Find yourself breaking out a bag of cookies when times
get stressful? A new study may help explain why.
A team from the University of Cincinnati found that consuming
sweet snacks or drinks helped fight anxiety in rats. They
theorize that the foods decreased production of the stress-related
hormone glucocorticoid, which has also been linked to
decreased immune response and increased obesity.
"The sweets we are talking about are not the low-calorie,
sugar substitute variety. We actually found that sugar
snacks, not artificially sweetened snacks, are better
'self-medications' for the two most common types of stress
-- psychological and physical," researcher Yvonne Ulrich-Lai,
a postdoctoral fellow in the psychiatry department, said
in a prepared statement.
She and her colleagues found that rats that received
a sugar drink over two weeks had lower glucocorticoid
levels after being given a mental and physical stress
challenge than rats who were given an artificially sweetened
drink.
The findings were presented Tuesday at the annual meeting
of the Society for Neuroscience, in Washington, D.C.
The next step in this research is determining how the
sugar drink decreases glucocorticoid production in the
rats.
"We need to find out if there are certain parts of the
brain that control the response to stress, then determine
if the function of these brain regions are changed by
sugar snacking," study co-author James Herman, professor
and stress neurobiologist, said in a prepared statement.
- More articles
on stress
Reference
Source 101
November
16, 2005
