Adherence to the EAT-Lancet diet and incident depression and anxiety

High-quality diets have been increasingly acknowledged as a promising candidate to counter the growing prevalence of mental health disorders. This study aims to investigate the prospective associations of adhering to the EAT-Lancet reference diet with incident depression, anxiety and their co-occurrence in 180,446 UK Biobank participants. Degrees of adherence to the EAT-Lancet diet were translated into three different diet scores. Over 11.62 years of follow-up, participants in the highest adherence group of the Knuppel EAT-Lancet index showed lower risks of depression (hazard ratio: 0.806, 95% CI: 0.730–0.890), anxiety (0.818, 0.751–0.892) and their co-occurrence (0.756, 0.624–0.914), compared to the lowest adherence group. The corresponding hazard ratios (95% CIs) were 0.711 (0.627–0.806), 0.765 (0.687–0.852) and 0.659 (0.516–0.841) for the Stubbendorff EAT-Lancet index, and 0.844 (0.768–0.928), 0.825 (0.759–0.896) and 0.818 (0.682–0.981) for the Kesse-Guyot EAT-Lancet diet index. Our findings suggest that higher adherence to the EAT-Lancet diet is associated with lower risks of incident depression, anxiety and their co-occurrence.