Why’re Comfort Foods So… Comforting?

Picture it: you’ve just broken up. Eyes red from crying, you listen to ne is the Loneliest Number?on endless repeat; no matter what the season, every time you step outside it rains. In a daze, you stumble through your kitchen, and inexorably you are drawn to the freezer; to the third drawer down; to the ice cream. Of course the slightly freezer-burnt Mint Chocolate Chip tastes good, it always does, but with every creamy bite, you find yourself thinking or the moment, at least that everything is going to be okay.

This all too familiar scenario is tied into a grand human tradition: comfort food. The fact that we seem to gravitate towards certain foods in times of grief is nothing new, of course (in fact, the term comfort food?gained official recognition from Webster's in 1972 and we've written an article about them once before), but recent research sheds interesting light on the relationship between grief and that fourth chocolate chip cookie.

Why do we want certain foods when we’re sad? Common wisdom dictates that whatever comforted you as a child makes a quick, soothing fallback when you're an adult. If mom gave you pickles to help with teething, it's likely you'll associate pickles with comfort when you're in pain. There's certainly truth to that, but all signs point to the comfort food phenomenon being something more than psychological.

According to one theory advanced by the University of California, we use high-fat, high-sugar foods to balance out our hormones during times of chronic stress. When the body is subjected to stress, adrenal glands release certain hormones called glucocorticoids. In immediate-danger situations (like, say, a car crash or extreme physical pain) the amount of glucocorticoids released can eventually crash our stress-response systems. But during periods of chronic stress, the hormones are released at lower level; instead of shutting us down, they drive us to seek out pleasurable foods and accumulate abdominal fat. By doing so, we send an OK signal to the brain, which halts the release of any more hormones.

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