Stress‘When people turn to food and they’re not physically hungry, it means that they’re using food for something else besides satisfying the needs of the body. They’re using it for a different kind of hunger – an emotional hunger, a psychological hunger, or a spiritual hunger.’
GENEEN ROTH
We all have an emotional relationship with food – it’s part of being human. Emotional eating is the act of using food to make yourself feel better. We humans are emotional beings and don’t just eat to satisfy physical hunger; we also eat to satisfy our emotional needs. Generally, we eat emotionally in response to negative emotions such as stress or loneliness, rather than positive ones such as happiness. This is something we’re taught from birth – as babies our first experience of eating or feeding is connected to being held by a parent, so we start to equate food with comfort and safety. These early experiences shape our understanding of how food is connected to emotion.
How do you know if you’re emotional eating? Here are some ways you might be able to identify it:
• Emotional hunger comes on suddenly rather than slowly. It feels like an itch that urgently needs scratching.
• You crave very specific foods, such as pizza or chocolate.
• You don’t eat mindfully, despite a lack of distractions.
• You really want to eat even though you feel totally full and satisfied.
• Emotional hunger often leads to regret, guilt or shame.
These aren’t foolproof rules, though: sometimes physical hunger can feel sudden if you’ve been totally distracted by something like work or seeing your favourite band live. Sometimes you have specific cravings because your body knows exactly what nutrients it wants; you may still crave something sweet after dinner because it’s a habit you’ve developed; and there is a whole host of reasons why you might feel guilty for eating something (of course, guilt is never an ideal response to food!). However, these are some useful guidelines to illustrate the idea that emotional eating is different from eating in response to hunger.
Emotional eating gets a bad rep. It’s seen as a sign of weakness, a lack of willpower, an inability to ‘control our emotions’. But I think it’s important not to dismiss emotional eating in this way, and instead to understand the origins and mechanisms behind it. After all, our mental and emotional health is just as important as our physical health.
It probably goes without saying that happiness is important for our health. If we’re healthy we’re more likely to be happier, but the reverse relationship is also true, and happiness has significant impacts on our health. Being happier means we’re more likely to be healthier for longer. There are strong associations in the scientific literature between low happiness and future development of heart disease, stroke, suicide, and early death in general. Happier people live longer, and they have stronger immune systems, better circulatory systems and endocrine (hormone) systems. Happier people are less likely, for example, to catch a cold, and also recover faster if they do catch one.44
But what role does food play in our happiness and our mental well-being? Think back to the last time you felt sad, happy, stressed or lonely. I’ll bet food was involved in some way. Food can impact our mood, and our mood can influence our food choices. Understanding the impact food can have on our mood can help us to become happier and healthier as a result.
The most obvious example known to most of us is the idea of ‘comfort food’ – foods that satisfy an emotional as well as a physical need. Comfort foods are a legitimate thing and have been studied by researchers in a variety of settings. The foods we perceive as comfort foods vary from person to person, as they are dependent on our upbringing, our culture, and our experiences growing up. What is consistent, though, is the effect comfort food can have on our emotional state. Food can help alleviate negative emotions such as stress, loneliness, anger and depression.
StressStress is a process by which any challenging experience or event, whether emotional or physiological, results in changes in the body to try to re-establish normality or stability. Emotional stressors are what we most commonly think of as stressful events, such as going through a break-up, the death of a family member, or unemployment. Physiological stressors include starvation, sleep deprivation, severe illness and hyper- or hypothermia.
Stressful experiences can therefore be emotionally or physiologically challenging. Stress changes our eating patterns and affects appetite through the hormones that are produced as a result of the stress response. The most important of these hormones are: cortisol, adrenaline and noradrenaline.
Before we get into the nitty-gritty of the stress response, a quick word on hormones.
Hormones are the chemical messengers sent out by your endocrine system. They travel around the body via your bloodstream to send signals to various target organs and tissues in order to get your body to do something, such as changing blood pressure or initiating a behaviour. Every multicellular organism has hormones. They are involved in every system in the body, including the ones we’re focusing on here: stress and appetite.
• Ghrelin – the hunger hormone. It is made in the stomach.
• Leptin – reduces hunger. It is made by cells in fat tissue.
