A bad habit very hard to break.
By Raif Karerat
WASHINGTON, DC: Eating sugar may quiet stress signals in the brain, leading some people to seek comfort by consuming more sweets and making the habit very hard to break, a new study suggests.
Reuters Health reported in a two-week experiment, 19 women drank three beverages a day sweetened either with real sugar or aspartame, a substitute. Researchers did magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) brain scans to see how the sweets affected the women and found that sugar, but not aspartame, triggered activity in a part of the brain involved in reacting to stress.
The MRI results indicate sugar may have interrupted the normal response to stress in the hippocampus region of the brain, limiting production of the stress hormone cortisol, according to senior study author Kevin Laugero, a nutrition researcher at the University of California, Davis.
“The findings suggest an explanation of how, mechanistically, sugar may positively reinforce its habitual consumption in people experiencing chronic stress,” Laugero explained to Reuters by email.
The study was constrained by its small size and its scope only included women. More research will inevitably be needed to understand how sugar consumption might impact feelings of stress, Laugero wrote.
It’s possible that stressed out people might crave an experience of eating something sweet, rather than just a specific ingredient such as sugar, chimed in David Benton, a psychology professor at Swansea University in Wales, via email correspondence with Reuters.
“Keeping a positive environment makes it harder to make an unhealthy choice and it also helps you to delay a response to the craving,” advised Julie Rish, a psychologist with the Bariatric and Metabolic Institute at Cleveland Clinic in Ohio. “Those cravings peak over 15 to 20 minutes and if you can just delay them and distract yourself for that long the cravings start to come down on their own.”