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December 1, 2010 | Why a piece of pizza is so tempting after a stressful day |
Washington:Wonder why the thought of pizza or a chocolate cake is really tempting especially when you have had a really stressful day at work? A new animal study
has found that exposure to stress post dieting can increase chances of binge eating.
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania examined the behaviour and hormone
levels of mice on limited diets. After three weeks of fewer calories, the mice
lost 10 to 15 percent of their body weight, similar to human diet weight loss.
"Yo-yo dieting" — temporarily losing weight only to regain it, plus more — is
a well-known phenomenon. Tracy Bale and her colleagues found the mice had increased
levels of the stress hormone corticosterone and displayed depression-like behaviour.
The authors also discovered that several genes important in regulating stress
and eating had changed. The researchers put the mice in stressful situations and
monitored how much fatty foods they ate. The previously restricted mice ate more
high-fat food than normal mice. "These results suggest that dieting not only increases
stress, making successful dieting more difficult, but that it may actually 'reprogram'
how the brain responds to future stress and emotional drives for food," Bale said.
"This study highlights the difficult road that human dieters often travel to attain
and maintain their weight loss goals. It also suggests that management of stress
during dieting may be key to achieving those goals,” said Jeffrey Zigman at the
University of Texas . The study appears in the Dec. 1 issue of The Journal of
Neuroscience.
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