COLUMBUS – You think you’re doing the right thing when you eat “good” fat. But a new study at OSU suggests that the benefits vanish when stress enters the picture.
In the study, women ate a biscuits-and-gravy breakfast made mostly with saturated fat — almost identical to the composition of a Big Mac and medium fries or a Burger King Double Whopper with cheese – and, unsurprisingly, fared worse in blood tests than those women who ate an identical breakfast made primarily with monounsaturated sunflower oil.
But Jan Kiecolt-Glaser, lead author of the study and a professor of psychiatry and psychology at OSU, says when women in the study had a stressful event before the test, it appeared to erase any benefits linked to the healthy fat choice.
The research, which appears in the journal Molecular Psychiatry, is the first to show that stress has the potential to cancel out benefits of choosing healthier fats,
Diet and stress can alter inflammation in the body and chronic inflammation is linked to heart disease, diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis, said Kiecolt-Glaser, who directs the Institute for Behavioral Medicine at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center.
Her advice: Shoot for healthier choices every day so that when stress gets in your way you’re starting in a better place.