Historical Newspapers of South Carolina

Below is the OCR text representation for this newspapers page. It is also available as plain text as well as XML.

Study finds stress may affect diet Women may eat more fatty foods because of stress BY DAN LEWERENZ THE ASSOCIATED PRESS STATE COLLEGE, PA. — Tough day at work? That might be one more reason to watch what you eat when you get home. It is well-established that peo ple often eat to relieve stress. But a study published in the monthly Journal of Applied Social Psychology found that even after the stress was over, women who were more frustrated by it ate more fatty foods than those who were not as frustrated. One surprising finding: Men’s snack preferences stayed the same, regardless of their stress levels. “A lot of studies have looked at what happens during stress,” said lead researcher Laura Cousino Klein, assistant professor of biobe havioral health at Penn State University. “What we wanted to know is what happens after the stress is over.” Klein and her colleagues pre sented the participants with a variety of tasks over 25 minutes while ran domly blast ing them with office sounds at 108 deci bels, the same noise level you would get stand ing next to a jackhammer. After that time was up, the par ticipants were left alone for 12 minutes and offered a magazine, water and a tray of snacks -- fatty cheese, potato chips and white chocolate, and lowfat popcorn, pretzels and jelly beans. After they had snacked, they were asked to trace their way through an unsolvable maze. Those women whose stress lev el was the highest during the maze exercise tended to eschew the low fat snacks in favor of fattier treats. Women who were highly frus trated by the noise stress ate 65 to 70 grams of the fatty snacks during the break, twice as much as the women who were not as frustrated. “What’s interesting is that dinr ing the noise, during the work time, people rise to the occasion,” Klein said. “They accomplish the job they have to get done, and they do quite well at it. They block all the other things that are going on in their environment. “But there’s a psychological and mental cost to that, and what that is is that after that’s over, once the stressor is done, then we see this behavioral element.” Klein said a corollary can-be seen most weekends, when people are most likely to binge drink or stray from their diets. The results of the study, com pleted in 1996 and published in the journal’s March issue, did not sur prise William Kelley Jr., director of the Wellness Center at Green Mountain College in Poultney, Vt. “Your body doesn’t stop deal ing with a stressor just because the stressor is no longer in place,” Kelley said. “You’re still process ing an event long after it hap pens.” Dr. Christopher Still, director of the Center for Nutrition and Weight Management at Geisinger Medical Center in Danville, Pa., said knowing that stress effects can be long-lasting can help peo ple anticipate that reaction and find other ways to deal with stress, such as exercise. In the study, men ate about 40 grams of fatty snacks, regardless of their stress levels. Klein said the explanation might have to do with the way men and women handle stress, an idea Kelley agreed with. “I definitely have seen the same thing, and I want to be care- — ful how I word that because I don’t want to start a gender de bate,” Kelley said. “But the men that I usually see are sort of, ‘It happened, it’s over, let’s deal with it and move on,’ whereas the women tend to struggle more with the processing time of an event afterward. I’m not sure if that’s genetic programming or society.” “Your body doesn’t stop dealing with a stressor just because the stressor is no longer in place.” WILLIAM KELLEY JR. DIRECTOR OF THE WELLNESS CENTER AT GREEN MOUNTAIN COLLEGE STROM: SUMMER I &i! Mon. - Fri. 6:00 a.m. -11:00 p.m, Sat. 10:00 a.m. -H0:00 p.m. Sun. 12:00 p.m. - itoO p.m. RJsATT: SUMMER I & !! Moq. - Fit 6:00 a.m. -10:00 p.m. Sat. 10:30 a.m. - 9:00 p.m. Sun. 12:00 p.m. -10:00 p.m. website: stc.sc.edu