Interview: What is 'Stress Eating'?

INT: Let’s start at the very beginning: What is stress eating? Is it different than “emotional eating” or “comfort eating”?

AJT: I can tell you that the researchers are also arguing about this, and so your confusion is not unusual. It seems as if emotional eating is a broader thing. So emotional eating can be in response to stress, but it can also be in response to anger or sadness — some researchers even characterize boredom as an emotion.

If there’s a Venn diagram, then “emotional eating” is the biggest circle and then within it is what I call stress eating or comfort eating. That’s when you’re eating specifically in response to stress, and not any of these other emotions.

INT: So maybe the real question is: How do you define stress?

AJT: You’ve waded into another huge theoretical argument: What is stress? Some people define it as a stressful event happening, so you lose your job. That equals stress. But there’s another view — and I would say this view is a little bit more well-established — that it’s a negative experience you feel like you can’t handle.

So it’s a very psychological thing: It’s not, “My tire went flat.” It’s, “Okay, my tire went flat, and this is really upsetting to me.” If you’re a billionaire and you have 10 cars, a tire going flat doesn’t matter to you — you have a chauffeur who will fix it. That’s why it’s really important to focus on how you subjectively feel. And if you feel stressed, then we trust you — we say you’re stressed.

INT: Does it work? Ignoring other potential downsides, if I eat a pint of ice cream because I’m stressed, will I feel better?

AJT: So I first came to this after I read a series of really interesting studies in rodents, actually. And those studies show that when you give rats access to comfort food — in their case usually Crisco mixed with sugar — and you stress them out, what you see is that over time, that comfort food actually dampens their stress hormones, it dampens down their brain’s responsivity to stress, it dampens down the signaling between the brain and the rest of the body, so they don’t secrete as many stress hormones.

I was thinking, okay, well, is this the case in humans, too? Because currently, we really demonize this behavior of stress eating. We shake our fingers and we say, “Don’t do that, it’s not good for you.”

But in my mind, if it’s serving this really important function of actually dampening down our physiological stress level, it warrants a closer look. And we find across several studies, that … when you do anything that’s rewarding to you — meaning that the reward parts of your brain sort of light up — those parts of the brain can sort of dampen down the parts of your brain that are freaking out with negative emotion. And that’s why comfort foods tend to be foods that are high in sugar and fat. They’re really rewarding; they really do light up the reward centers of our brains.

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Interview, cont.

There’s also some work showing that when you do comfort eating, it builds up fat in your belly region and that fat pad sends a signal to your brain to decrease the amount of stress hormones that you’re producing, and the specific signal hasn’t been worked out yet. So that’s another pathway.

And then there’s conditioning. If throughout your whole life, you’ve paired stress relief with comfort foods over and over again, then soon enough, your body is going to automatically respond to eating these comfort foods with relaxation.

...If you see something in multiple species, to me — to scientists in general — that means that that is an important behavior. And, in addition to rodents, we also see comfort eating working in some non-human primate species as well. So my main take home from this is self-compassion: You’re not doing the comfort eating because you’re some sort of weak-willed human being; you’re biologically driven to do this.

INT: [W]hy doesn’t everyone have the same response? Everyone (presumably) feels stress, but some people eat, and others totally lose their appetites.

AJT: We don’t know the why. The best numbers we have currently are that 40 percent of people increase their eating when they’re stressed, 40 percent decrease their eating, and 20 percent stay the same. That’s really old data, so we’re actually this fall launching a new nationally representative study to see if that’s even true. I just think the percent of people who eat more when they’re stressed is higher than 40 percent.

But anyway, those are the numbers we have right now. Men tend to stress eat less than women, so that’s something we know. But that’s about as much as we know for who does it and why, and that’s really an important next step.

I’m trying to figure out what to do with this. Like, even if stress eating works, we still probably shouldn’t do it all that often. But it’s tempting, because it works!

So we’ve amassed a little bit of evidence showing that comfort eating actually comforts, but a lot of people say, “Okay that’s great, but we don’t want people eating Snickers bars every time they’re stressed, so what do we do here?”

[T]here are reasons to believe that strawberries might work as comfort food. There’s some research showing that any sweet taste can dampen stress ... in a study that we’re running right now, we’re trying to do a mind hack to get people to be really calmed and soothed by strawberries, or whatever fruit. We’re literally doing Pavlovian classical conditioning: We’re having people do a relaxation exercise and eat fruit at the same time, and we have them do that over and over and over and over again, with the hope that eventually, just the strawberry alone will automatically elicit this relaxation response. And so that way, even if fruit doesn’t naturally comfort you, maybe we could use this mind hack to get you to feel really soothed from strawberries.