Comfort foods affect hormones that bring on stress, study shows

There’s a reason we find high-fat, high-sugar foods comforting, UC San Francisco researchers have discovered. They’re part of a complex feedback system that turns off the release of stress hormones such as cortisol.

In a series of experiments spanning 20 years, physiology professor Mary Dallman and her colleagues found that stress hormones increase rats’ consumption of sucrose and lard -- the animals’ idea of comfort food -- which makes them fat in the abdomen. The increased abdominal fat sends a message to the brain that turns off the production of “fight or flight” hormones.

“We don’t know what the message is. It could be something released from fat; it could be nerves that go from fat to the brain,” says Dallman, lead author of an article on the research.

Other pleasure-seeking behaviors, such as running on a wheel or ingesting addictive drugs, do not stop the release of stress hormones. The study will be published in the Sept. 30 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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Dianne Partie Lange