Essay About Distressed Individuals And Fat-Rich Snacks

Teching Strategies
Essay Preview: Teching Strategies
Report this essay
between food and mood in emotionally distressed individuals. In this relationship,
emotional distress, especially symptoms such as depression and fatigue, generates
cravings for sweet carbohydrate- and fat-rich snacks, such as ice cream, candy bars,
and desserts. The cravings cause a search for and consumption of these snack
foods, which results in a temporary mood improvement. Because the improvement
is temporary, the negative mood state returns and the cycle starts again.
This hypothesis was based on data revealing that individuals with seasonal
affective disorder (Rosenthal et al., 1984), overweight individuals (Wurtman &
Wurtman, 1986), individuals experiencing premenstrual syndrome (Bowen &
Grunberg, 1990), and some individuals experiencing unipolar depression report
cravings for sweet carbohydrate- and fat-rich snacks. Additionally, craving intensity
is correlated with emotional eating (Hill,Weaver, & Blundell, 1991) and with a
variety of mood and psychiatric symptom categories, such as depression, tension,
fatigue, somatatization, obsession-compulsion, and paranoid ideation, especially in
female carbohydrate-cravers (Christensen & Pettijohn, 2001). Female food-cravers
are more likely to have engaged in binge eating and to have attempted to control
their eating by dieting, vomiting, exercising, or using laxatives or diet pills and to
have had a lifetime history of alcohol abuse or dependency (Gendall, Sullivan,
Joyce, Fear, & Bulik, 1997). In sum, many individuals experiencing emotional distress
also experience cravings for sweet carbohydrate- and fat-rich snacks.
These individuals not only crave the sweet carbohydrate- and fat-rich foods,
but also report increasing and actually appear to increase their consumption of
these foods. Depressed individuals report increasing their consumption of these
snacks as they become depressed (Fernstrom, Krowinski, & Kupfer, 1987), and
they also consume significantly more carbohydrates, especially sweet carbohydrates,
than their nondepressed counterparts (Christensen & Somers, 1996). Similarly,
individuals with seasonal affective disorder (Krauchi, Wirz-Justice, &
Graw, 1990), obese individuals (Lieberman,Wurtman, & Chew, 1986), and individuals
with severe premenstrual syndrome (Dye, Warner, & Bancroft, 1995;
Rossignol, & Bonnlander, 1991) crave and preferentially consume sweeter carbohydrate-
and fat-rich foods, particularly in the form of snacks.
The relatively immediate effect of consumption of the sweet carbohydrateand
fat-rich snack food provides an improvement in mood. For example, Sayegh
and colleagues (1995) revealed that drinking a sweet, carbohydrate-rich drink
decreased self-reported depression, anger, and confusion in women with severe
premenstrual symptoms. Obese individuals experiencing cravings for sweet carbohydrate-
and fat-rich snacks reported a decline in depression after consuming
these snacks (Lieberman et al., 1986). Similarly, individuals with seasonal affective
disorder experienced a slight decline in fatigue following a carbohydrate-rich
meal, whereas individuals without seasonal affective disorder experienced an
increase in fatigue (Rosenthal et al., 1989). This mood improvement does not
last, however, and the pre-snack level of emotional disturbance returns, resulting
in a cycle of cravings and consumption of carbohydrate- and fat-rich foods. To
294 The Journal of Psychology
break this cycle, individuals must permanently ameliorate the emotional distress
(e.g., through the administration of psychotherapy or pharmacotherapy),
although there is some evidence (Fernstrom & Kupfer, 1988) indicating that
antidepressants can increase cravings for sweets. For some individuals, a dietary
manipulation that eliminates caffeine and added sucrose from the diet (Christensen
& Burrows, 1990) can also improve the mood.
Evidence supporting this cyclical model of emotional distress and eating
behavior is scant. Also, prior research suggesting that emotional distress causes an
increase in consumption of carbohydrate- and fat-rich foods has come from either
retrospective reports (Fernstrom et al., 1987), comparison of distressed and nondistressed
individuals (Christensen & Somers, 1996), or assessment of the dietary
intake of distressed individuals (Lieberman et al., 1986). Only in the area of premenstrual
syndrome has there been a systematic demonstration of individuals
increasing their consumption of carbohydrate- and fat-rich foods as they develop
the emotionally distressing premenstrual symptoms (Bowen & Grunberg, 1990). To
conclude that emotional distress leads to an altered preference for sweet carbohydrate-
and fat-rich foods would require a demonstration that a distressed mood state
results