Healthy versus unhealthy comfort eating for psychophysiological stress recovery in low-income Black and Latinx adults

Abstract

Low-income Black and Latinx individuals are disproportionately vulnerable to chronic stress and metabolic disease. Evidence suggests that these populations engage in elevated levels of comfort eating (i.e., eating comforting food to alleviate stress), which can harm diet quality. For this reason, many interventions discourage comfort eating. However, if comfort eating does indeed buffer stress, it may be a protective health behavior, particularly if healthy foods (e.g., strawberries) buffer stress as effectively as traditional unhealthy comfort foods (e.g., brownies). By choosing healthy foods, people may be able to simultaneously improve their nutrition and reduce their stress levels, both of which have the potential to reduce health disparities among chronically stressed populations. The present study tested the efficacy of healthy and unhealthy comfort eating for improving psychophysiological stress recovery. A sample of low-income Black and Latinx individuals (N = 129) were randomly assigned to consume a healthy food (e.g., grapes), unhealthy comfort food (e.g., chips), or no food after exposure to a laboratory stressor. Throughout, we measured participants' psychophysiological stress responses, including self-reported stress, rumination, autonomic nervous system activation (i.e., electrodermal activity (EDA), heart rate variability (HRV)) and neuroendocrine responses (i.e., salivary cortisol). We compared participants' stress recovery trajectories by condition and found no significant group differences (p = 0.12 for self-reported stress; p = 0.92 for EDA; p = 0.22 for HRV, p = 1.00 for cortisol). Participants in all conditions showed decreases in self-reported stress and in cortisol post-stressor (ps < 0.01), but rates of decline did not differ by condition (i.e., healthy or unhealthy comfort food, brief no-food waiting period). Although null, these results are important because they challenge the widely-held assumption that comfort foods help people decrease stress.

Keywords: Comfort eating; Health disparities; Health equity; Healthy eating; Stress; Stress recovery.