THE TIMES: How to ward off depression and feel better

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Cut out crisps and ready meals
All that processed food — the crisps, the ready meals, the biscuits — has to go if you want your mood to improve long term. In a study of almost 46,000 people published this month in Psychosomatic Medicine, Dr Joseph Firth, an honorary research fellow at the University of Manchester and a research fellow at Western Sydney University, showed that the more nutrient-packed your diet, the better. No single diet was better than another at boosting mood, but Firth says that “cutting out refined, sugary and fast foods appears to be sufficient for avoiding the potentially negative psychological effects of a ‘junk food’ diet”.