A blog that I have just come across is Deric Bownds’ Mindblog. He covers issues of standard and evolutionary psychology and is well worth reading. One of his posts is this: Social heirarchy, stress, and diet, in which he presents recent evidence that stressed primates (in this case humans) eat lower quality, high sugar and high starch, food (crisps and M&Ms).

Why? I can think of several reasons. One is that this gives immediate energy release to deal with the stressors. But what if you are constantly stressed, by, say, being of low status on the social dominance hierarchy? Then you might eat low quality food too much of the time, and your health would suffer. This may explain the famous Whitehall Study and subsequent experiments, that show that, controlling for all other factors, low status is a predictor of worse health. This is not restricted to human primates, either - Macaques and other monkeys, baboons and the great apes all show this effect.

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