The term "stress eating" has turned into an everyday thing in popular culture, and now a recent study has shown the true relation between food and stress, showing in brain scans exactly what happens to the body when it deals with everyday stressful situations that could ultimately lead us to self-sabotage our diets.
Researchers from Switzerland's College of Zürich have taken to analyze the relation between food and stress, and the results are staggering: when stress becomes a strong factor in your everyday life, it directly affects the way you control yourself when it comes to food intake.
According to Yahoo! News, for their food and stress study, Swiss researchers used brain scans to see that, when someone is under stress, movement in the circuits of the brain associated with reward increases, while the areas of the brain associated with self-control end up getting dialed down; and, in fact, the more stressed someone is, the less self-control they have altogether.
Reuters reports that the food and stress study involved 29 participants that went through a treatment that induces moderate stress in lab conditions, and they were then asked to take their pick between two different food options; on the other hand, another 22 participants were asked to pick food items without going through this stress-inducing treatment.
"Our findings provide an important step towards understanding the interactions between stress and self-control in the human brain, with the effects of stress operating through multiple neural pathways," Silvia Maier, the lead author of the food and stress study, told Eureka Alert. "Self-control abilities are sensitive to perturbations at several points within this network, and optimal self-control requires a precise balance of input from multiple brain regions rather than a simple on/off switch."
The food and stress study was published in the latest edition of Neuron journal, under the name "Acute Stress Impairs Self-Control in Goal-Directed Choice by Altering Multiple Functional Connections within the Brain's Decision Circuits."
