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Study: Stress May Prompt Women to Eat

Wed Jul 7, 7:25 AM ET
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By DAN LEWERENZ, Associated Press Writer

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.

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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 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 results of the study, completed in 1996 and published in the
journal's March issue, did not 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 stress effects can be long-lasting can help people anticipate
that reaction and find other ways to deal with stress, such as
exercise.

In the study, men ate about 40 grams of fatty snacks, regardless of
their stress levels.

Klein said the explanation might have to do with 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."