Study: Glucocorticoids May Cause People to Turn to Unhealthy Foods to Relieve Stress

Why does chronic stress cause some people to crave such foods as chocolate chip cookies and greasy cheeseburgers?

According to a study published this week in the early edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, natural hormones called glucocorticoids appear to play a key role in this unhealthy response to stress.

In their studies on animals, University of California-San Francisco (UCSF) researchers found that rats exposed to chronic stress engaged in pleasure-seeking behaviors such as eating high-energy foods containing sugar and lard.

"Our studies suggest that comfort food applies the brakes on a key element of chronic stress," said study co-author Norman Pecoraro, a postdoctoral fellow at UCSF. He said the study also might explain why people with stress, anxiety or depression often find solace in unhealthy foods.

Pecoraro and his colleagues believe that glucocorticoids send a signal to the brain in animals under chronic stress to seek high-energy food. Once they consume this type of food, their stress goes away.

Evolutionarily, the drive to eat comfort foods makes sense in the animal world since it is an eat-or-be-eaten world, and an animal under constant stress may prefer high-energy foods as a way to stay in the game, observed Pecoraro.

Pecoraro said the need to seek out high-energy foods would also be great in areas of the world where people struggle with wars, disease epidemics and chronic food shortage.

However, seeking out such food when dealing with stress in the developed world -- where high-energy sugary and fatty food can be found on every corner -- can lead to disastrous results such as abdominal obesity, which can lead to cardiovascular disease, diabetes and stroke, he added.

Fortunately, Pecoraro said the developed world offers other ways to treat chronic stress such as exercise, yoga and meditation and many other healthy activities that activate regions of the brain that stimulate pleasure.

"In the short term, if you're chronically stressed, it might be worth eating and sleeping a little more to calm down, perhaps at the expense of gaining a few pounds," says Pecoraro. "But seeking a long-term solution in comfort foods -- rather than fixing the source of the stress or your relationship to the source of the stress -- is going to be bad for you."

Other sources: University of California at San Francisco