With the holiday season approaching, researchers in London warn that stress can be a dieter’s worst enemy.
Your food and how you cope
Their study shows that people who have a tendency to cope with anger or depression by eating are more likely to indulge in foods that are high in fat and calories when they feel under pressure.
“Stress may compromise the health of susceptible individuals through deleterious stress-related changes in food choice,” the researchers wrote in the November/December issue of Psychosomatic Medicine last year.
The experiment
The investigators interviewed 68 people about their food preferences and attitudes toward eating. Based on the information, individuals were described as emotional or non-emotional eaters, and restrained or non-restrained eaters.
Participants were then placed randomly into two categories: Stressed and Unstressed. Those in the stressed group were given 10 minutes to prepare a 4-minute speech that they were told to deliver after lunch. To add to the pressure, they were warned that their speech would be filmed and evaluated.
Those in the other group listened to a brief presentation before lunch.
Results
During lunch, the researchers, Dr. Jane Wardle and colleagues, analyzed individuals’ food choices. Emotional eaters in the stressed group tended to eat more high-calorie, high-fat foods such as cake and chocolate cookies, compared with non-emotional eaters in the unstressed group.
Stress did not appear to influence the food choices of restrained eaters.
More women than men were described as emotional and restrained eaters.
Interpretation of results
It is not clear how people develop into emotional eaters. Wardle’s group suggests that foods high in carbohydrates, such as cookies and pies, might influence brain chemicals that affect mood.
Stress-prone individuals might therefore choose these foods as a way to cope with their feelings.
“There is increasing evidence that stress may affect health not only through its direct biological effects but also through changes in behaviors that influence health,” Wardle said in a prepared statement.
