It seems straightforward, but stress complicates the way the body processes food, Kiecolt-Glaser said.
Advertisement
The researchers looked at 58 health females who ate two separate but nearly identical breakfasts on two different days. One was high in saturated fat, while another was high in sunflower oil, a healthier fat. “We had expected that stress might make a saturated fat meal worse, and it didn’t”, Dr. Jan Kiecolt-Glaser, the study’s lead author, told Global News.
Women who ate a breakfast with healthy fats and had not experienced stress before reporting for the study did have healthy constituencies compared to women who ate breakfasts with saturated fats – something known to cause a wide range of diseases, the Los Angeles Times reports.
That is according to a new study, which finds anxiety counteracts any benefits of a healthy meal.
“We’re not sure why stress negates the benefits of healthy eating”. She’s director of the Institute for Behavioral Medicine at Ohio State’s Wexner Medical Center.
The findings, published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry, shed new light on how our mental health affects our physical well-being.
Saturated fats have been shown to trigger inflammation in the body, which contributes to heart disease, diabetes, arthritis, osteoporosis, and a slew of other conditions.
However, they wanted to examine the interaction between stress, diet, and inflammatory markers that they could measure in the bloodstream.
Research suggests that eating healthy diet is simply not enough. They were randomly assigned to one of the two breakfasts, which – in addition to biscuits and gravy – included eggs and turkey sausage. Averaging 53 years old, the women took the same meals at home on the first day. But when woman had a stressful day before the breakfast, the stresses of previous day apparently erased any health benefits linked to consuming a healthy breakfast. A stressful event did not include minor irritants, but did include having to clean up paint a child spilled on the floor, and struggling to help a parent with dementia who was resisting help.
“If they were stressed, it wiped out all the good stuff”, Kiecolt-Glaser said.
During the study period, the women’s blood was drawn multiple times, and researchers looked at two markers of inflammation and two markers that predict a greater likelihood of plaque forming in the arteries.
They then drew blood and checked four different kind of blood markers for inflammation.
All four unhealthy markers were higher following the saturated fat meal than the sunflower oil meal.
For more on a healthy diet, visit the American Heart Association.
But a stressful day cancelled all of this out. Food like fish, nuts, and vegetables can provide “good” fats.
The meal was chosen to mimic a typical fast food meal. Both breakfasts had 930 calories and 60 grams of fat, which is likened to a Big Mac and medium fries. The women were given 20 minutes to eat. Unsaturated fats mainly come from plant sources.
Everyone knows eating a healthy diet is good for our bodies, but women who are stressed may not reap the nutritional benefits of eating well.
There are “bad fats” that can raise bad cholesterol levels in the body known as saturated and trans fats. And those were normal stresses not the life-shattering ones.
Advertisement
Rather, Belury said, it could serve as a reminder to shoot for healthier choices every day so that when stress gets in your way you’re starting in a better place. Christopher Fagundes of Rice University in Texas also worked on the research.
