Diet Quality and Sociodemographic, Lifestyle, and Health-Related Determinants among People with Depression in Spain: New Evidence from a Cross-Sectional Population-Based Study (2011–2017)

The role of diet quality in depression is an emerging research area and it appears that diet quality could be an important modifying factor. The aims of this study were to report the prevalence of diet quality among individuals with and without a self-reported diagnosis of depression aged from 16 to 64 years old in Spain, to analyze the time trends of the frequency of food consumption and diet quality from 2011 to 2017 in individuals with a self-reported diagnosis of depression, and to explore the associations between poor/improvable diet quality and sociodemographic, lifestyle, and health-related factors. A nationwide cross-sectional study was conducted in 42,280 participants with and without a self-reported diagnosis of depression who had participated in the 2011/2012 and 2017 Spanish National Health Surveys and the 2014 European Health Survey in Spain. A logistic regression analysis was performed to identify the variables associated with diet quality. The overall prevalence of diet quality among depressive and non-depressive individuals revealed 65.71% and 70.27% were in need of improvement, respectively. Moreover, having a poor or improvable diet quality is associated with male gender, people aged 16–24 years old and 25–44 years old, separated or divorced, and also in smokers.