Comfort Food

The myth of comfort food.

OBJECTIVE People seek out their own idiosyncratic comfort foods when in negative moods, and they believe that these foods rapidly improve their mood. The purpose of these studies is to investigate whether comfort foods actually provide psychological benefits, and if so, whether they improve mood better than comparison foods or no food. METHODS Participants first completed an online questionna...

Health Psychology The Myth of Comfort Food

Chronic stress and obesity: a new view of "comfort food".

The effects of adrenal corticosteroids on subsequent adrenocorticotropin secretion are complex. Acutely (within hours), glucocorticoids (GCs) directly inhibit further activity in the hypothalamo-pituitary-adrenal axis, but the chronic actions (across days) of these steroids on brain are directly excitatory. Chronically high concentrations of GCs act in three ways that are functionally congruent...

Is comfort food really comforting? Mechanisms underlying stress-induced eating

☆ This research was supported by the National Cent (NCCR) for the Affective Sciences, financed by a grant fr Foundation (51NF40-104897), hosted by the University from Firmenich, SA, to David Sander and Patrik Vuilleum Postdoctoral Mobility fellowship from the Swiss N (P300_151174/1) to Géraldine Coppin. ⁎ Corresponding author at: Campus Biotech, Universit 60, 1211, Geneva 20, Switzerland. Tel.:...

Exploring comfort food preferences across age and gender.

Building on findings related to physiological and psychological motivations of food preference, this research develops a framework to examine preferences toward comfort foods. Study 1 used a North American survey of 411 people to determine favored comfort foods, and Study 2 quantified the preferences for these foods across gender and across age groups using a stratified sample of 1005 additiona...