Comfort-food cravings may be body's attempt to put brake on chro...( UCSF researchers have identified a bioc...),Health

UCSF researchers have identified a biochemical feedback system in rats that could explain why some people crave comfort foods - such as chocolate chip cookies and greasy cheeseburgers - when they are chronically stressed, and why such people are apt to gain weight in the abdomen.

The finding, to be published this week on-line in the Early Edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, focuses on a glucocorticoid steroid hormone (corticosterone in rats, cortisol in humans) that plays a key role in the stress-response system. In their study, the researchers determined that 24 hours after activation of the chronic stress system - which stimulates a flood of hormonal signaling from the hypothalamus to the adrenal glands glucocorticoids prompt rats to engage in pleasure-seeking behaviors, which include eating high-energy foods (sucrose and lard). The animals develop abdominal obesity, and the negative aspects of the chronic stress response system, otherwise ushered in by the glucocorticoids, are blunted. The researchers suspect that the metabolic signal to inhibit the stress system comes directly from fat depots.

The finding offers an explanation into how chronic stress can be inhibited, or curbed. While the body's acute response to stress - say to being cut off in traffic by a speeding car - diminishes through a naturally occurring inhibitory feedback mechanism of the adrenal stress system, its chronic response to stress - in which a barrage of threats, scares or frustrations occur over days, weeks or months -- becomes chronically excited. Over time, the elevated stress level can initiate a host of deleterious effects on the body - a loss or gain of weight, depression, obesity (associated with type II diabetes, cardiovascular disease and stroke), and a loss of brain tissue.

"Our studies suggest that comfort food applies the brakes on a key element of chronic stress," says study co-author Norman Pecoraro, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow i
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Contact: Jennifer OBrien
jobrien@pubaff.ucsf.edu
415-476-2557
University of California - San Francisco
10-Sep-2003

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