Study: Some comfort foods may actually impair your body’s response to stress

While comfort foods — like macaroni and cheese, cinnamon rolls, chicken parm and fast foods — may intrinsically make you feel better or at least slightly boost your mood, that may not exactly be the case for your body. As Rachel Hall writes in The Guardian, “researchers have found that [eating comfort foods] can reduce blood flow to the brain and cause poorer vascular function — which in turn can have a negative effect on mental health and cognitive function, and increase the risks of heart disease.” It’s recommended to instead snack on fruits and vegetables during especially difficult, stressful or trying times, as unexciting as that might sound.

The study looked at “healthy, young adults” who were given two butter croissants for breakfast and then assigned a mental math challenge which increased in speed as the questions progressed. The researchers found that consuming fatty foods when mentally stressed reduced vascular function by 1.74%. Previous studies have shown that a 1% reduction in vascular function leads to a 13% increase in cardiovascular disease risk. “The experiment was designed to simulate everyday stress that we might have to deal with at work or at home,” said the study’s first author, Rosalind Baynham of the University of Birmingham.

The good news? While fruits and vegetables still reign supreme, cocoa was included in the list of foods (especially those high in polyphenols), which are good to eat when stressed or upset due to how they can “prevent the impairment in vascular function.”

The research was published in the journal Frontiers in Nutrition and Nutrients.