I would also be curious to see the difference on mostly whole plant foods vs. processed vegan food. I've been eating better for a few months now after a year or two of largely junk food.
@geosaved This survey has a big design flaw. People will naturally alter their responses to prove their diet superior.
By having only questions related to mood and diet, you’re unable to account for other factors, like employment, socioeconomics, or personality traits.
To demonstrate the intensity of lying to make everyone’s diet seem better, you can repeat the survey without the diet question. I’m certain you’d end up with worse emotional scores.
@geosaved I don't want to be over-critical since you're an undergraduate student, but this is a poor survey and will not be useful in actually understanding the relationship between diet and mood.
This survey doesn't ask about past mental health and/or diet. I'm vegan and have been depressed lately. However, I've been prone to depression all of my life and my most severe episodes happened while I still ate meat. If I answered and submitted the survey, I would just be a datapoint correlating a vegan diet with depression. This is misleading considering I was equally or more depressed before going vegan.
Correlation vs Causation: Nutrition is one of countless factors which influence mood and mental health. This survey makes absolutely no effort to address other major variables including social activity, physical exercise, financial (in)stability, etc. Furthermore, mood can influence diet just as much as diet influences mood. Depression can lead people to under-eat or to compulsively binge eat. Being depressed about the state of the world can also lead people to become vegan in the first place.
I filled out the survey but did not submit it because I felt there was a very high likelihood of my response being misinterpreted. If you just want to finish this project so you can graduate, then feel free to phone it in. If you actually care about research though, I would highly recommend consulting experts in research methodology and experimental design.
@geosaved Done, but i found that the questions were a little hard to answer because of the rating system or the questions were a bit vague .
Anyway - Good luck with your study
