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For Women, Stress Cancels Out Healthy Breakfasts

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Stress can thwart a woman’s best intentions, especially when it comes to her diet, new research suggests. Even when women started the day with a healthy breakfast, its effects were overpowered by the negative impact of stress.

Women who ate a breakfast with healthy fats and had not experienced stress before reporting for the study did have healthy constituencies compared to women who ate breakfasts with saturated fats – something known to cause a wide range of diseases, the Los Angeles Times reports.

But after going through a day filled with financial worries, health scares and heavy multitasking, this difference was erased.

Janice Kiecolt-Glaser, the lead author on the study and director of Ohio State University’s Institute for Behavioral Medicine Research, and her team put 58 healthy women through a series of tests. Averaging 53 years old, the women took the same meals at home on the first day. The next day, the women were randomly assigned to one of two meals at the research site.

While both meals contained high-calorie, high-fat items such as eggs, turkey sausage, biscuits and gravy, one was prepared in butter while the other was prepared in sunflower oil. The first one was heavy on saturated fats while the second leaned on unsaturated fats in what is called the “Mediterranean diet.”

The women had blood samples taken before and after the meals, and were asked to relive their day in detail, including any stressors. Blood pressure was also measured and medical history taken. To measure the healthy response, inflammation markers were monitored and checked.

Inflammation is a healthy, normal response of the immune system under normal circumstances, but it can lead to serious diseases when out of control. According to the study, women who had reported severe stress the day before did not show lower levels of inflammation compared to the women who had eaten the saturated fats breakfast. Interestingly enough, women who had eaten the saturated fats breakfast and reported undergoing stress did not show higher inflammation levels. Kiecolt-Glaser theorizes this may be because the system is already “basically saturated.”

A history of depression also factored in. Women who had reported major depressive disorders were less likely to experience a drop in blood pressure, no matter what meal they ate. The long-term implications are that the stead build-up of wear and tear on the blood vessels and heart might be the link scientists have seen between depression and heart disease.

Kiecolt-Glaser says that this should not deter women from continuing to make healthy diet choices. It’s important to recognize that what we eat is just as important as how we live, she says. Women need to make the best choices they can when it comes to managing stress and choosing meals.

The study was published in Molecular Psychiatry.

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