• Neuropeptide Y – increases hunger and reduces anxiety. It is made in the stomach.
• Insulin – controls blood glucose (blood sugar) levels. It is made by the pancreas.
• Cortisol – also known as the stress hormone. It is made in the adrenal cortex, part of the adrenal gland.
• Adrenaline (also known as epinephrine) – part of the ‘fight or flight’ response. It is made in the adrenal medulla, part of the adrenal gland.
• Noradrenaline (also known as norepinephrine) – part of the ‘fight or flight’ response. It is made in the adrenal medulla, part of the adrenal gland.
In humans, the stress response is manifested through two interacting stress pathways: the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis and the sympathetic-adrenal medullary (SAM) system. The HPA axis is a neuroendocrine system and communication pathway between the hypothalamus in the brain, the pituitary gland in the brain, and the adrenal glands above the kidneys. In the HPA axis, stress stimulates the release of a hormone from the hypothalamus, which stimulates the synthesis of another hormone from the pituitary, which triggers production of glucocorticoids (mainly cortisol) from the adrenal cortex. So, in plain English, stress stimulates a signalling cascade from your brain to the adrenal glands that results in cortisol release. Which is why cortisol is commonly referred to as the stress hormone.
The SAM system is activated in response to acute stress, which triggers the release of the hormones adrenaline and noradrenaline. These hormones promote energy responses in the body, such as increased cardiac output, blood pressure and triglyceride levels, and redirection of blood to fuel the muscles, heart and brain. Overall, this promotes the fight-or-flight response. Systems that might compete for energy, such as reproduction and digestion, are inhibited – meaning that the acute stress response includes suppressing appetite and food intake. This is a feeling we can probably all relate to; for example, you may find that during a stressful exam you don’t feel hungry at all, then as soon as you put down your pen and leave the room, your stomach starts rumbling. I don’t imagine many people would feel hungry if you’re on a plane that’s experiencing heavy turbulence, or when you’re walking home alone late at night. During acutely stressful times – which in the past would be more likely to feature being chased or attacked by a wild animal – it’s more helpful for your appetite to be suppressed, as it would otherwise provide a distraction when you need to focus and either face the fear (fight) or get away from it as quickly as possible (flight).
Acute stress can be beneficial and activate responses in the body that help you get through that stressful situation, whereas prolonged chronic stress leads to wear and tear of the body’s regulatory systems. Repeated and uncontrollable stress can dysregulate the HPA axis over time, which then affects energy balance and eating behaviours. Chronic stress can also weaken any beneficial responses to stress, dampen the immune system and lead to increased risk of disease.
These two systems, the HPA axis and the SAM system, release hormones that affect our appetite hormones. Both systems result in release of glucocorticoids, of which cortisol is the most famous one. High cortisol in the bloodstream increases leptin, ghrelin and neuropeptide Y. Leptin inhibits appetite, ghrelin increases appetite, and neuropeptide Y increases appetite as well as specifically making us crave carbs. Also, noradrenaline tends to suppress appetite during stress, whereas cortisol tends to stimulate appetite during recovery from stress. Some of these effects seem to be directly contradictory, so what effect does this swirling hormone soup actually have on you, the person?
Stress itself alters metabolism independent of a person’s lifestyle habits.45 Around 40 per cent of people increase their caloric intake when stressed, 40 per cent decrease, and around 20 per cent don’t change behaviours during stressful times.46 Over 70 per cent of us are also more likely to snack when we’re stressed and less likely to eat proper meals. These individual differences partly depend on what’s causing stress, how long that stress lasts and how hungry someone is to begin with. Mild stressors seem to lead to increased food intake, whereas more severe stressors lead to decreased intake. For some people, stress doesn’t seem to have any significant effect on their eating at all! Although there are differences across the population, what appears to be the case is that people don’t fluctuate between eating more in response to stress one week, then eating less the week after. We’re consistent in our responses, so if you’re the kind of person who eats more when stressed, then that’s unlikely to change over time.
If you’re someone who eats more in response to stress, then you likely have high stress reactivity – meaning you show a stronger cortisol increase in response to stress, which drives your appetite hormones up and encourages you to eat.47 People who experience high stress reactivity may choose energy-dense foods to blunt the stress response or reduce anxiety. Given that we live in a food environment where we have an abundance of energy-dense food that is readily available and easily accessible, this is an understandable response to stress.
