Mood-Food Connection: We Eat More And Less-Healthy Comfort Foods When We Feel Do

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Mood-Food Connection: We Eat More And Less-Healthy Comfort Foods

When We Feel Down, Study Finds

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/medicalnews.php?newsid=62159

People feeling sad tend to eat more of less-healthy comfort foods

than when they feel happy, finds a new study co-authored by a

Cornell food marketing expert. However, when nutritional information

is available, those same sad people curb their hedonistic

consumption. But happier people don't.

In the January issue of the Journal of Marketing, Wansink, the

S. Dyson Professor of Marketing, Applied Economics and

Management at Cornell, and two colleagues describe several studies

they devised to test the link between mood and food. For example,

they recruited 38 administrative assistants to watch either an

upbeat, funny movie ( " Sweet Home Alabama " ) or a sad, depressing one

( " Love Story " ). Throughout the viewings the participants were

offered hot buttered, salty popcorn and seedless grapes.

" After the movies were over and the tears were wiped away, those who

had watched 'Love Story' had eaten 36 percent more popcorn than

those who had watched the upbeat 'Sweet Home Alabama,' " said

Wansink, author of the recent book " Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More

Than We Think " (Bantam Books). " Those watching 'Sweet Home Alabama'

ate popcorn and popped grapes, but they spent much more time popping

grapes as they laughed through the movie than they did eating

popcorn. "

Wansink suspects that happy people want to maintain or extend their

moods in the short term, but consider the long term and so turn to

comfort food with more nutritional value. People feeling sad or

depressed, however, just want to " jolt themselves out of the dumps "

with a quick indulgent snack that tastes good and gives them an

immediate " bump of euphoria. "

To see whether nutritional information influences comfort-food

consumption, the researchers offered popcorn to volunteers who

completed several assignments, including irrelevant mental tasks,

writing descriptions of four things that made them happy (or sad)

and reading short stories that were either happy or sad. One group

reviewed nutritional information about popcorn, while the other did

not.

The researchers found that the sad people with no nutritional

information ate twice as much popcorn as those feeling happy. In the

groups that reviewed nutritional labels, however, the happy people

ate about the same amount, but the sad people dramatically curbed

their consumption, eating even less popcorn than the happy people.

" Thus, it appears that happy people are already avoiding

consumption, and the presence of nutritional information does not

drive their consumption any lower, " said Wansink.

" While each of us may look for a comfort food when we are either sad

or happy, we are likely to eat more of it when we are sad, " Wansink

concluded. " Since nutritional information appears to influence how

much people eat when they are in sad moods, those eating in a sad

mood would serve themselves well by checking the nutritional

information of the comfort foods they choose to indulge themselves

with. "

The studies were conducted with Nitika Garg of the University of

Mississippi and J. Inman of the University of Pittsburgh.