Daily stress can put an end to healthy eating habits. For families, that could mean a stressed carer giving in to a quick, easy, but likely unhealthy meal. But parents can fight those urges with a little extra preparation. Cooking the night before helps parents stick to healthy meal plans even when they're stressed. That's according to new research from the University of Georgia.
The study examined how daily stressors from work, school or other demands influence the decisions parents or caregivers make about food served with family meals and snacks.
"We know that stress affects eating behavior, but we actually know very little about how behavior is changed by everyday worries," said study author Allan Tate, an assistant professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at UGA's College of Public Health.
Understanding how these temporary stressors affect food decisions may be key to correcting unhealthy eating behaviors.
Tate's work is part of a collaboration with the University of Minnesota to examine how stress affects the food environment at home. The Family Matters Study was designed to assess the effects of not only chronic stressors but also transient stressors.
“The Family Matters Study aims to identify temporary factors, such as stressors or hassles, that can hinder a parent's decision-making process about providing healthy food to their family. If we can find ways to act on these stressors, we can help parents make good food choices for their families when they are faced with stress," said Jerica Berge, a professor at the U of M Medical School and principal investigator of the study. research.
A new way to track stress
“There are many tensions that are very transient and may not be detectable in traditional studies,” Tate said.
Tate and his colleagues needed to find a way to observe those short-term effects of transient stressors. To do that, they used a new method of collecting responses from study participants, known as ecological instantaneous assessment.
The primary caregiver in each family received daily surveys asking whether they had experienced stress, what the stress was related to, and whether they felt that stress had altered family meals. The surveys also included questions about the health behaviors of parents and children, such as how often they ate fruits and vegetables or drank sugary drinks.
A total of 150 families of six races and ethnicities completed the surveys for a week, providing more than 1,000 days of observable data from their home environment. Most families reported having little to moderate stress during the day. The most common source of stress reported by families was related to work or school requirements, followed by family requirements.
The most common response to stress was to prepare a quick or easy meal. In particular, skipping meals or resorting to unhealthy meals such as fast food were not uncommon. The team did note that parents tended to drink more sugar-sweetened drinks or eat unhealthy snacks when they were stressed, but they did not notice that their stress affected their children's food choices.
Stress response varies by race and ethnicity
Another notable advantage of this study, Tate said, is the diversity of the sample. In addition to white and African American groups, the study also included Hispanic, Hmong, Native American and Somali families.
“A big gap in nutritional epidemiology is that we tend to have information about a very small group of people, and we miss important subpopulations. This work tells us about traditional populations being studied, as well as about these subgroups. ”
Their results showed that sources of stress differed between groups and also how their response to stress influenced family meal decisions.
“So there may be socioeconomic and sociocultural determinants of meal planning, meal environment and child behavior that we want to learn more about,” said Tate.
Meal planning was also found to be associated with a reduction in unhealthy snacking among parents and children in all six groups.
“Planning meals seems to buffer unexpected family or work stress,” Tate said.
