Eating
Disorders
Loud Noise, Stress May Prompt Women to Eat
(Jul 1, 2004) -- A study published in the current issue of the Journal of
Applied Social Psychology found that even after a stressful day has ended,
women who were more frustrated by it ate more fatty foods than those who
weren't as frustrated.
"A lot of studies have looked at
what
happens during stress," said Laura Cousino Klein, assistant professor of
biobehavioral health at Penn State University, who led the study. "What we
wanted to know is what happens after the stress is over."
Klein and her colleagues presented their subjects with a variety of tasks
over the course of 25 minutes while randomly blasting them with office sounds —
a phone ringing, a typewriter clacking — at 108 decibels, the same volume as
standing next to a jackhammer.
After that time was up, the subjects were left alone for 12 minutes with a
magazine, some water and a tray of snacks — fatty cheese, potato chips and white
chocolate, and lowfat popcorn, pretzels and jelly beans.
Subjects then were asked to trace their way through an unsolvable maze. Those
women whose stress level was the highest — their blood pressure and heart rate
remained high, and they quickly showed frustration with the maze — also 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 weren't 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 to that, and what that is is
that after that's over, once the stressor is done, then we see this behavioral
element."
Klein said a corollary can be seen most weekends, when people are most likely
to binge drink or stray from their diets.
The study result didn't surprise William Kelley Jr., director of the Wellness
Center at Green Mountain College in Poultney, Vt.
"Your body doesn't stop dealing with a stressor just because the stressor is
no longer in place," Kelley said. "You're still processing an event long after
it happens."
Dr. Christopher Still, director of the Center for Nutrition and Weight
Management at Geisinger Medical Center ini Danville, Pa., said knowing that the
stress effects can be long lasting can help people anticipate that reaction and
find other ways to deal with stress, such as exercise.
One surprising finding: Despite the dramatic difference among women, men made
the same snack preferences, eating about 40 grams of fatty snacks, regardless of
their stress levels.
Klein said the difference might be in the way men and women handle stress, an
idea Kelley agreed with.
"I definitely have seen the same thing, and I want to be careful how I word
that because I don't want to start a gender debate," Kelley said. "But the men
that I usually see are sort of, 'It happened, it's over, let's deal with it and
move on,' whereas the women tend to struggle more with the processing time of an
event afterward. I'm not sure if that's genetic programming or society."
By Dan Lewerenz
Related Information:
back to top |
news index
|
