Stress-eating comfort food makes stress worse, study finds — here’s why and what to eat instead

Your deadline is rapidly approaching, and you’re running late, so you reach for the only thing that can help: a greasy donut.

You just made your stress worse, according to a new study that reveals eating fatty food before or during a stressful event reduces the functioning of your brain and heart, and slows your body’s recovery from stress.

“We took a group of young healthy adults and gave them two butter croissants as breakfast,” Rosalind Baynham, a researcher at the UK’s University of Birmingham, said in a news release.

“We then asked them to do mental maths, increasing in speed for eight minutes, alerting them when they got an answer wrong. The experiment was designed to simulate everyday stress that we might have to deal with at work or at home,” Baynham added.

The study team found that eating fatty foods under stress reduced cardiovascular function by 1.7% — and other studies have shown that a 1% reduction in cardiovascular function leads to a 13% spike in the risk of heart attack, stroke and other cardiovascular disease.

“Importantly, we show that this impairment in vascular function persisted for even longer when our participants had eaten the croissants,” Baynham said.

The scientists were able to detect reduced elasticity in the arteries of the study participants up to 90 minutes after the stressful event was over.

“When we get stressed, different things happen in the body, our heart rate and blood pressure go up, our blood vessels dilate and blood flow to the brain increases. We also know that the elasticity of our blood vessels – which is a measure of vascular function – declines following mental stress,” Baynham said.

In addition to the impact on the heart, the team also found that eating high-fat foods affected the flow of oxygen to the brain.

Fatty foods reduced oxygen flow to the brain’s pre-frontal cortex by 39% during stress, compared to when participants consumed a low-fat meal. Moreover, fat consumption hurt the participants’ mood both during and after the stress episode.

The study, published in the journal Frontiers in Nutrition, also suggests consuming low-fat food and drinks had less of an impact on people’s recovery from stress.

After eating a low-fat meal, stress still had a 1.2% decrease in cardiovascular functioning, but this decline returned to normal 90 minutes after the stressful event.

In an earlier study, the same research team found that by eating healthier food — especially those rich in polyphenols, like cocoa, berries, grapes, apples and other fruits and vegetables — an impairment in cardiovascular functioning can be totally prevented.

Other foods that can reduce the impact of stress on the body include complex carbs like whole-grain breads and cereals; salmon, tuna and other fish rich in omega-3 fatty acids; nuts such as almonds and pistachios; and crunchy, raw vegetables like carrots and celery.

“We all deal with stress all the time, but especially for those of us in high-stress jobs and at risk of cardiovascular disease, these findings should be taken seriously,” said Jet Veldhuijzen van Zanten, professor of Biological Psychology at the University of Birmingham.

“We looked at healthy 18 to 30-year-olds for this study, and to see such a significant difference in how their bodies recover from stress when they eat fatty foods is staggering. For people who already have an increased risk of cardiovascular disease, the impacts could be even more serious,” van Zanten added.