Health & Medicine
It appears that chronic stress and junk food make a particularly fattening mix. A study published last week in the journal Nature Medicine showed that—in mice, at least—stress and a high-calorie diet increased the amount of an appetite-stimulating chemical in abdominal fat and promoted the growth of new fat cells.
A team of scientists from the United States, Australia, and Slovakia fed two groups of mice a rodent-pleasing chow rich in fat, carbs, and calories. To stress some of the mice, they either stood them daily in a pool of cold water or made them spend time with an aggressive mouse.
Besides gaining more weight around their middle, the stressed mice developed problems similar to those that arise in abdominally obese people, including high blood pressure and a prediabetic condition known as impaired glucose tolerance. But researchers also found that an injection blocking the chemical's activity prevented the growth of extra fat cells in the mice—which suggests that a drug might be developed to work in people, too.
Synergy. The new research explains how stress and bad diet can work together to increase people's weight, says Mary Dallman, a professor of neuroscience at the University of California-San Francisco who cowrote a commentary accompanying the new study. "It's a big step forward," she says. However, crafting a practical treatment from the research is still a distant dream.
And it might not work, because the forces linking stress and obesity in people may be more complex than those at work in lab mice. "Our brains are hard wired to seek fat when we're stressed," says Elissa Epel, an obesity researcher at the University of California-San Francisco who was not affiliated with the study.
Meantime, simple lifestyle changes—reducing either emotional stress or consumption of fat and sugar—might help people in much the way that the hoped-for drug would, advises Zofia Zukowska, the Georgetown University researcher who led the study.
This story appears in the July 16, 2007 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
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