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Objective: We examined the influence of effort-reward imbalance, a stressful feature of the work environment, on cardiovascular and inflammatory responses to acute mental stress., Methods: Ninety-two healthy men (mean age, 33.1 years) in full-time employment were recruited. Effort-reward imbalance was measured using a self-administered questionnaire. Blood, for the analysis of C-reactive protein (CRP) and von Willebrand factor (vWF) antigen, was sampled at baseline and 10 minutes after two mental stress tasks, whereas cardiovascular activity was measured throughout., Results: Plasma CRP and vWF were significantly elevated following the stress period, and cardiovascular activity was increased during and after both tasks (p < .001). Multiple linear regression analysis adjusted for age, body mass index, and baseline levels revealed that men with higher effort-reward imbalance demonstrated greater CRP and vWF responses to the stress tasks but blunted cardiovascular responses. Inflammatory and cardiovascular responses to stress appeared to be unrelated., Conclusions: These findings suggest that the association between chronic work stress and cardiovascular disease risk may be mediated in part by heightened acute inflammatory responsivity. These responses appear not to result from differences in sympathoadrenal activation.

Objective: This study investigated experimentally whether acute stress alters food choice during a meal. The study was designed to test claims of selective effects of stress on appetite for specific sensory and nutritional categories of food and interactions with eating attitudes., Methods: Sixty-eight healthy men and women volunteered for a study on "the effects of hunger on physiology, performance, and mood." Eating attitudes and food preferences were measured on entry to the study. The stressed group prepared a 4-minute speech, expecting it to be filmed and assessed after a midday meal, although in fact speeches were not performed. The ad libitum meal included sweet, salty, or bland high- and low-fat foods. The control group listened to a passage of neutral text before eating the meal. Blood pressure, heart rate, mood, and hunger were measured at baseline and after the 10-minute preparatory period, when appetite for 34 foods and food intake were recorded., Results: Increases in blood pressure and changes in mood confirmed the effectiveness of the stressor. Stress did not alter overall intake, nor intake of, or appetite for the six food categories. However, stressed emotional eaters ate more sweet high-fat foods and a more energy-dense meal than unstressed and nonemotional eaters. Dietary restraint did not significantly affect appetitive responses to stress., Conclusions: Increased eating of sweet fatty foods by emotional eaters during stress, found here in a laboratory setting, may underlie the previously reported finding that dietary restraint or female gender predicts stress-induced eating. Stress may compromise the health of susceptible individuals through deleterious stress-related changes in food choice.

Objective: This study was conducted to determine whether an increase in salivary free cortisol would be reliably elicited by a midday meal, thus providing a convenient physiological challenge to the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, and whether this cortisol release depended on the protein content of the meal., Method: In healthy men, free cortisol was measured in saliva samples taken before and after two identical protein-rich midday meals (39% energy as protein) and compared with a day on which no meal was eaten. Next, in healthy women in a nonclinical setting, salivary cortisol was measured before and after a protein-rich meal (32% energy as protein) on one day and a low-protein meal (5% energy as protein) on another day. Measures of mood, appetite, and psychological well-being were also taken., Results: An acute meal-dependent increase in salivary cortisol occurred, which was reliable over 2 test days. This increase in cortisol depended on the proportion of protein in the meal, increasing after the high-protein but not the low-protein meal. The extent of this increase in cortisol correlated significantly with poor psychological well-being in women. Some postmeal improvement of mood (positive affect) was associated with the high- but not the low-protein meal., Conclusions: The cortisol response to meals may have implications for the effects of meal composition on mood, cognitive function, and food choice. The measurement of free cortisol in saliva provides a psychologically stress-free and reliable technique to assess the cortisol response to a standard protein-rich meal, ie, a physiological challenge to the HPA axis in men and women that could be investigated in naturalistic settings outside the laboratory.