Source: USA TODAY

New research suggests that fatty foods do more than satisfy our stomachs. They may also soothe our psyche, literally serving as comfort foods.

“Eating fat seems to make us less vulnerable to sad emotions, even if we don’t know we’re eating fat,” said psychiatrist Dr. Lukas Van Oudenhove, co-author of a study that tracked people’s responses to sad and neutral experiences while fatty acids were inserted into their stomach. The food appeared to cause emotional and physical changes.

Anyone who’s ever dipped into a pint of premium ice cream after a breakup knows that certain foods feel emotionally healing. But is it all in the mind — a connection to, say, childhood comforts? Or are there signals that go from mouth or stomach to the brain?

Researchers previously have tackled these questions by focusing on how the smell, taste and appearance of food affect emotions, said Van Oudenhove, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Leuven in Belgium. But this new study is a first, he said, because “we bypassed sensory stimulation by infusing fatty acids directly into the stomach, without the subjects knowing whether they were getting fat or saline.”

For the study, published in the August issue of theJournal of Clinical Investigation, the researchers recruited 12 non-obese, healthy volunteers who received fatty acids or a saline solution through a feeding tube. Using functional MRI, the researchers also scanned the volunteers’ brain waves as they were exposed to sad and neutral music, and sad and neutral facial expressions.

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