Bananas and cereal will help keep your B vitamin levels up.

RODALE NEWS, EMMAUS, PA—Americans spend about $44 billion dollars each year on depression-related medical costs, and older adults with depression can have even higher bills. Their healthcare costs are nearly 50 percent higher than those of nondepressed adults of the same age. But a new study suggests that eating some meat and bananas, along with taking a multivitamin, could keep depression at bay and your healthcare costs low. Scientists from Rush University in Chicago found that B vitamins, particularly B12 and B6, could be a link between depression and diet that can keep you happy as you age.

THE DETAILS: For the study, which was published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 3,500 adults aged 65 and older filled out food-frequency questionnaires as part of the Chicago Health and Aging project. They also answered questions about depressive symptoms; those with four or more symptoms on a 10-item list were considered "depressed" for the purposes of the study. After 12 years of follow up, the participants who had higher intakes of vitamins B6 and B12, both from food and from supplements, had a lower incidence of depression. And, the authors found, for every 10 additional milligrams of vitamin B6 and of vitamin B12 the participants took in, they experienced a 2 percent decrease in their odds of developing depressive symptoms each year of the study.

WHAT IT MEANS: Keeping your B vitamin intake up could ward off depression as you age. And this may be a case where your diet could use some help from supplements. Although vitamin B6 in both food and supplement form seems to ward off depression, vitamin B12 is less bioavailable, which means the body has a harder time absorbing it from food, especially in older adults, says Kimberly A. Skarupski, PhD, MPH, associate professor of nutrition and nutritional epidemiology at Rush University and one of the lead authors. But when you combine food sources of B vitamins with the added boost of supplements, the positive effects on depression are more pronounced, she notes. It's difficult to determine from these results whether a higher B vitamin intake was simply an indication of a healthier diet, which also protects against depression. But the evidence suggests that adding B vitamin supplements to your daily routine will keep you happier in the long run.