2023-06-18 15:33:20
A recent scientific study revealed the relationship between feeling stressed and craving fast food.
Researchers at the Garvan Institute for Medical Research in Sydney explained that chronic stress can cause changes in the brain that lead the body to adopt unhealthy habits, eat fast food, and gain weight, according to the “Middle East” website, quoting the “ABC” network. American.
Professor Herbert Herzog, lead author of the study, said that our brain naturally regulates the amount of sugary and fatty foods we consume, and when people eat a lot of unhealthy foods, there are certain mechanisms in the brain that say to the body: “Okay, that’s enough for now.”
He added, “This is what is called the (anti-reward) system,” noting that “it is located in an area of the brain called (lateral habenula).”
He continued, “Eating a tasty snack helps calm us down by activating the reward system in the brain; Because fast food is rich in sugar, high in fat, and easy to digest; So increasing your sense of reward by eating it may make you better able to deal with stress.”
“In stressful situations, healthy food simply does not provide the same reward as potato chips, burgers and pizza,” he stressed.
Herzog and his research team discovered that this natural system in the brain is not activated when a person is exposed to stress or chronic stress.
The team conducted its study on a group of mice, half of which were subjected to psychological stress by placing them in a cage with a large amount of ice for an hour.
The researchers conducted magnetic resonance imaging of the brains of all the mice, to find that the “anti-reward” system was not activated in those who were exposed to psychological stress, unlike the control group, and the mice that were exposed to stress ate twice as much as their counterparts in the control group.
The study concluded that the neural pathways of the reward system in the brain are very similar between mice and humans, and therefore the researchers’ findings apply to humans as well.
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