Does Comfort Eating Decrease Stress? A Recent Study Says Hell No

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Fuck — and I mean this in all sincerity — comfort eating. Comfort/emotional/stress eating, call it however you like, usually comes from the need to feel better and results in overdosing on ultra-processed crappy foods that are high in calories, fat, sugar, and/or salt.

But does comfort eating decrease stress?

Since I started the post with “fuck — blah blah blah — comfort eating” you can guess the answer. Sadly I can’t stop at 60 words because Medium will go all no no no what kind of post is this we’re not going to pay you for this please write more sweary words. So I shall continue.

A recent study tested the efficacy of healthy and unhealthy comfort eating for improving psychophysiological stress recovery. 129 individuals were randomly assigned to three groups after exposure to a laboratory stressor:

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Immediately after the stressor, poor stressed-out souls did some testing to measure the psychological stress.

Then, off they went to the other lab room where they spent five minutes eating either “healthy” or “unhealthy” food to relieve stress. Oh, let’s not forget those…