Fall Is Here: What Is Comfort Food And Why Do We Crave It?
With cooler weather, cravings for feel-good, or “comfort foods” often also come. These are foods that we associate with warmth, care and comfort (thus the nickname). But many of us may not understand the reasons we crave these foods nor the impact they may be having on our physical and emotional health.
According to PsychologyToday, people eat comfort foods primarily for emotional relief, pleasure, and nostalgia, as these foods activate the brain’s “reward system” and often evoke positive memories. While this may sound like a positive strategy to evoke comforting feelings, there is a potential downside. The foods that many find comforting are also high in sugars and saturated fats, producing immediate emotional reward, but also potentially longer-term problems for our physical and emotional wellbeing. This is especially true if we eat them more than occasionally.
Gaining a better understanding of comfort foods, their pros and cons, can help us all to make more informed choices about our diets and our and our families’ overall health.
Emotion Regulation And Diet
Comfort foods are typically high in calories, saturated fats, and artificial sweeteners, such as chocolate, ice cream, pizza, and French fries. They provide a sensation of pleasure or temporarily make us feel better. New research is helping us understand why.
One finding points to a link between the consumption of so called comfort foods and the expectation of the benefit they will provide in managing negative feelings, reducing boredom, and enhancing cognitive performance. Because people expect these foods to make them feel better, they can!m Additionally, there is a physiological component in which the “reward system” (as mentioned above), is triggered, producing a temporary boost in mood. However, this boost is often short-lived and later can lead to feelings of fatigue, sluggishness and even mood disturbance (anxiety, depression, anger, impatience), and excessive consumption can lead to significant long-term health problems such as weight gain and obesity, poor cardiovascular health, and nutritional deficiencies—all of which play a role in poor emotional health.
The good news is, that science also shows that foods rich in nutrients, fiber and healthy fats can also boost our moods and lead to long-term positive effects on our physical and emotional health. Increasing these foods and decreasing the high-fat/highsugar foods can be an important step toward a healthy life span.
Ideas For Healthier Comfort Foods
Because so much of how we experience anything is connected to how we think about it, it can help to start with a positive attitude and a mindfulness
about what we are eating and why. Just stopping and taking a moment to really consider if we are eating out of hunger or emotion can be helpful in
mitigating unhealthy choices.
Another helpful practice is that rather than eating out of emotion, boredom or habit, to engage in activities –physical, cognitive, spiritual or social — that help to evoke positive emotions, without the added calories, fats and sugars.
You can also try keeping healthier snacks nearby so that when the cravings hit, you can satisfy them in more healthful way.
And finally, when you do make comfort foods, try to make them healthier, by using reduced-fat products, natural sugars in moderation (maybe cut the
amount you would normally use by 1/4), and adding healthy ingredients to the recipe (think mac and cheese with reduced fat milk and broccoli!).
This work is supported by the Beverly and Addison Gilbert Hospital Community Benefits Community Grant Program.
The Food and Thought Program works to promote awareness and provide short term counselling around the important link between.
nutrition and emotional health. For more information or for a referral to the program, please contact the Food and Thought Program
Sources for this month’s newsletter have been taken from: https://www.news-medical.net/news/20250714/Study-reveals-thepsychological-
reasons-for-comfort-eating.aspx;https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/science-of-choice/201609/5-reasons-whywe-
crave-comfort-foods?msockid=201c84dac00468390cb49159c12469b4;