Science Daily: Comfort food cravings linked to chronic stress

Science Daily reported in 2003 that comfort food cravings may be the body's natural response to chronic stress. From the article:

Evolutionarily, the drive to eat comfort foods makes sense, says Norman Pecoraro, co-author of the study. In the animal kingdom, it's an eat or be eaten world, and a body under constant, or chronic, stress may preferentially eat high-energy foods to stay in the game. Under the model that the research team has proposed, glucocorticoids would both prompt vigilance to threats and send a signal to the brain of a chronically stressed animal to seek high-energy food. If it were successful in finding such food, stress and its attendant feelings would be terminated.

In regions of the world where people struggle with wars, epidemics of disease and chronic food shortage, the need to seek out high-energy foods would be great, as well. In the developed world, where stress is more often found in a commuting office worker, people seem to be seeking the same solution and finding it at every street corner.

So if you, too, are feeling stressed like so many of us, stop and eat a chocolate chip cookie. Just be sure to follow it up with a glass of milk and a couple miles on the treadmill.