Chronic stress and obesity: a new view of “comfort food” (Dallman et al. 2003)

Research paper

Dallman MF, Pecoraro N, Akana SF, La Fleur SE, Gomez F, Houshyar H, Bell ME, Bhatnagar S, Laugero KD, Manalo S. Chronic stress and obesity: a new view of “comfort food.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 2003;100(20):11696-11701. doi:10.1073/pnas.1934666100. PMCID: PMC208820.

Why we cite it

PNAS paper proposing a biological model for why people eat comfort food when stressed. It sets out three functionally congruent actions of chronically high glucocorticoids — CRF expression in the amygdala, increased salience of pleasurable activities, and increased abdominal fat depots — and proposes that the resulting fat signal feeds back to inhibit the stress-response network. *The paper’s own sentence is the standard: ”We propose that people eat comfort food in an attempt to reduce activity in the chronic stress-response network with its attendant anxiety.” The feedback half is rat work, and the abstract itself records that rats and humans diverge: chronic stress ”usually decreases body weight gain in rats; by contrast, in stressed or depressed humans, chronic stress induces either increased comfort food intake and body weight gain or decreased intake and body weight loss.”* It reframes stress eating from a willpower failure to a proposed biological self-medication strategy — offered to explain a pattern, not established as a mechanism in people.

DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1934666100 · PubMed 12975524 · Publisher