Eating Comfort Foods May Not Be So Comforting After All

NPR:

For many of us, chicken soup can soothe the soul and mac and cheese can erase a bad day. We eat chocolate when we feel gloomy, or when we’ve been in the presence of a Dementor. And we eat chocolate ice cream to help us get over a bad breakup.

These comfort foods usually aren’t so good for our arteries, but we tend to think they have healing properties — that they’re the antidote for all our emotional afflictions.

But maybe they’re not, says Traci Mann, a professor of psychology at the University of Minnesota. In a recent study, Mann and some colleagues induced a bad mood in 100 college students by making them watch clips from sad movies. They then fed half the students their favorite comfort food, while the other students ate food they enjoyed, but wouldn’t consider comfort food.

Read the whole story: NPR