Although stress leads to increased leptin levels, which you would expect to decrease appetite, instead it seems that the large amounts of glucocorticoids decrease our sensitivity to leptin, meaning that we need much larger amounts of leptin to have the same response to it. So, although we have plenty of appetite-suppressing leptin around, the body doesn’t respond to it, and so our appetite doesn’t go down. This occurs in individuals across the BMI spectrum.47
As well as quantity of food, stress can also affect our specific food preferences and choices. Stress is associated with a shift towards choosing more palatable, delicious foods, regardless of change in total energy intake. These foods tend to be both high in fat and high in sugar,48 particularly desserts and snacks, as these are especially delicious to us. When experiencing stress, most people tend to choose foods that taste sweet.49
Overall, we can conclude that stress has a pretty detrimental effect on our eating patterns. Not only are we far more likely to overeat, snack more, and go for high-sugar, high-fat foods, stress is also linked to binge-eating in some people. It should be noted that these effects are consistent across genders.
High levels of stress can alter the body’s ability to regulate appetite and energy, which can lead to overeating as the body is unable to send you the proper signals to say, ‘Stop eating, I’m full’. Over time, chronic stress is therefore linked to weight gain. High stress and high cortisol levels also affect insulin. This hormone is normally released by the pancreas into the bloodstream in response to you eating glucose (and some protein), which then encourages glucose to be taken up by cells to be used for energy. Think of it this way: every cell has a door that only glucose can go through, and insulin is the key that unlocks that door. Without insulin, glucose just stays in the bloodstream and your cells can’t use it for energy. Cortisol messes with insulin by preventing secretion from the pancreas and preventing cells from creating enough doors to allow glucose through. So we end up with a lack of keys and a lack of doors. This can lead to insulin resistance – the precursor to type 2 diabetes.47
Before, I mentioned that our stress responses are pretty consistent; however, one factor does seem to change this: dieting. Dieting or restrained eating is associated with increased cortisol, and may increase your vulnerability towards stress-induced increased appetite. So, if you’re usually the kind of person who’s not that affected by stress but you decide to go on a diet, you may then suddenly start overeating in response to stress. In fact, it’s been suggested that this is why there is such a divide in terms of stress-induced appetite responses: those who are dieting generally eat more when stressed, those who aren’t on diets generally don’t. It has been estimated that around 70 per cent of those who eat more when stressed are restrained eaters or are on a diet.48
Restraint may be associated with greater food intake following stress, but in these people, emotional eating is only linked to eating more in response to an ego threat – a threat to a person’s self-image or self-esteem. This means restraint may encourage eating in response to stimuli such as stress, whereas emotional eating tries to cancel out negative self-focused emotions.
People who are on diets tend to have rigid rules around their eating habits – what they are and aren’t allowed to eat, for example – and so are less tuned in to the physiological cues of hunger and satiety, which can also lead to overeating. It has been suggested that people on a diet are so focused on maintaining restraint and control around food that they don’t have the emotional energy to deal with stressors, and so end up overeating; or that their self-imposed restriction breaks down in favour of dealing with a more urgent concern (the stress).
The particular foods that are commonly chosen when stressed, such as sweets or crisps, are also often foods that people avoid when they’re on a diet as they are ‘forbidden’ foods. It’s interesting that people on a diet are far more likely to increase their intake of these foods when stressed, as these are foods that are not typically ‘allowed’. They reportedly eat these foods to make themselves feel better.48 This can go part way towards explaining why dieting is a risk factor for weight gain, and why diets tend to fail. People typically describe experiencing short-term loss in appetite, and possibly some weight loss, in response to stress, followed by a compensatory increase in appetite once the stressful situation has passed, which leads to weight regain, sometimes to a higher weight than before. In addition, regular chronic stress (even just five days a week) and its disruption to the body’s appetite signals can exacerbate this further.
Low stress levels and the ability to cope well in stressful situations goes a long way towards maintaining a stable weight, rather than fluctuation and weight-cycling, which, as discussed in the previous chapter, is not a good place to be in. In addition, it’s worth noting that experiencing weight stigma would be considered a stressor, and if experienced regularly can lead to chronic stress, again supporting the argument that shaming people into losing weight is not the answer.
