What is it about comfort food, exactly, that dampens the stress response? Is it the body’s metabolic response to sugar, fat, and/or calories, or is it the food’s reward value itself? Yvonne Ulrich-Lai, a neuroscience researcher at the University of Cincinnati, set out to answer this question. She and her team offered rats intermittent access to small volumes of sugar water, water sweetened with the calorie-free sweetener saccharin, or plain water, and then measured the activation of their HPA axis following restraint stress. She hypothesized that sugar’s stress-busting effect is due to its
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