2024-04-15 06:30:00
It is well known that loneliness has a significant impact on mental health, which can in turn have an effect on physical health. A new study examined the brain reactions of ninety-three women to photos of different foods. Its results might provide a better understanding of why women suffering from loneliness tend to choose a certain category of food.
In participants who reported feeling lonely, the scientists found greater activity in brain regions responsible for rumination, while regions responsible for control were less active.
Arpana Gupta, psychologist at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and lead author of the study, explained to the Washington Post that women’s and men’s brains work differently when it comes to eating behavior, which justifies conducting a study only on women.
Sweets stimulate the reward center
In the experiment, researchers first invited women aged 18 to 50 to complete a questionnaire regarding their mental health. In the next step, they watched images of different savory and sweet meals, with high and low calories respectively, and their brain activity was recorded using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). For comparison, they also looked at pixelated images without food.
It turned out that participants with higher feelings of social isolation had increased brain activity around food in their inferior parietal lobe, a brain structure associated with rumination. At the same time, their dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, a part of the brain important for reasoning and inhibition, was less active.
This effect was strongest for sugary, high-calorie foods like cakes. Arpana Gupta speculates that sweets that stimulate the brain’s reward center might serve as a source of pleasure, “helping to reduce the social pain and discomfort associated with being alone or isolated”.
Ultimately, there is no point in asking those affected, “Why don’t you eat healthier?” Katherine Hanna, a lecturer in nutrition and dietetics at the Queensland University of Technology (Brisbane, Australia), who was not involved in the study, told the Washington Post: “Part of the problem is this tendency to oversimplify why we eat what we eat, which leads to judgmental attitudes. Changing the way we eat is much more complicated than just being self-aware or having enough willpower.”
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