High levels of stress increase consumption of highly palatable foods, so it makes sense that high levels of stress can affect the brain reward systems. Activation of the HPA axis is linked to activation of the dopamine reward system in the brain, as both food and food cues increase dopamine release. But it’s important to note that dopamine release is not equivalent to addictive properties. The hormones involved in appetite and energy balance, such as leptin and ghrelin, can also play a role in food cravings. This is important as it provides a link between high levels of cortisol (stress), increased appetite, and increased desire to eat highly palatable foods that activate the reward centres in the brain (and therefore make you feel better). These foods produce a response in the brain that helps calm down the HPA axis, thereby reducing the stress response.50 So consuming these kinds of foods actually helps to reduce stress on a biochemical level. Amazing!
Chronic stress is often accompanied by other emotions such as anxiety, depression, anger, apathy and loneliness. Hyper-palatable foods may serve as ‘comfort foods’ as a form of self-medication to alleviate these feelings of distress. This adds an additional psychological component to what is otherwise a very physiological argument for emotional eating. Let’s look at this idea of comfort foods in a bit more depth in connection with another strong emotion: loneliness.
LonelinessMoving away from home, fighting with a close friend, breaking up with a partner, and many other similar circumstances can leave people feeling alone and isolated. When these situations occur, the comfort of a familiar food can be especially enticing.
Comfort food helps alleviate loneliness, as these foods are associated with specific people and our relationships with them. As humans, we are desperate to belong and to form relationships with people, to the point where it’s been argued to be a fundamental human need. We want to avoid feeling lonely. Feeling lonely and being socially isolated is both physically and psychologically damaging, as it can lead to lowered self-esteem, depression, and even physical sensations of pain.51
Recent research suggests that people sometimes seek out ‘social surrogates’ when they want to avoid feeling lonely. These can be in the form of escaping into the world of a fantasy novel, writing in a diary or seeking out food. Comfort food is one way in which people can find a sense of belonging in the midst of their loneliness. While comfort foods are associated with happy times, they are almost exclusively eaten alone, not with others. It has been suggested that foods become comfort food because of the associations with specific people or occasions, and those associations get reinforced to the point where that food reminds you of someone or something every time you eat it. In one study, comfort foods were usually identified as a family tradition, a cultural tradition, something eaten for a holiday, or a reminder of home.51 They were not usually typical everyday foods. Christmas dinner is an excellent example of this. If you close your eyes and imagine last year’s Christmas dinner, does it make you feel warm and happy inside? I bet it does.
Four types of comfort food have been identified: nostalgic foods, indulgence foods, convenience foods and physical comfort foods.52 Many foods can also fall into more than one category.
These are foods that remind you of moments in your own history, especially from childhood. A particular food may remind you of something you used to bake together with your mother, or a weekend childhood family tradition, or a meal you’d share with your dad when you spent time together one-to-one. When you feel lonely or disconnected from people you love, eating foods that reminds you of them can help bring them closer, so they don’t feel so far away, especially in unfamiliar surroundings. Nostalgic foods, especially ones linked to childhood, evoke feelings of being cared for by someone, particularly our mothers. This is obviously conditional on having a happy childhood with a caring mother. These foods are also linked to sharing food with loved ones, particularly sharing of family meals around the dinner table on special occasions, and the preparation of food. Nostalgic foods are less likely to be takeaways or ready meals, instead leaning more towards meals cooked from scratch in a family kitchen. Preparing food with someone and spending time in the kitchen together is quite an intimate thing – I’m sure you’d be happy to invite new acquaintances into your dining or living room but be more hesitant about having them in your kitchen, especially while you’re cooking. It’s the ‘behind the scenes’ part that only the lucky few generally get to see.
There’s a reason that comfort foods tend to be foods we’re already familiar with. New foods just don’t feel the same, and from an evolutionary perspective, new foods were potential sources of danger, whereas familiar foods were safe – you knew they wouldn’t kill you! So whereas new foods can evoke feelings of anxiety, familiar foods can help relieve feelings of distress.
