We all have times where food is our best friend. When we are sad, we sometimes think of food as an emotional support, as if it were a person comforting us. For a breakup, bad day, stressful periods in our lives and even boredom, some people tend to lean on food. However, we do not reach for veggies or healthy foods, what we strike for are high-calorie foods with low nutritional values.
Therefore the term ‘comfort food’ was born (that is a generality, but of course some people may feel reassured by eating carrots and vegetables.)
While eating a pack of cookies, I wondered why is it that food makes us feel better in critical situations and why we are depending on it to feel better.
The University of Buffalo released a study in which they reported that we tend to feel pulled by foods that we associate with positive memories. For example, if you ate pasta one day with someone you love and had an amazing time, the psychologist Shira Gabriel explains that it’s the secure feeling that pulls us to those foods during hard times. Comfort food is food that makes us feel safe.
Another study proved that at a molecular level, food really does bring us emotional support. Dr. Lukas Van Oudenhove from the University of Leuven, in Belgium, brought a team together to use MRI scans to see the emotional impact food has once injected into the stomach. They scanned the brains of 12 healthy-weighted volunteers as a series of sad music and neutral images were shown. Without telling which, they inserted either fat or saline into the volunteers stomachs, which meant they couldn’t identify the food and associate it wit any kind of memory. The scientists saw that the music and images caused the volunteers’ mood to fall over, however the people who got injected with the fat had 50% less sadness among them than those who got injected saline. Dr. Oudenhove came to the conclusion that fat makes us less vulnerable to sad emotions without knowing it.
After all, emotional eating is still an issue and overcoming that primarily involves viewing food in a healthier way and not as some kind of support when we feel stressed or sad. Even though we shouldn’t let our emotional eating get too severe, we are still allowed from time to time to please ourselves with some good food.
