Ice cream. Potato chips. Mac and cheese. French fries.
When you’re having a bad day, are there certain foods that you grab to feel better? If so, a new study says that feeling may be completely bogus.
The University of Minnesota study was funded by NASA, which is looking for ways to keep astronauts emotionally happy for longer missions in space, Minneapolis CBS affiliate WCCO-TV reports.
Researchers took 100 people and showed them scenes from depressing movies, then split them up into groups and gave out different kinds of “comfort food.”
One group got no food at all. I’d have definitely become depressed to be in that group.
After letting the human guinea pigs chow down, they handed out a “mood questionnaire.” The thought of having to fill out a questionnaire might be depressing to some people.
The answers, researchers say, indicate there’s “no real difference” among groups who are the so-called “feel-good foods” and healthier alternatives. You might be tempted to conclude, based on their conclusion, that eating anything is better than eating nothing.
But it turns out, researchers didn’t find any real difference between those who ate something and those who ate nothing.
Now I’m definitely depressed.
Does comfort food help your mood? I feel like it helps mine; what we think we feel, after all, is the main reason we run to it, isn’t it? Otherwise, if we didn’t feel we’d get a benefit from it, wouldn’t we do something else that we thought would help more?
Isn’t that common sense?
The study, to its credit, does say that it appears we think it helps, even if there’s no evidence that it does.
That’s good enough for some of us.
By the way, do you have a favorite comfort food? If so, head over to this week’s edition of “The Big Question” and tell me about it!
Do you agree with the study?
