"The question we should ask ourselves the next time we're stressed and we reach for a bag of cookies is this: Is bingeing on Oreos the direct result of an emotionally distressing event that occurred five minutes ago, or the indirect symptom of a decade of poor food choices?"

Emotional eating (EE) is defined as the conscious or unconscious consumption of sweetened, salty or fatty foods, usually to excess. This eating behavior is believed to be triggered by negative emotions arising from unpleasant events like an argument with someone, a stressful day at work or a poor grade on a test. Many people, even those who are not overweight, have some sense of the connection between emotions and diet. The core theory behind emotional eating is that strong negative emotions (the cause) trigger the desire to eat high-calorie foods (the effect).

Sounds plausible, but what if we've got the cause and effect part of this equation backwards? Up until now, we've only focused on the eating behavior that follows an emotion-fueled binge, but what about the content and quality of the food that precedes the event/binge? What if it's actually what we're eating that determines our negative response to life's ups and downs, which in turn, influence eating behavior?

There is clearly a strong connection between how we feel and what we eat, but over the years, I've come to doubt the core tenet of EE, which is that external events trigger negative emotions, which override dietary prudence. I believe that a weak nutritional foundation may be the real culprit behind EE. The post-event binge may really just be a symptom of the underlying problem: poor diet. The conventional treatment for EE has been focused on attacking the problem from an emotional and psychological approach. There may be some validity to this. Acquiring relaxation skills and adjusting one's perspective to better learn how to cope with life is a valuable skill, but I rather doubt the effectiveness of this approach when applied without an accompanying adjustment in diet.

The commute from Hell: A blow by blow account
I have, in my own experience, a particularly powerful example of how diet drives behavior, not the other way around. One day little over a year ago, I enjoyed a really good morning workout, walking and jogging for over two hours. I decided to do something different and stick with vegetarian meals throughout the day just to inject a little diversity into my diet. I wasn't terribly hungry so I ate an apple for breakfast and followed that with a large salad for lunch. As I made my way around the office later that day, I noticed that my legs ached. This was unusual as I had experienced more strenuous workouts in the past and hardly noticed any discomfort afterward. When dinner arrived, I enjoyed a wonderful cream of vegetable soup accompanied by bell peppers topped with cheese and stuffed with carrots and onions. I finished up the day with a cup of milk and a slice of banana bread. My total intake for the day amounted to just over 1200 calories. What made this day unusual was that my carbohydrate intake was significantly higher than normal, while my fat intake was lower and my protein intake significantly lower.

The first clue that all was not well came the following morning when I overslept by almost two hours. I had to drag myself out of bed. I felt exhausted and worn as if I had been up running on a treadmill all night. Not only was my body lethargic, my mind seemed to have trouble kicking into gear. There was a nagging sense of unease that hung over me--a feeling that something was not quite right, but I couldn't put my finger on it. I felt thin, empty, but when I stepped on the scale, I noted that my weight was actually up a bit. I ate scrambled eggs for breakfast. I had an early appointment and it was too late to work out, even if I had felt like it, so I dressed and left for work. Traffic was terrible, but no worse than usual. Cars were backed up well before the interstate onramp. I calmly took my place in line, but that growing sense of unease began to well in me like a rising tide. I was a bit surprised, as I had not felt this way in quite a while. By the time I approached the onramp, I could see that the interstate was little more than a parking lot stretching for miles. To make matters worse, my aging SUV was idling poorly and even stalled a couple of times. By now, horns were blaring and there were so many people giving each other the finger that I was tempted to look skyward to see what they were pointing at. I finally gave up and decided to return home, but first I had to turn around.

I made my way across two lanes of hostile traffic into the far-left lane where I found myself in the middle of a very long line, far from the nearest intersection. My dwindling patience was darkening my mood, minute by minute. I began to feel anxious and to my surprise, even angry. I began to feel tense, troubled and jittery. When I couldn't stand waiting another moment, I impulsively whipped the steering wheel hard to the left, jammed the accelerator and bounced up onto the median. My aging, gas guzzling, environmentally hostile Ford reclaimed a sliver of my respect as it deftly plowed across the median and U-turned onto the opposite road. Normally I abhor such reckless behavior, but there was nothing normal about the way I felt at that moment.

