This study showed that participants' psychological and physiological stress responses were the same regardless of whether they ate healthy comfort foods or traditional comfort foods high in calories, fat, or sugar.

Unhealthy comfort eating shares the same outcome with healthy comfort eating.

People respond to stress by increasing their intake of foods that are high in calories, fat, or sugar. According to American Psychological Association (2016), this is a common behavior, with approximately 39% of American adults reporting overeating or eating unhealthy foods because of stress.

Pepperdine University

Comfort eating is eating as a way to soothe negative emotions. Research showed that eating sweet high-fat food can blunt the activity in the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis (HPA), a neuroendocrine system that in humans has been shown to regulate psychological processes, including negative emotions.

Comfort Eating(Emotional Eating)

Finch, L. E., Cummings, J. R., & Tomiyama, A. J. (2019). Cookie or clementine? Psychophysiological stress reactivity and recovery after eating healthy and unhealthy comfort foods. Psychoneuroendocrinology, 107, 26-36. doi:10.1016/j.psyneuen.2019.04.022

Cookie or clementine? Psychophysiological stress reactivity and recovery after eating healthy and unhealthy comfort foods.

Unhealthy Comfort Eating

People respond to stress by eating fruits and vegetables that contain natural sugars (e.g., fructose).

Healthy Comfort Eating

Individuals with attachment insecurity have less interoceptive awareness and difficulty regulating emotion. Hence, Insecurely attached individuals may eat emotionally because they misinterpret internal hunger cues.

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