Chronic stress and obesity: A new view of “comfort food”

By M. Dallman, N. Pecoraro, S. Akana, S. L. la Fleur, F. Gómez, H. Houshyar, M. Bell, S. Bhatnagar, K. Laugero, Sotara L Manalo. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2003

1,406 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Behavioral Neuroscience, Endocrine and Autonomic Systems, Physiology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/bd99d83472eef08f9dad59e67d7e73872f2f35cb

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Citations in the corpus

Work stress in the etiology of coronary heart disease--a meta-analysis. (2006, background): “Stress has been associated with sleep disturbances (20), increased smoking intensity (21), reduced leisure-time physical activity (22), unhealthy diet (23), increased weight gain and obesity (66, 67), metabolic and hemostatic disturbances (18, 68), reduced heart rate variability and vagal tone (9, 6”
‘Liking’ and ‘wanting’ food rewards: Brain substrates and roles in eating disorders (2009, background): “Another important topic is how stress systems interact with brain reward systems [151] [152] [153] [154] [155].”
Race and Unhealthy Behaviors: Chronic Stress, the HPA Axis, and Physical and Mental Health Disparities Over the Life Course (2009, background): “Recent research from Dallman et al.19,20 suggests that consumption of foods that are high in fats and carbohydrates reduces anxiety via feedback to the HPA axis.”
Chronic stress and comfort foods: self-medication and abdominal obesity. (2005, background): “Intra-abdominal fat stores appear to serve as an excellent surrogate for an indirect metabolic negative feedback signal of glucocorticoids since they are highly negatively correlated with hypothalamic CRF expression and HPA responsivity in both adrenalectomizedcorticosterone replaced, and in intact,”
Corticostriatal-hypothalamic circuitry and food motivation: integration of energy, action and reward. (2005, background): “For example, emotional factors are clearly very important; ingestion of food provides a great deal of subjective pleasure, particularly if the food is rich in sugar or fat, and eating can be a source of comfort in depression or stressful states [4].”
Socioeconomic Disparities in Health Behaviors (2010, background): “Several studies measuring perceived stress or biological stress markers find relationships with higher fat consumption and lower levels of mild, moderate, and strenuous physical activity (Burdette & Hill 2008, Dallman et al. 2003, Ng & Jeffery 2003).”
Central effects of stress hormones in health and disease: Understanding the protective and damaging effects of stress and stress mediators. (2008, background): “Hunger for comfort foods and increased caloric intake are one result, along with depressed mood and cognitive impairment (Dallman, 2003; McEwen, 2006).”
Regulation of the Hypothalamic‐Pituitary‐Adrenocortical Stress Response (2016, neutral): “As both the CeA and BST project strongly to behavioral, neuroendocrine and autonomic effectors circuits, upregulation of CRH predicts enhanced capacity for stress excitation, and is purported to reflect a “chronic stress-recruited” pathway (30).”
High-fat diet-induced obesity in animal models (2010, background): “Depressed individuals with eating disorders often describe themselves as chronically stressed and usually are obese, suggesting that they eat more when stressed in an attempt to cope with the situation and feel better((230)).”
The Darwinian concept of stress: benefits of allostasis and costs of allostatic load and the trade-offs in health and disease. (2005, background): “Recently, Dallman and colleagues [413] suggested that people or animals eat comfort food in an attempt to reduce the activity in the ‘chronic stress-response network’ with its attendant anxiety.”
Limbic system mechanisms of stress regulation: hypothalamo-pituitary-adrenocortical axis. (2005, background): “Overall , the data have led to the intriguing hypothesis that amygdalar glucocorticoid receptors play a Ffeed forward_ role in stress regulation , serving to potentiate rather than inhibit HPA responses ( Dallman et al .”
Stress and Obesity. (2019, background): “Through negative reinforcement (Adam & Epel 2007), these foods can serve to provide relief from both stressful states and the hedonic withdrawal that occurs as a result of long-term exposure to cortisol (Dallman et al. 2003) and can then be ingrained as reward-driven habits (Schwabe & Wolf 2009).”
Why the Poor Get Fat: Weight Gain and Economic Insecurity (2009, background): “Nutritionists, for instance, often refer to " stressinduced eating " and " comfort foods " when exploring the personal reasons for excessive body weight (Greeno and Wing 1994, Dallman et al. 2003).”
Emotional influences on food choice: sensory, physiological and psychological pathways. (2006, background): “This may reflect an adaptive change in hypothalamic pituitary adrenal (HPA) axis function: in rats, drinking sucrose solution for several days inhibits production of corticotrophin releasing hormone (CRH) in the brain, and appears to mimic glucocorticoid replacement in adrenalectomised rats [50].”
Stress, eating and the reward system. (2007, background): “This has been described as ‘self medication’ with food [5,119].”
Weight stigma is stressful. A review of evidence for the Cyclic Obesity/Weight-Based Stigma model. (2014, background): “Eating is a common comfortseeking behavioral response to stress and negative emotion (Adam & Epel, 2007; Greeno & Wing, 1994) and is a behavior conserved across species (Dallman et al., 2003).”