With spring and exams just around the corner, having both a reason to celebrate and a reason to stress can add up to one thing: a reason to eat comfort food.
Whether you think of it as something traditionally prepared and sentimental, or as something that has a lot of sugar or carbs, comfort food evokes-as the name would suggest-a psychologically comfortable and pleasurable state. In particular situations, people tend to crave specific foods which will bring psychological comfort.
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The key to understanding the psychological aspect of comfort foods lies in differentiating between nutrition and nurturing. When food is used to seek comfort and pleasure, it becomes an expression of nurturing rather than a form of nutrition.
"We absolutely know that many people use food for other things than just nourishment," says Wendy Shah, a Calgary-based dietician and co-founder of Craving Change Inc., a program created to help emotional eaters identify and change their personal eating triggers and patterns. "It's a way to cope with stress, it's a way to reward yourself for doing a good job, it's a way of distracting yourself when you should be studying … there are all these different reasons that we're eating, and one of the most common relationships people have with food is to use it for comfort, or to nurture themselves."
The relationships people have with comfort food tend to be personal and are often influenced by the surrounding environments and conditioned associations. A 2006 study led by Dr. Brian Wansink, director of the Cornell Food and Brand Lab at Cornell University, showed that feelings evoked by comfort food are the driving factor towards consumption of a specific meal. These evoked feelings and conditioned associations may exist between food and specific people, such as the connection found in eating a parent's favourite meal, or between food and important events, such as the meal your mother fed you when you were sick. There may be an association between food and a feeling that a person may wish to recapture, such as being rewarded with chocolate for receiving good grades in school. Sometimes, there may simply be the desire for a specific taste or smell.
Besides these social affective contexts, studies have also shown a connection between food and mood.
"We eat when we're happy, we eat when we're sad, we eat when we're bored. … It's not just that people eat when they're feeling down, we tend to associate food with celebrations and rewarding ourselves and happiness," says Shah. While comfort food is most often associated with negative moods, people are drawn to food whether they are happy or unhappy.
Wansink, currently on leave from Cornell University after receiving a presidential appointment as the executive director of USDA's Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion, agrees. "People tend to use food to maintain a good mood, or to regain a good mood if they're in a bad mood. They use different foods to do this," he says. "Now what we've found is if they're in a positive mood, they'll tend to eat things that are more meal-related, and there's generally more nutrient depth, like hamburgers, pasta, or soup and vegetables. But when you're in negative moods, they tend to be more caloric and convenient snack foods."
Wansink believes that those who are unhappy have a short-term focus: they want an instant mood booster. While we eat both when we are happy and sad, those in a sad frame of mind tend to consume more hedonic, high-calorie foods.
In addition, "'stressed' and 'unhappy' and 'lonely' [people] all answer the same way. And when you're lonely, you can eat a lot more when you're stressed," says Wansink.
Snack food plays with pleasure receptors
While psychological studies show that stress and sadness lead to cravings for more caloric and convenient snack foods based on associations with positive memories, there is evidence that comfort foods have a scientific connection to mood as well.
"If you look at the types of food people tend to eat, they all have one of three things in them," says Wansink. "They have salt, they have sugar, [or] they have fat. And all of those don't have any psychological effects on people."
Typically, comfort foods high in sugar, fat, or salt effect neurotransmitters such as endorphins, serotonin, and dopamine.
A recent study at Princeton demonstrated that when hungry rats consumed large amounts of sugar, their brains released a surge of dopamine. After a prolonged period of time, the rats' brains began to show fewer dopamine receptors and more opioid receptors, a change similar to the brain structure of rats on cocaine and heroine.
According to Elizabeth Somer and Nancy Snyderman's book, Food & Mood, "the mere touch of sugar on the tongue produces an immediate endorphin rush." This immediate rush is then bolstered by the lingering effects created by serotonin, the neurotransmitter crucial to regulating moods.
As the body regulates blood sugar, consuming large amounts of refined sugar causes the pancreas to release insulin. In turn, the insulin causes a quick spike in the levels of tryptophan, the large amino acid responsible for manufacturing serotonin. The corresponding spike in serotonin creates a feeling of well-being and relaxation. However, refined sugars and high glycemic index starches, which are rapidly converted to sugar, cause a rapid spike and crash in blood sugar levels, thus begetting a feedback loop as low blood sugar levels increase cravings.
Besides the production of these neurotransmitters, researchers at the University of California, San Francisco discovered that chronic stress stimulates hormones which prompt rats to undertake pleasure-seeking behaviours, such as consuming sucrose and lard. In a press release issued by UCSF, the study's co-author, Dr. Norman Pecoraro, suggested that there seemed to be a feedback loop involving abdominal fat, energy-rich food, and pleasure centres in the brain, while "stress hormones increase the salience of rewards."
Other strategies for stress
All this spells bad news for stressed out students heading into final paper and exam season. Not only are we psychologically conditioned to seek comfort food, there is also physiological evidence that the type of high calorie comfort food we seek is potentially addictive.
"What I like to say about eating is, it's quick, it's very convenient, there's almost always food around, it's legal, it's fairly inexpensive," states Shah. "So it tends to be what we think of first, or what we've learned to do to calm ourselves, to reward ourselves, and so it's a matter of finding other ways to do that than using food."
To change the way you have cravings, you really need to increase your self awareness of eating triggers.
"One of the biggest questions you should ask yourself when you're about to eat something is, 'Am I physically hungry?'" suggests Shah. "Because really the only way that food is going to satisfy you is if you are physically hungry." If you are not physically hungry, determine why you want to eat. If the reason is procrastination or distraction, find something else to do.
Another easy strategy is to make yourself wait: delay gratification.
"If you're craving something and you're just about to go grab that bag of chips or cookies, just tell yourself you can eat them but you have to wait three minutes first," says Shah. "If after three minutes you still want to eat it, then go ahead. But sometimes that little bit of delay just gives you enough time for that craving to sort of go down a little bit, it's not so strong, gives you a few more minutes to talk yourself out of it."
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