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Lookup NU author(s): Professor Melissa BatesonORCiD, Matthew Johnson, Professor Daniel Nettle
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
© 2025 Bateson et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Food insecurity is associated with increased odds of anxiety and depression, but it is unclear whether this effect is causal, and if so, the timescale over which it occurs. We conducted a preregistered analysis of an intensive longitudinal dataset, the Changing Cost of Living Study, to explore evidence for causal processes linking food insecurity to anxiety and depression. Data were collected monthly between September 2022 and August 2023 from panels of adults in the UK (n = 244) and France (n = 240). Food insecurity predicted higher concurrent symptoms of anxiety and depression (measured respectively with GAD-7 and PHQ-8), controlling for gender, age, time and mental health in the previous month. Effect sizes were similar for GAD-7 and PHQ-8 scores. Changes in food insecurity produced changes in symptoms (within-individual standardised effects: 0.15 [95% CI 0.08-0.22] on GAD-7 and 0.11 [95% CI 0.03-0.18] on PHQ-8). The deterioration in mental health when participants became food insecure was of similar magnitude to the improvement observed when they became food secure. Consistent with Granger causality, food insecurity in the current month predicted poorer mental health in the following month after controlling for current mental health. These results support the hypothesis that food insecurity causes symptoms of anxiety and depression. The effects were rapid, occurring within a month of becoming food insecure, and were equally rapidly reversed. We conclude that policy interventions designed to reduce food insecurity would have immediate, clinically relevant, positive impacts on mental health.
Author(s): Bateson M, Chevallier C, Johnson EA, Johnson MT, Pickett KE, Nettle D
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: PLOS Mental Health
Year: 2025
Volume: 2
Issue: 7
Online publication date: 16/07/2025
Acceptance date: 03/06/2025
Date deposited: 02/02/2026
ISSN (electronic): 2837-8156
Publisher: Public Library of Science
URL: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmen.0000320
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pmen.0000320
Data Access Statement: The raw data and analysis code are available at https://osf.io/3rby2/
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