Stress tied to food choice

STATE COLLEGE, Pa. – Tough day at work? That might be one more reason to watch what you eat when you get home.

It is well-established that people often eat to relieve stress. But a study published in the monthly Journal of Applied Social Psychology found that even after the stress was over, women who were more frustrated by it ate more fatty foods than those who were not as frustrated.

One surprising finding: Men’s snack preferences stayed the same, regardless of their stress levels.

“A lot of studies have looked at what happens during stress,” said lead researcher Laura Cousino Klein, assistant professor of biobehavioral health at Penn State University. “What we wanted to know is what happens after the stress is over.”

Klein and her colleagues presented the participants with a variety of tasks over 25 minutes while randomly blasting them with office sounds — a phone ringing, a typewriter clacking — at 108 decibels, the same noise level you would get standing next to a jackhammer.

After that time was up, the participants were left alone for 12 minutes and offered a magazine, water and a tray of snacks — fatty cheese, potato chips and white chocolate, and lowfat popcorn, pretzels and jelly beans.

After they had snacked, they were asked to trace their way through an unsolvable maze.

Those women whose stress level was the highest during the maze exercise – their blood pressure and heart rate remained high, and they quickly showed frustration with the maze – tended to eschew the lowfat snacks in favor of fattier treats.

Women who were highly frustrated by the noise stress ate 65 to 70 grams of the fatty snacks during the break, twice as much as the women who were not as frustrated.

“What’s interesting is that during the noise, during the work time, people rise to the occasion,” Klein said. “They accomplish the job they have to get done, and they do quite well at it. They block all the other things that are going on in their environment.

“But there’s a psychological and mental cost … that after that’s over, once the stressor is done, then we see this behavioral element.”