Can Stress Eating Make You Gain Weight?

Obesity is one of the primary health concerns of Americans today with 39.8 percent or 93.3 million adults in the U.S affected by obesity as of 2015-2016, according to the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey.

Stress eating is a common cause of obesity since it the easiest coping mechanism in any difficult situation, considering the access and prevalence of low-cost fast foods. The yearly survey brought out by American Psychological Association (APA) said that in 2018, 64 percent of adults in the country did not know how to manage stress.

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For this reason, it has become increasingly important to study the effects of stress eating per se to find out how it impacts the nation’s health. A study, published recently in Cell Metabolism by the Eating Disorders Laboratory at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research in Darlinghurst, Australia, established the direct link between insulin production and stress in laboratory mice.  

The researchers made a comparison between stressed mice fed with a high-calorie diet and mice that were not stress eating. They found that insulin levels had risen ten times higher in the stressed mice.

The brain produces a molecule called the Neuropeptide Y (NPY) specifically in the amygdala when a person is undergoing stress. The location of the NPY in the amygdala is important as it the part of the brain that is responsible for memory and emotions, activated during times of stress.

When the NPY is not activated, insulin correctly delivers glucose into the bloodstream in stress-free situations. However, the nerve cells in the molecular pathway of NPY are highly receptive to insulin generally but the nerve cells become desensitised to insulin and boost NPY levels in moments of duress.

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Excess insulin is created in the body due to this desensitisation since less absorption is possible into the bloodstream. The researchers called it a vicious cycle. 

The researchers did not expect to find that insulin has such a profound effect on the neural pathways in the brain because insulin was previously believed to only be connected to organs such as the liver and pancreas.

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“Mechanistically, it is the diminished insulin signalling capacity on central amygdala NPY neurons under combined stress and high-fat-diet conditions that leads to the exaggerated development of obesity,” the researchers said.

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