The mediating role of Mental Health in the relations between dietary behaviors and General Health
The aim of this study is to find a pathway to explaining the effect of dietary behaviors on mental health and psychological functioning.
METHODS:
This cross-sectional study contains 4763 participants from the employees of Isfahan University of Medical Sciences (IUMS). In this study 4 questionnaires were administered which were provided as followed: 21-item dietary behaviors questionnaire, Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale questionnaire (HADS), and 12-item General Health Questionnaire (GHQ-12). We started the analysis with the SEM model with 4 unobserved latent and 16 observed variables.
RESULTS:
The results show that the regression coefficient (SE) of diet behavior on mental health and mental health on GHQ were -1 (0.37) and 0.02 (0.01) with their p-values as 0.007 and 0.01, respectively. For this model the estimated RMSEA is 0.062 with CI90% of (0.060-0.065). In addition, the comparative fit indices were as the following: 0.860 for NFI, 0.810 for RFI, 0.866 for IFI, 0.818 for TLI, and 0.866 for CFI. All these indices represent fairly good fit of the model to the data.
CONCLUSIONS:
We can conclude that "lower scores on diet behavior - higher scores on mental health problems" and " higher mean scores in depression and/or anxiety – higher scores in GHQ domains". The SEM results showed that dietary behaviors have significant impact on depression and/or anxiety and general health status.