There is a scientific explanation for why so-called “comfort eating” has the soothing effect implied by the name, and for why it can be therapeutic if it does not entail overeating junk food.
A team of Chinese researchers has established that consuming “palatable” food triggers a response in the brain that counters how anxiety and worry affect neurons.
Based at the Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology (SIAT), part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the team used scans on mice to show that eating their preferred food reversed “neural and behavioural abnormalities” caused by stress.
In a study published in the journal Advanced Science, the researchers explained that comfort eating triggers dopamine in neurons that suppresses “stress-induced hyperactivity” seen in other neurons.
Dopamine is a hormone that acts as a kind of messenger between brain and body, helping manage the response to rewards and pleasure.
The team described how there appears to be a multi-step neural pathway running from the brain’s prefrontal cortex to the hypothalamus that comfort-eating activates to help alleviate stress.
At the same time, however, stress can affect the brain’s capacity to rationally weigh up how much to eat.
In a 2023 study, a team from the Sydney-based Garvan Institute of Medical Research warned that stress “overrode the brain’s natural response to satiety, leading to non-stop reward signals that promote eating more highly palatable food” – an effect that can transform comfort eating into bingeing and lead to unwanted weight gain. – dpa
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