In some truly distressing health news, a new study has revealed that our favourite comfort foods may not be making us feel so comfortable after all, and in fact may be increasing our anxiety levels.
“But eating junk does make me feel good,” I can hear you say. Me too. That’s because eating foods high in salt, sugar and fats release serotonin in your brain, the happy feel-good chemical.
But new research from the University of Birmingham has found eating these foods as a coping mechanism for stress actually hinders your body’s long-term ability to regulate the effects of stress, in effect prolonging it.
So eating bad food may feel good in the short-term, but it will make your body feel stressed more often.
The researchers say this is because consuming junk food before a stressful episode “reduce brain oxygenation and cause poorer vascular function in adults”, which in turn promote more stress responses from your body.
“We took a group of young, healthy adults and gave them two butter croissants as breakfast. We then asked them to do mental math, increasing in speed for eight minutes, alerting them when they got an answer wrong,” said Dr Rosalind Baynham, first author of the study.
“We found that consuming fatty foods when mentally stressed reduced vascular function by 1.74 per cent.
“Importantly, we show that this impairment in vascular function persisted for even longer when our participants had eaten the croissants.”
They might not be as tasty (to some) but if you’re trying to eat to reduce stress, Dr Baynham recommends foods rich in polyphenols, such as cocoa, berries, grapes, apples and other fruits and vegetables – which awork to prevent this same impairment in vascular function.
Not much fun though, that’s for sure.
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