Edited from article Comfort-food Cravings May Be Body’s Attempt To Put Brake On Chronic Stress
Back in 2003 UCSF researchers identified a biochemical feedback system in rats that could explain why some people crave comfort foods – such as chocolate chip cookies and greasy cheeseburgers – when they are chronically stressed, and why such people are apt to gain weight in the abdomen.
“Our studies suggest that comfort food applies the brakes on a key element of chronic stress,” says study co-author Norman Pecoraro, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of senior author Mary Dallman, PhD, UCSF professor of physiology. And it could explain, he says, why solace is often sought in such foods by people with stress, anxiety or depression.
Evolutionarily, the drive to eat comfort foods makes sense, says Pecoraro. In the animal kingdom, it’s an eat or be eaten world, and a body under constant, or chronic, stress may preferentially eat high-energy foods to stay in the game. Under the model that the research team has proposed, glucocorticoids would both prompt vigilance to threats and send a signal to the brain of a chronically stressed animal to seek high-energy food. If it were successful in finding such food, stress and its attendant feelings would be terminated.
“If, after the near-miss on the freeway, you get into work and almost lose your job during an argument with your boss, and have a fight at home that night – and these types of events are relentless—you’re going to have chronically elevated adrenal hormones [ie., chronic stress],” he says. There has to be a brake on the system, and, for some, it’s chocolate.