These tend to be foods that are often perceived as ‘unhealthy’ or high in calories. They can be comforting to someone, as they are often foods high in fat and sugar, which makes them particularly palatable and incredibly delicious, lighting up pleasure centres in the brain. Research shows that concerns about nutrition, while noted, get ignored in favour of making a food choice that would satisfy cravings and improve mood.52 A sentiment I think we can all relate to! Indulgence foods are also often used to provide comfort when trying to get through difficult challenges, such as exams, stressful times at work, or even just feeling tired and hungover. Takeaway pizza is a wonderful example of this, as is reaching for baked goods as a reward for having finished an evening of overtime, or using sweets to help teach your child maths. In this way, indulgence foods can also be a security blanket during times of low self-esteem. In addition, an interesting explanation for indulgence foods as comfort foods is that we crave these foods because we restrict them. Restriction almost inevitably leads to overeating and feeling strong negative emotions such as sadness or loneliness makes that restriction and ‘willpower’ to avoid them so much harder. So we don’t avoid them, and reach for them to help us feel better.
These are pretty self-explanatory. When you’re feeling down, lonely or stressed, you want something that’ll make you feel better immediately. No preparation, no cooking and no effort. If you’re feeling sad, sometimes even something as simple as cooking can feel too much. You want effortless gratification, and convenience foods provide just that.
These provide comfort by passing on their physical attributes to you, the person eating them. An ‘icy stare’ is not literally icy, but it can send a cold shiver down your spine. Similarly, a warm, comforting meal can produce a feeling almost like an internal hug. It warms up the body and fills you up, removing feelings of emptiness. In this way, comfort foods provide both physical and psychological comfort.
Interestingly, there seem to be some differences in comfort food preferences across ages and genders. Men, and those who identify as male, are more likely to reach for warm, hearty meals, whereas women, and those who identify as female, are more likely to reach for sweet foods and snacks.53 Younger people also generally prefer more snacks, whereas older people prefer whole meals. In both women and younger people in general, eating these foods is associated with more feelings of guilt for ‘giving in’ to these cravings.
AngerAnger is not seen as a productive or acceptable emotion; it’s a ‘bad’ feeling that has to be channelled into something more ‘positive’. This is particularly so for women, who are often not allowed to express anger in society and told to ‘calm down’ instead, as it’s seen as too aggressive and masculine. So because anger cannot be expressed outwardly at the source, it’s directed either inwardly or towards food – hence why women tend to feel a stronger desire to eat in response to anger compared with men.54 Keeping such an emotion inside can be uncomfortable, and so comfort foods are sought out to negate the discomfort. Food is also a distraction, as anger is an emotion that is usually followed by an action of some sort, and the action of eating allows us to move away from these feelings of anger.
Particularly for those who have issues with conflict, feeling angry can be a scary experience, and so food is used to bury those feelings, thereby avoiding any conflict. Eating in response to anger can also lead someone to feel angry and frustrated with themselves for feeling out of control, which directs the anger away from someone or something else and towards themselves instead. This is more common if they are someone who has depression, low self-esteem, or generally has a habit of thinking very negatively about themselves – blaming yourself is a much more comfortable and familiar place to be.
Anger drives us to eat more impulsively, meaning fast and irregular eating directed at any food type available.55 Being ‘hangry’ (hungry-angry) is an interesting phenomenon as well, although it’s more likely to be irritability than pure anger. Being hungry can influence mood, for example through the release of cortisol and adrenaline, which make you feel more tense. On top of that, low blood sugar is also a pretty unpleasant feeling. Interestingly though, we’re more likely to experience hanger if we’re unaware that we’re physiologically hungry, which sounds the wrong way round. Feeling hangry occurs when your hunger-induced negativity gets blamed on external factors, like the person who stole your parking space or suddenly stopped directly in front of you while walking. You assume they’re the ones who are making you angry, not the fact that you’re super hungry. But this isn’t a deliberate process; it’s unconscious.56
Being overly hungry/hangry can not only just lead to you snapping at someone unnecessarily but can also easily lead to overeating, as we tend to eat more quickly with less thought, and are less likely to pause partway through eating. Paying more attention to hunger is the key here.
BoredomA brief word on boredom. Boredom can be described as ‘emotional purgatory’. It’s neither a good mood nor a bad mood, it’s just there. It’s meh. It’s the emoji of the person shrugging with indifference. As a result, it hasn’t been studied to the same extent that stress and loneliness have in relation to eating.
