Stress eating is real, but what drives us to stress eat? In the latest Short Talks from The Hill podcast, we hear from Grant Shields, an assistant professor in the Department of Psychological Science. He explains to host Todd Price what we know about stress eating and what we still need to understand — first by defining stress.
Grant Shields: I define stress as the subjective experience that occurs when we perceive our situation — broadly defined, this can include social situations or extended in time — to be unpredictable, uncontrollable, or presenting a real or perceived threat to the physical or social self, and a couple of other things. Stress is really characterized by a specific biological response. It is probably partially because of that response that stress does what it does to eating behavior and food choices.
Price: Let’s talk about eating in general then. Is it fair to say that most of us, given the choice, would prefer to eat unhealthy food? And why is self-regulation so important for healthful eating?
Shields: I think that there are probably some folks out there that may be exceptions to the norm, but by and large, I think that most of us would prefer to eat unhealthy foods. We’ve just gotten really good as a society about focusing in on those things that, throughout our evolutionary past, were most indicative of foods that would help us live longer. And so we find things that are easily digestible in terms of providing quick energy to us, like sugar — very hyperpalatable. And same with fat. Fatty foods bring more calories per bite than anything else. So we like both of those things. When we put them together, I think you would be hard-pressed to find somebody that doesn’t occasionally enjoy a really nice piece of chocolate cake or something like that.
Price: If we need to self-regulate and control ourselves to be good and eat healthy, what does stress do to that self-regulation?
Shields: We can talk about self-regulation in a lot of different ways. At its core, you can conceptualize self-regulation as a bit of a seesaw between things that we want to do and things that we know that we should, in a long-term, goal-directed way. Stress can affect both sides of the seesaw. It can affect our reward processing and our negative emotionality. Both of those things are going to increase the “I want to do the bad thing right now” side of that seesaw. It also can affect the extent to which we can maintain our long-term goals and implement self-regulatory control processes to override the nasty emotions that we feel. Stress really monkeys with both sides of the equation. It’s typically thought that it does so in the same way on either side — typically such that it makes that thing that we shouldn’t do look a lot more appealing.
Price: Does stress actually change how we taste and perceive foods?
Shields: There are some studies that do suggest so, yes. That research is not entirely consistent. It seems like stress can influence even the minimum detectable thresholds that we need to perceive something as salty or sweet.
Price: What are the other really important physiological and psychological factors that lead to stress eating and affect appetites when it comes to stress?
Shields: A lot of us engage in comfort eating, maybe even intentionally. We know that the chocolate cake makes us feel better — while we’re eating it, at least. Turns out, if you look kind of long term, once the chocolate cake is gone, it tends not to have really helped that we ate it, but we can keep eating the chocolate cake. Encouraging comfort eating may be because of a cultural understanding around, “Well, I’m stressed. I feel like it’s OK to eat this thing right now.” That could be one mechanism.
Stress also directly affects some of our physiological processes in ways that make us want food more. There’s some evidence that stress increases the hunger hormone ghrelin and cortisol. People call cortisol the “stress hormone.” That’s a misnomer, in my opinion. Cortisol is a glucocorticoid. Its primary function is actually energetic. And what it does is mobilize our reserves such that our muscle and other forms of tissue have more glucose at the ready, if need be, for an extended exertion. And because of that, our systems that we have in place to detect those reserves start sounding alarms, saying, “Hey, we may need a little bit more glucose here.”
Price: Is comforting and effective? I mean, should we do it? It sounds like if we just keep doing it and don’t stop, it will work.
Shields: Can I say that I don’t occasionally comfort eat knowing what I know about the stress and eating behavior literature? Not at all. Should I comfort eat knowing what I know about the stress and eating behavior literature? Not at all. It doesn’t seem to be effective long term, but it is very effective in the moment. If you’re dealing with some incredibly overwhelming negative affect, I maybe don’t feel too bad about eating that pint of ice cream. But in the types of negative affect that we typically experience from a stressor, yeah, it’s probably not a good idea to eat the pint of ice cream.
It’s not enough just to understand, “We want to eat this because we’re stressed and this is not something we should do.” Overcoming that sort of intellectual understanding that this is stress eating isn’t enough to stop us, typically.
Price: Yeah. At least me. Even you — and you study this for a living?
Shields: Yeah.
Price: We often think about stress just as something that we suffer as individuals. Losing a job can make us stressed. An upcoming test in school can make us stressed. But there are larger events that can stress a lot of people at once — a pandemic, an economic downturn. Do we see broad changes in the way people eat when these events occur?
Shields: We do. There are fewer studies on this than you might imagine. One of the only international stressors that’s been really well studied with respect to this eating behavior and stress type of idea is the COVID-19 pandemic. I don’t know if you’ve heard the joke about gaining “the COVID-19.” That’s what that literature has found — that the pandemic was associated with a shift in food preferences. People tended to eat fast food and hyperpalatable food a little bit more. Maybe that’s because they didn’t want to go to the grocery store, and that shows kind of the complexity of considering these national stressors. At least in the situations in which it’s been studied, nations and populations tend to show the expected effects that you would think you would see from this kind of more micro lab experiment type of research.
Price: Let’s talk about your work in general. So your research is focused on stress. Why? What brought you to this subject?
Shields: A couple reasons. I’m really particularly interested in the intersection between stress and cognition. What brought me to that research interest you can talk about in a few different ways. One of them, it was just the intersection of the expertise that my earliest advisors had, and I saw that there wasn’t as much work on the topic as you would expect. So I started to make that my area of interest. That’s the pragmatic answer.
The subjective answer that I feel is more accurate, even though I’m not sure how true this is — when I was working between undergrad and grad school in a group home, I saw youth, when they were stressed out, do things that they would really regret doing later on. And then I began to see some of the same things in me. Right? Like I eat a pint of ice cream from time to time — not quite to the same degree. I started to think, well, maybe this kind of failure of self-regulatory behavior under stress is something that is common and yet understudied. And so I want to study it.
Price: Talk about some of the work that you’ve done so far. What are specifically some of the experiments you’ve done? And I know your graduate students and undergraduates also do experiments. Maybe talk about some of the work you’ve directed with them. What are the questions you’re trying to answer there?
Shields: One study that we wrapped up pretty recently was examining how different things that happen to us during a stressful experience might influence how we remembered those experiences. In this case, we actually didn’t stress anyone out. We just had them write about stressful events that had happened that contained specific characteristics — either they did this or they didn’t do that — and we wanted to see how it influenced the types of information that people were retrieving about those memories. And we found some interesting results.
Another one of my students right now just finished putting together a study examining how stress influences a particular form of decision-making. And before coming here, I actually just participated in it as a participant.
Price: Is that something you do often?
Shields: I do ask my students to always have me be participant zero in their studies. I want to make sure that everything is implemented correctly and everything kind of comes together as it should before we run other participants through it. I also feel like it’s only fair — if I’m asking somebody else to do this, that I’ve done it myself. But again, we don’t only do stress studies. So if you sign up for a study in my lab, you might not have any of these things happen to you.
That was Grant Shields, an assistant professor of psychological science, discussing stress eating with Todd Price. You can hear their full conversation when you listen to Short Talks from The Hill in your podcast app of choice.
Ozarks at Large transcripts are created on a rush deadline. Copy editors utilize AI tools to review work. KUAF does not publish content created by AI. Please reach out to kuafinfo@uark.edu to report an issue. The audio version is the authoritative record of KUAF programming.
