About 160 million Americans are overweight, including 30 per cent of children under the age of 20, according to The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. And The Weekreports the average U.S. adult weighs 15 pounds more than two decades ago, and researchers have been studying the obesity epidemic at a rising rate.
How did the U.S. get here?
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) was correlating restriction with obesity over a decade ago and found: “(Animals) given intermittent access to sugary food ate less of their normal food when the sweet food wasn’t available, and they overate the sweet food when it was available again. The scientists hypothesized that the brain’s stress system might be behind the behaviour.”
A Boston University team tested drugs that block signaling for stress, showcasing the power of food addiction. A partner of the study, Dr. Eric Zorrilla at the Scripps Research Institute, explained that stress often leads to overeating. “Our findings suggest that intermittently eating sweet food changes the brain’s stress system so that you might feel stressed… In other words, you might be self-medicating stress-like symptoms of abstinence with that piece of pie.”
And are Americans stressed? Absolutely. The American Psychological Association found that stress levels were rising due to political and economical tensions. It reports that almost half of Americans, 45 per cent, have lied awake at night in the past month due to stressful thoughts. And perhaps more surprising, the survey found stress was growing among individuals of almost every class.
