Comfort eating ‘bad for heart’

WHEN you’re sad, stressed or heartbroken, it’s tempting to seek solace in comfort food. But that could be bad for you, researchers warn.

They found that comfort eating risks damaging your heart.

The study of 1,109 people over 1 years found that emotional eating was linked to stiffness in the arteries, which increases the chances of heart disease and strokes.

It also produced a 8 per cent rise in stiffness in the heart, where the muscle does not relax properly, increasing the chance of developing heart failure. A third of this association was down to stress, researchers report in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology. The amount of calories eaten did not seem to matter.

Study author Professor Nicolas Girerd, from the University Hospital of Nancy in France, said: ‘We might expect that emotional eaters would consume high-calorie foods... but this was not the case.

‘Emotional eaters may binge when stressed and then eat less at other times. This yo-yo pattern may have negative effects on the heart and blood vessels.’