Powerful link between women's diet, stress level

WASHINGTON (WUSA9) - More women are trying to eat healthier, but many say they are not feeling the benefits.

Researchers suggest there may be a powerful link between a woman's diet and her stress level.

After they get home from school and before they start their homework, Joanne Drew says it’s common for her kids to crave certain comfort food.

After all, days can be long and stressful even at their age.

"When you're stressed, you feel out of control so what you try to do is be in control and to be in control, you eat," Joanne said.  

In an effort to keep her family fit, Joanne looks for healthier ingredients in food whenever she can, but a new study suggests in stressful situations that may not be as helpful as you might think.

"What this tells us is that stress really does interact with the type of food you're eating,” said Dr. Janice Keicoltglaser. 

Dr. Keicoltglaser led the study at Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center to see how stress impacts diet.

Researchers fed 58 women two different meals.
 
"One was a meal that was high in saturated fat, another was high oleic sunflower oil, that's a healthier oil, obviously, than saturated fat," said Dr. Janice Keicoltglaser. 

After women ate the meal with saturate fat, blood tests showed their inflammation levels were higher. After the healthier meal, they were lower.

Then researchers added stress to the equation.

"To our surprise, if women had a stressor the day before their meal, the type of fat didn't matter,” said Dr. Keicoltglaser.

In fact, healthier types of fat has no benefit for women who were stressed. Their inflammation markers remained elevated.

"That's important because those markers are associated with a variety of age related diseases like cardiovascular disease and diabetes," said Dr. Keicoltglaser. 

And it is even linked to some forms of cancer.

If you want to get the most out of a healthy diet, make managing your stress a key ingredient.