absorb vitamins and minerals, but they sure don't want you do eat any useful fats, just those 2 weekly servings of oily fish.


The nutritional recommendations THEY provide are just topsy-turvy, upside down, and getting worse all the time.