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I've had a look at the studies and I'm not impressed.
I'm not sure how the second study links to life satisfaction, since it appears to be talking about gut microbes and measurements of being in good health. A quick skim of the paper body didn't show any measurement of life satisfaction either so I've ignored it.
The first and third studies cover very short timeframes. It seems obvious that health is an area where bad diet could induce unhappiness that could be resolved by a good diet, but none of these studies cover the kind of timeframe that would be required for a dietary change to result in significant health changes. Neither even covers the "couple months" you said it takes for sugar cravings to go away - shouldn't these people still be craving sugar (and therefore be unhappier than usual) on the timeframes these studies cover?
Given it can't be a major turnaround in health, what changes are being caused by the new diet that would explain substantially improved mood over such a short timeframe? The studies don't seem to have any idea what specific changes they're looking for, since they've thrown a variety of tests that mostly just return insignificant results.
Doing this scattershot approach, especially on small study sizes, is a good way to get meaningless but "statistically significant" results.
I'm asking you to just look at the people around you. Unless you're in a particularly strong bubble then most of them will be eating sugar at least some of the time. Are they constantly eating more and more sugar? Do children brought up occasionally eating cookies eventually graduate to eating whole packets of cookies by adulthood? An addictiveness even a tenth of heroin's should be readily apparent.
If you need to apply statistical tools to populations over years to find see the effect then that already puts its addictiveness leagues away from heroin.
healthy microbiome is associated w well-being, the reason short time frames are used is that these are intervention studies and it’s difficult to tell a person to eat a new diet for years. We know from correlation studies that refined carb intake is associated with poor well being. A short time frame can induce changes in inflammatory markers and some gut changes. For instance iirc there are profound mood changes from 10 days of very low caloric fasting
Yes? Look at the obesity epidemic. Addiction is not linear. Maybe only 10% of those who take opioids become addicted. But opioids are addicting. There’s a study on heroin users in Vietnam which show only a minority continued their addiction on returning home
https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/pdf/10.2105/AJPH.64.12_Suppl.38
Yes, statistically, given the rise in obesity
I'm aware of the difficulties of doing longer term studies, but that doesn't make the results any better. The proper reaction to results like these would be larger, longer, and more focused follow-up tests to ensure they're not just random noise of the kind that will inevitably occur when you apply a large number of tests on a small population.
And these lead to the mood improvements that are seen in the studies above? How?
I've heard suggestions that changes in gut bacteria can impact feelings of hunger and sure, being part of the digestive system that sounds plausible. Saying they make you happier is a lot harder to justify.
As for inflammation... if reducing inflammation has significant positive effects on depression shouldn't we have noticed that by now? Many of the most common household medicines are anti-inflammatory drugs.
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