We are all likely to eat more when we’re bored. Very strong, powerful emotions, such as heightened anxiety, rage or acute stress, tend to reduce our food intake, whereas more mellow emotions like boredom increase our chances of overeating. In fact, food is often the first thing we think of in relation to boredom, unlike other emotions.57 How many times have you been bored at home and walked over to your fridge, opened it, stared inside, maybe picked at something and then left again, only to repeat this same process a few minutes later?
Unlike stress eating or eating due to loneliness, boredom eating feels pretty pointless. We usually boredom-eat when we don’t actually physically need food, and there’s something more useful we could be doing. So in some ways it’s a form of procrastination. After a few bites the food usually isn’t even that satisfying, as we weren’t actually hungry to begin with.
Why do we eat when we’re bored? It’s worth pointing out that sometimes boredom allows us to realise that we are genuinely physically hungry. Sometimes we can be so focused on work or a video game or a book that we tune out our hunger signals, and then boredom allows them to become the focus again. But for those situations when you’re not actually physically hungry, it may simply be that we’re willing to do anything to avoid boredom (even give ourselves electric shocks!58) and food is just a nice, convenient way to do that.
It may also link back to dopamine and the reward system in our brain. We are evolutionarily programmed to enjoy food. Food is supposed to elicit a pleasure response in our brains. While this is a distinct advantage – it makes food more enjoyable and so we eat it and don’t starve to death – it can also have its downsides.
It’s possible that when we’re feeling bored and unmotivated, so are our dopamine neurons. When we eat out of boredom, what we’re really doing is trying to get them awake and excited again. In the absence of any other dopamine trigger, food looks like a pretty effective and easy way of doing that.
This also goes some way towards explaining why we tend to reach for snacks and sweet treats when we’re bored, rather than full meals. Some people, of course, will go hardcore in the kitchen in response to boredom, spending hours baking bread, making cakes or cooking an elaborate feast. But generally we want something quick to distract us from boredom, or to procrastinate and give us a little pleasure hit before getting back to what we need to be doing.
I would go so far as to suggest this isn’t an inherently bad thing. Sometimes a little break and burst of pleasure is ideal for getting us into a better mindset to just get shit done. But if it’s a regular repetitive habit, it can lead to overeating, feelings of guilt and stress.
HappinessWe have enough evidence to say that negative emotions cause increased food intake in a great many people.59 But food doesn’t just help us get out of a negative place, it can also help us feel happier in general. In the short term, comfort foods are very much what we lean towards, as they provide an immediate alleviation of negative mood. This is exactly what we need at that moment in time, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. In the long term, however, the kind of patterns of eating that promote lasting happiness are ones based on plenty of fruits and vegetables.49 Not only that, but foods rich in carbohydrates are known to increase serotonin levels in the brain, and as serotonin is also known as the ‘happy hormone’, yes, that means carbohydrates make you happier.60 Serotonin is made from the amino acid tryptophan*, but ironically, consumption of high-protein foods actually decreases the level of tryptophan and serotonin in the brain, whereas carbohydrates increase levels. When you eat high-protein foods, tryptophan competes with other amino acids to get past the blood-brain barrier into the brain, and all that competition means less tryptophan makes it through, and you don’t get such an increase in serotonin. However, when you eat carbohydrates, insulin is released, which triggers most amino acids to be absorbed into the bloodstream, and tryptophan has a free ride up into the brain, where it increases serotonin levels. But not all carbohydrates affect serotonin equally: it’s the complex carbohydrates found in vegetables and whole grains that seem to improve mood, more so than simple sugars. I find this ironic, considering a number of celebrity chefs and gym bros have made good money by telling people that the diet that makes you happy is a low-carb diet high in protein and fat. It is true, though, that dopamine levels are increased by eating protein-rich foods, and while dopamine doesn’t have the same effects as serotonin, it does contribute to overall mood and well-being. Obviously, we don’t eat carbohydrates or protein in isolation, we eat foods that contain these nutrients, so overall the key (food-wise) to long-term happiness lies in a healthy, balanced diet that includes sources of protein and carbohydrates.
