HEALTH: Stress is destroying your healthy diet

Hey Type As, here’s something to chew on: All your stress is canceling out your healthy diet!

A new study published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry suggests women don’t benefit from eating healthier fats if they had high stress levels the day before.

Subjects were fed a high-calorie, high-fat meal of biscuits and gravy, eggs and turkey sausage at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center that mimicked a typical fast-food breakfast. But some women were randomly assigned a meal cooked in less-healthy saturated fats from palm oil, while others ate the healthier, unsaturated fat from sunflower oil that Mediterranean Dieters rave about.

There’s no surprise that unstressed women who ate the healthier-fats meal had better blood tests and less inflammation than those who ate the saturated fat. But when the healthy eaters had a stressful event before the breakfast test — such as caring for a parent with dementia — their blood tests were no better than the women eating the bad fats.

“It’s more evidence that stress matters,” said lead author Jan Kiecolt-Glaser.

Previous reports have suggested stress is weighing us down, but this is the first to reveal it can actually erase the benefits of eating well, such as the good-for-you monounsaturated fats found in sunflower, olive or peanut oils. The Ohio State researchers want to do more research into the interplay between stress, diet and inflammation, which is linked to heart disease, diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis.

But don’t take this as an excuse to just pig out whenever you’re stressed. Inflammation builds up over time, so you’re better off making healthier food choices every day to fend it off. That way, when a stressful deadline or family emergency does strike, your body is already a step ahead — which fits into a Type A’s philosophy, for sure.