What is comfort food and who is more likely to exhibit emotional ...

[Themember4]

What is comfort food and who is more likely to exhibit emotional eating in response to daily hassle stress?
 
  What will be an ideal response?

Question 2

What was the goal of Healthy People 2010 regarding Americans' fruit and vegetable consumption? How well was it met?
 
  What will be an ideal response?

[SVictor]

Answer to Question 1

A potential physiological mechanism for mood alteration includes self-medicating through eating foods that boost serotonin levels (recall from Chapter 7 that serotonin is one of the feel good neurotransmitters). Many of the foods that boost serotonin we call comfort foods. For example, carbohydrate rich foods like high fat sugar snacks that are low in protein can minimize increases in cortisol and negative mood elevations in response to stress, presumably through boosting brain tryptophan levels, a precursor to serotonin. Individuals who are high cortisol stress-reactors are more likely to exhibit emotional eating in response to daily hassle stress than low cortisol stress-reactors suggesting that cortisol may play a role in triggering the emotional eating process.

Answer to Question 2

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (2000) Healthy People 2010 began the first decade of the 21st century with the public health initiative of achieving a goal that at least 75 of Americans would eat 2 to 4 servings of fruit and 50 consume 3 to 5 servings of vegetables per day by the end of the decade. How did Americans do? Unfortunately, by the later part of the decade only 16.4 of the population met the fruit consumption goal and 29.4 met the vegetable consumption goal.