We eat “badly” if we are under pressure: more sugars and fats when we are stressed

It is scientifically proven as it stress represents a great enemy of psychophysical well-being and more specifically of the intake of healthy food anddiet balanced (HERE we talked about nervous hunger).

As reported by the Higher Institute of Health, citing a study published in British Medical Journal Open out of a sample of 5,008 people, in Italy during the spring 2020 lockdown, 88.6% of people over 16 suffered from psychological stress and almost 50% from symptoms of depression. Participants with moderate or severe depressive symptoms were less likely to consume dairy products, fruits, and vegetables foods high in sugar and fat more often.
Previous studies reported that 42% of individuals consume less healthy, high-fat, high-sugar foods more and more often during times of stress.
In a research published last November on Frontiers The researchers involved 21 healthy adults (20-30 years old) who were given a high-fat (56.5 g of fat) or low-fat (11.4 g of fat) meal for 1.5 hours before an increasingly intense 8-minute mental stress exercise and were warned when they got an answer wrong.

The consumption of fatty foods under stress mental seems to reduce the endothelial function by 1.74%, exposing you to a greater risk of events cardiovascular. “In the past, the endothelium was considered a simple single-cell lining of the blood vessel wall that separated the circulating blood from the vascular wall,” he explains Roberto Pedretti, associate professor of Cardiovascular Diseases at the University of Milan Bicocca, director of the Cardiovascular Department at the IRCSS MultiMedica of Sesto San Giovanni (Milan) and member of the Board of Directors of the European Association of Preventive Cardiology. «In reality, endothelial cells perform important functions, so much so that the endothelium is now considered a real organ with a key role in the regulation of vascular tone and structure. If functioning well, it produces numerous vasodilating and vasoconstrictor substances and is able to inhibit or activate various functional mechanisms, such as platelet aggregation, with a significant action in the genesis of thrombotic processes and atherosclerotic lesions. For this reason, an alteration in endothelial function can not only modify vascular tone, but also play an important role inorigin of vascular damage and therefore cardiovascular events. Without forgetting that epidemiological data demonstrate how chronic stress, therefore prolonged and persistent stress, predicts the onset of coronary heart disease.”