A study of 4,320 schoolchildren found that they tended to slip into generally
unhealthful dietary practices as their lives grew more stressful. Rather
than simply overeating in response, they munched more often on bad stuff
while ignoring healthy ways to eat, says the report in the August issue
of the journal Health Psychology.
“Children in the most stressed category ate more fatty foods and
more snacks, but they were also less likely to consume the recommended
five or more fruits and vegetables or eat a daily breakfast,” says
Jane Wardle, director of Cancer Research UK’s Health Behaviour
Unit. Some prior researchers had found that stress was linked to eating
more,
while others connected it with eating less.
This could be bad news down the road, the researchers note: Obesity heading
into the teenage years increases the chances of being overweight as an
adult, which can then lead to increased risk of heart disease, cancer or
Type 2 diabetes.
Wardle’s team asked the children to take a standard test for stress,
with questions like, “How often have you felt that you couldn’t
control the important things in your life?”
They also inquired about the students’ consumption
of 34 fatty food items, and how many servings of fruit and vegetables
they ate each day,
how often they snacked, and how frequently they ate breakfast. (Eating
a healthy breakfast has been shown to have a positive effect on long-term
health.)
Wardle found that the strongest association for stress was with fatty
foods. The most stressed students ate nearly twice the amount of the least
stressed group, she says.
Curiously, overweight students said they were less likely to eat fatty
foods, snacks and breakfast. Overweight children claiming to eat less may
seem contradictory, but Wardle says that obese adults typically underreport
their daily energy intake, too.
Ethnic identity played a role in eating patterns, too. Asian students,
who made up 8 percent of the sample, ate the best diets, and black students
(comprising 19 percent) the worst, with white children (62 percent of the
participants) in the middle. Higher socioeconomic status was also correlated
with healthier eating practices.
“Stress appears to be consistently harmful to children in terms
of steering their food choices away from the healthy and towards the unhealthy,” she
says.
Wardle and her collaborators hope to follow this group of children, observing
them as they grow older, to track their diets and their health.
The study was funded by a grant from Cancer Research UK and the Department
of Health.
