More Stress Means Less Eating

Here's a pop quiz. What do speeches, fires and first dates have in common?

Hmm, well, they all tend to cause stress that suppresses our appetite. The last thing on our mind as we run from a burning building is that yummy donut we left on the counter.

Our anxiety is connected to hormones in the brain called corticotropin-releasing factors or CRFs, which regulate stress and appetite.

Recently the drug industry, desperate to uncover a solution to obesity, say they found a type of this hormone called CRF2 that cuts hunger without added stress. Sounds like a dream huh?

Well it was, until a group of scientists took a closer look. Their study in the Journal of Neuroscience concludes that activating CRF2 in rats cut their appetites in half, no doubt - BUT the rats ate less is because they were totally stressed out. They nervously self-groomed, licking so much they often knocked themselves over.

Seems stress and appetite is a ying yang combo. Not surprising, ask anyone who's suffered a broken heart they’ll say the only good thing about being dumped is that easy 10 pounds we lose.
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Age Brings Happiness

Do people get happier or crankier as they age? Stereotypes of crotchety neighbors aside, scientists have been trying to answer this question for decades, and the results have been conflicting. Now a study of several thousand Americans born between 1885 and 1980 reveals that well-being indeed increases with age—but overall happiness depends on when a person was born.

Previous studies that have compared older adults with the middle-aged and young have sometimes found that older adults are not as happy. But these studies could not discern whether their discontent was because of their age or because of their different life experience. The new study, published online January 24 in Psychological Science, teased out the answer by examining 30 years of data on thousands of Americans, including psychological measures of mood and well-being, reports of job and relationship success, and objective measures of health.

The researchers found, after controlling for variables such as health, wealth, gender, ethnicity and education, that well-being increases over everyone's lifetime. But people who have lived through extreme hardship, such as the Great Depression, start off much less happy than those who have had more comfortable lives.

This finding helps to explain why past studies have found conflicting results—experience matters, and tough times can influence an entire generation's happiness for the rest of their lives. The good news is, no matter what we've lived through, we can all look forward to feeling more content as we age.
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High Stress Levels Linked to Cellular Aging

Stress may take a toll on your health by affecting the strands of DNA on the ends of chromosomes, new research suggests. A report published online today by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences indicates that women with higher psychological stress levels have shorter telomeres, which play an important role in cellular aging. What is more, the difference between stressed study participants and the control group was equivalent to nearly a decade of additional aging.

Telomeres, chromosomal caps that promote genetic stability, naturally shorten with each cellular replication: shorter telomeres are associated with greater biological age. In the new work, Elissa S. Epel of the University of California at San Francisco and her colleagues studied healthy premenopausal women to investigate the link between psychological stress and telomere shortening. For the high-stress group, the researchers recruited 39 mothers of chronically ill children and compared them to control women who had healthy children. In a questionnaire, mothers with sick children reported that they were more stressed compared to mothers with healthy children. When the scientists obtained cell samples and compared stress levels to telomere length, they found correlations between the length of caregiving (and thus stress levels) and cellular aging. According to the report, women who felt more stressed had cells with shorter telomeres, lower levels of the associated enzyme telomerase, and greater levels of oxidative stress.

"The new findings suggest a cellular mechanism for how chronic stress may cause premature onset of disease," Epel says. "Chronic stress appears to have the potential to shorten the life of cells, at least immune cells." The team plans to continue its investigation of the connection between stress and telomere length with a long-term study that repeatedly measures the variables over time instead of taking a single snapshot. In addition, the researchers intend to try to determine whether prolonged stress impacts telomeres in other types of cells, such as those that line the cardiovascular system.
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