Is comfort food actually comforting for emotional eaters? A (moderated) mediation analysis

An important but unreplicated earlier finding on comfort eating was that the association between food intake and immediate mood improvement appeared to be mediated by the palatability of the food, and that this effect was more pronounced for high than for low emotional eaters [26]. This has not yet been formally tested using mediation and moderated mediation analysis. We conducted these analyses using data from two experiments on non-obese female students (n = 29 and n = 74). Mood and eating satisfaction in Study 1, and mood, tastiness and emotional eating in Study 2 were all self-reported. In Study 1, using a sad mood induction procedure, emotional eaters ate more food, and when mood was assessed immediately after food intake, ‘eating satisfaction’ acted as mediator between food intake and mood improvement (decrease in sadness or increase in happiness). In Study 2, where we measured the difference in actual food intake after a control or a stress task (modified Trier Social Stress Test), and assessed mood during the food intake after stress, we found significant moderated mediation. As expected, there was a significant positive mediation effect of tastiness between food intake and mood improvement in the high emotional eaters, but also a significant negative mediation effect of tastiness between food intake and mood improvement in the low emotional eaters. This suggests that tastiness promotes ‘comfort’ from food in female emotional eaters, but conflicts in non-emotional eaters with a tendency to eat less when stressed. In conclusion, palatable food may indeed provide comfort specifically for high emotional eaters during eating.