This whole concept links beautifully back to the chapter on weight and health: if we are kind to our body, we are more likely to treat it well by feeding it a well-balanced diet, which will in turn make us happier.
Knowing that foods make us happier, the next step would be assessing if food can help with depression. There is a clear link between diet and risk of depression. Broadly speaking, people who eat a wide variety of fruits, vegetables, nuts and oily fish (all nutrient-dense foods) have a reduced risk of depression.61 The difficulty here is that the relationship seems to go both ways: if you’re depressed, you’re less likely to cook and feed yourself well by following a well-balanced, nutrient-dense diet, and if you don’t eat well that can impact your mood so you feel worse. But you may have spotted that this nutrient-dense diet is very much the Mediterranean way of eating. Following a Mediterranean-style diet can help alleviate the symptoms of depression, more so than social interactions.62 So we can now say that eating well causes an improvement in symptoms of depression.
Considering depression is such a serious issue, this could have serious implications for treatment. Dietary improvement may provide an efficacious and accessible treatment strategy for the management of depression. But I have to stress that studies examined the effects of diet on depression alongside standard treatment. Food was not, and should not, be used as a stand-alone treatment for depression. It should only be considered in addition to talking therapy or medication (or both) that it should be considered. It would also be misleading and unethical to suggest that eating a nutrient-poor diet causes depression, because that absolutely isn’t the case. Depression is complex and multifactorial, often linked to trauma, stressful life events, abuse or brain chemistry. While consuming nutrient-dense foods may help with symptoms, this will not be addressing the underlying cause.
We have a tendency to focus on the aspects of foods that affect our physical health, and not the emotional aspects. But food is so much more than just fuel; food nourishes your mind as well as your body. We all have an emotional connection with food, and that’s backed up by the research out there right now. There are some physiological reasons why these foods make us feel good: high-carbohydrate foods can increase serotonin levels in the brain, and highly palatable foods activate the reward centres in our brains. But these reasons aren’t enough to explain the existence of comfort foods. They don’t explain the diversity in foods identified as comfort foods, explain why we choose some and not others, and why we choose certain foods in particular situations.
Diet quality and nutrition are clearly important factors in mental health. There’s no denying that reconciling negative feelings and emotions by eating comfort foods can be riskier than other methods of dealing with these emotions, as it can lead to overeating or disordered eating patterns. But it’s far from the worst coping mechanism, as I’d argue using drugs or alcohol poses more serious health risks. While there is nothing inherently wrong with using food to help soothe emotions – it’s totally normal and part of being human – it can become a problem if food is the only coping strategy you have.
I want to be absolutely clear that it is totally normal to eat for emotional reasons. I also want to point out that there will be times when we think we’re emotional eating, but actually we may just be hungry. If you eat an apple for breakfast and a small salad for lunch, then you get home and demolish the entire contents of the fridge, that’s not emotional eating. You were just really hungry and needed to eat! Making sure you’re eating enough throughout the day is one easy way to prevent some cases of emotional eating – being super hungry is a stressful state for your body – as is taking time to de-stress, and having other coping mechanisms available to you when you experience negative emotions.
In short, it’s an oversimplification to dismiss emotional eating as ‘unhealthy’. It’s more nuanced than that.
All of us respond to different emotions in different ways, and sometimes those feelings make us want to eat. Please consider the extent to which each of the following feelings leads you to feel an urge to eat by checking the appropriate box.
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NO DESIRE TO EAT |
A SMALL DESIRE TO EAT |
A MODERATE DESIRE TO EAT |
A STRONG DESIRE TO EAT |
AN OVERWHELMING DESIRE TO EAT |
Inadequate |
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Excited |
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Sad |
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Irritated |
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Jealous |
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Worried |
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Frustrated |
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Lonely |
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Stressed |
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Angry |
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Nervous |
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Guilty |
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Bored |
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Helpless |
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Upset |
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Happy |
The more your answers are over to the right side of the table, the more you are driven to eat in response to emotions. This is not a diagnostic tool but is here to help you recognise and gain awareness of your current response to emotional situations. The final chapter offers some guidance on strategies to ensure you don’t rely so heavily on food as a tool.
* Amino acids are the building blocks of protein, and so you’d assume that high protein foods would give you the highest amount of tryptophan.