If you have one form of SAD there is a much higher chance you will have PAD.

Acronyms are often easy to remember handles; a few are perfect descriptions of something, but one, SAD, is a perfect description of two different things.

For psychiatrists SAD means seasonal affect disorder, depression which occurs in winter and which is usually well treated with regular use of light of a certain wavelength. Nutritionists use SAD to mean standard American diet, food that is mostly processed, high in sugar, salt and fat. It would be hard to find any acronym more descriptive than either SAD.

Michael Greger (NutritionFacts website) hypothesizes that we are genetically programmed to be depressed when we are inflamed. The genetic advantage is that will we rest and withdraw when we are infected, allowing more rapid and effective healing. Until western civilization’s recent dietary change to SAD general body inflammation was usually due to infection, but now most Americans are always chronically inflamed. As discussed in prior blogs, SAD changes bowel flora and does not supply enough essential nutrients, setting off a cascade of physiological events which precipitate chronic inflammation and many forms of chronic illness.

Multiple studies have confirmed a strong association of chronic inflammation with depression which is not seasonal but persistent. A Danish study of over 70,000 people found a high correlation of elevated C-reactive protein, a frequently used marker for chronic inflammation (see my earlier blogs), with depression. Thus I have created my first acronym, PAD (persistent affective disorder), to describe the type of depression associated with the chronic inflammation of SAD. Give up SAD and you may get rid of PAD!

No discussion of depression and lifestyle would be complete without again mentioning the strong effect of exercise to improve PAD (see Ratay’s wonderful book Spark.)