Whenever someone is sad or anxious they do what most people do. Eat food.
Comfort food can be both healthy and unhealthy food mostly being advertised as the unhealthy ones. When stress sets in people begin craving something to provide them with a sense of security leading to the constant circle of comfort food cravings. However good they may taste, the deliciousness is deceiving your brain to distract it from the issues that are developing from eating them so often.
Through the disguise of tasty food people are developing lower life spans as a result of the greater body mass made possible from the unhealthy ingredients in the meals. These foods have been proven to increase their consumers metabolic risks as well as compromise their immune systems. They can cause high blood sugar over time leading to brain atrophy over a long period of time actually damaging the brain. The companies that sell the foods use their products to trick the brain into thinking that people will feel better after eating them when at the same time people feel warm, comfortable, and at peace they are also introducing long term medical issues into their lives. The National Library of Medicine conducted a study which found that “comfort food is associated with reduced stress responses and increased metabolic risk across adolescence, young adulthood,and middle adulthood” where they continued their study to find out exactly how people were affected in older adulthood. The results being that the consumption of high-fat/sugar food is connected “with reduced mortality in older adults” however they also found that conducting an intervention for someone who eats food too much could be “both beneficial and detrimental” across the person’s lifespan.
Although the current knowledge about comfort food is more gathered for long term adulthood results, they still matter during adolescence when teens are thinking about what to grab for food quickly or if they have eaten enough junk food that day or not. There are still researchers who are looking into the more immediate effects of eating comfort foods such as Nutritional Psychiatrist Dr. Uma Naidoo who CNN had a sit down interview with. Dr. Naidoo expressed that “research has shown that foods, for example, that are high in sugar, tap into the same dopamine reward pathways as substances, street drugs like cocaine” which is why they are so addicting to teenagers. She went on to explain that foods are able to trick people’s brains because “they increase insulin levels and therefore allow tryptophan which is the natural amino acid building block for serotonin to enter the brain and in the brain it’s converted to serotonin which is our feel good hormone” kicking our brains into action working on their craving cycles. Regardless of the bad parts, doctors stress that there is no need to stop eating comfort food completely because there are ways to make a balance between eating healthy food and comfort food.
