دانلود رایگان مقاله انگلیسی سیگار کشیدن، خوردن بخاطر استرس و وزن بدن: نقش مدون تنش درک شده - تیلور و فرانسیس 2018

ABSTRACT

Background: Some individuals respond to stress with increased food intake while others reduce their food intake. Smokers often report using smoking to cope with stress and have a lower body weight than nonsmokers on average. Thus, smokers may tend to eat less when stressed, which may partly explain their lower body weight as compared to nonsmokers. In turn, nonsmokers may tend to eat more when stressed, which may partly explain their higher body weight as compared to smokers. Objective: To examine the interplay between smoking and stress-related eating. Methods: N = 314 (78% female, 14% smokers) participants reported whether they were current smokers, their body height and weight and completed the Salzburg Stress Eating Scale and the Perceived Stress Scale. Results: Smokers did not differ from nonsmokers in body mass index (BMI), stress eating and perceived stress. When perceived stress was high, however, nonsmokers reported eating more and smokers reported eating less than usual. Moreover, in individuals with high perceived stress, being a smoker was indirectly related to lower BMI through eating less when stressed and being a nonsmoker was indirectly related to higher BMI through eating more when stressed. Conclusion: Smokers most likely use smoking instead of eating to cope with stress and, therefore, food intake and body weight decrease in stressed smokers. After smoking cessation, these individuals may be more susceptible to weight gain when—similar to nonsmokers—eating instead of smoking is used to cope with stress.

Discussion

In this study, relationships between smoking status, stress, stress eating, and BMI were examined. Contrary to expectations, smokers and nonsmokers did not differ in stress eating and BMI. However, an indirect effect of smoking status on BMI was found, which was moderated by perceived stress. Being a smoker was indirectly associated with a lower body weight through eating less when stressed, but only in individuals who actually reported being stressed.

Stress can induce craving and greater activity in the striatum in substance users but not in controls (Sinha, 2008) and can enhance the propensity to eat high calorie food via its interaction with central reward pathways (Sominsky & Spencer, 2014). As stressed smokers reported to eat less than usual and stressed nonsmokers reported to eat more than usual, the present findings dovetail with the idea of a “brain reward site competition.” Specifically, a shared neural reward pathway may be “occupied” by a rewarding substance and, thus, individuals tend to consume one rewarding substance to the other’s exclusion (Cummings, Ray, & Tomiyama, 2017; Jastreboff et al., 2015; Meule, 2014; Warren & Gold, 2007). That is, smokers seem to retreat to smoking as their favorite drug for coping with stress and are, therefore, “immune” against other substances or behaviors that might serve this function. However, it has been argued that although reward-related brain mechanisms of food and drug consumption overlap, there are also notable differences both on a neural and behavioral level (DiLeone, Taylor, & Picciotto, 2012; Rogers, 2017) and, thus, other explanations for the current findings need to be considered as well.