When I returned home unexpectedly, my wife was understandably curious. My grunts and non-communicative responses to her questions only magnified her interest. She followed me downstairs to the gym where I put on a pair of boxing gloves and unleashed a non-stop flurry of punishing blows to the large heavy bag that hung from the ceiling. The dishes in the hutch on the floor directly above, danced hysterically as the pounding intensified. I continued to hit the bag with such ferocity and speed that it remained suspended in the air at an improbable angle until the pain in my unwrapped wrists forced me to stop. Not completely vented, I began cursing in the tradition of ditch-diggers, dogcatchers and certified public accountants. In time, the hurricane of emotion that had overtaken me slowly began to ebb. After a pause, my wife, in a characteristic display of marital diplomacy, quietly announced that there would be no more vegetarian days for me for the foreseeable future. As my mood settled, I noticed that I was hungry and it was barely 9:00am.

The aftermath
Was it the food? I can't know for certain, but it seems very likely. When I was rear ended on the interstate a month earlier and later slapped with a $300.00 bill from the car rental agency I did not respond so emotionally. When a dear sister passed--I felt no urge to engage in the reckless out-of-control behavior that I did on this otherwise uneventful day. How was it possible that my response to these highly emotional events was so calm when getting stuck in traffic sent me over the edge?

What I find curious is that most nutrition experts would approve of my one-day experiment with vegetarianism as healthy and appropriate, and yet, I believe I was left physically and emotionally debilitated because of it. Perhaps I should have consumed more calories, but upon reflection and after checking my nutrition records, I saw that there have been many times when a similarly low calorie count did not yield a similar result. The only real difference then, was the food. Anecdotal? Yes, but for me this experience was as real and as tangible as the pain in my throbbing wrists.

It seemed highly probable that it was the change in diet that triggered the exaggerated emotional response and the subsequent desire to eat. I believe I was only able to make this observation due to the fact that I normally, my diet consisted of a good balance of fats, carbohydrates and proteins. Looking back, I saw that when I followed the conventional dietary advice of low-fat/high carb eating, intense emotional responses to negative events were quite common.

What we eat does affect us in ways we sometimes can't imagine or understand. There have been a number of studies that establish a link between low-fat diets, impulsive behavior, depression and suicide. In 2003, the April issue of Psychology Today ran an article by Hara Estroff Marano that looked at the issue of diet and behavior. The article stated that, "People who consume a diet low in fats and especially low in cholesterol are at risk for depression and suicide." The article went on to say that this puzzling observation came to light when it was observed that people with the lowest levels of cholesterol were more likely to die of "suicide, accidents and violence." As a reformed vegetarian, I don't doubt these findings, but could a change in diet manifest itself in drastically altered behavior over the relatively short span of one day? If you've ever witnessed the spectacle of a two-year-old stoked on an excess of refined sugar, you know the answer to that question is an enthusiastic yes. In that context, the notion that food can have a quick and dramatic affect on behavior seems less startling.

The question we should ask ourselves the next time we're stressed and we reach for a bag of cookies is this: Is bingeing on Oreos the direct result of an emotionally distressing event that occurred five minutes ago, or the indirect symptom of a decade of poor food choices?

Diet and nutrition experts rightly point out that many of us lead excessively sedentary lives. They tell us that we need to be more responsible and that exercise is the key to healthy weight maintenance. They're right of course, but they're leaving out a critical piece of information that determines how successful you may be in your pursuit of health. The food you eat often determines, in part, whether you have the strength and the motivation to exercise. The wrong diet, even a so-called healthy diet, can be counterproductive if it leaves you in a weakened state of body and an inability to handle life's ups and downs. As a wise old surfer once said: "Brother, you can never control the wave, only how you respond to it."

We need to realize that the consumption of food whether animal, vegetable or synthetic, represents an act of intimacy that should not blithely be dismissed as simply "refueling." We must discard the idea that our gastrointestinal system is an impermeable tunnel through which food passes and recognize that it functions more like a filtering system through the mechanics of metabolism. Finally, we must accept that the food we eat, from Twinkies to spinach to roast beef, helps to shape who we are both figuratively and literally. These foods are part of a complex mechanism that factors into how we respond to the world we live in and helps us to understand our own, sometimes puzzling, behavior.