Why It's Your Parents' Fault That You Eat When You're Sad

A diet of candy bars and soda won't get you too far in life, beyond an examining table or a dentist's chair. But according to a new study, parents who obsessively control their children's diets and let them have only candy and snacks as treats or rewards aren't necessarily helping their kids in the long run, either.

It turns out that if Mom gave you, say, a little bit of Snickers action for eating all your vegetables when you were little, you're more likely to emotionally eat later in life.

A research team from Aston University and Loughborough and Birmingham universities in England followed three- to five-year-old children to study how their parents fed them and whether they used food as a reward. The researchers then watched the children until the age of seven to see how they behaved when they were mildly stressed: Were they more likely to play with toys, or to stuff their little faces with fat and sugar? The researchers observed that those who had been given food as a reward when they were younger were far more likely to emotionally eat.

That's problematic, particularly given that childhood obesity has doubled in kids and quadrupled in adolescents in the past 30 years, according to the CDC. And it's not just America. The world is fatter too, with more obese people than underweight people globally. Developing healthy eating habits early in life is arguably more important than ever.

"The evidence from our initial research shows that in doing this, we may be teaching children to use these foods to cope with their different emotions, and in turn unintentionally teaching them to emotionally eat later in life," said lead researcher Claire Fellow of Aston University.

Another study published last year in the Journal of Experimental Psychology found that the better reward might be a toy. Martin Reimann and his team at the University of Arizona found that the promise of a toy or other non-food reward can result in people eating smaller, healthier portions.

He calls it the "Happy Meal effect." When presented with the choice between a full sandwich and a half sandwich paired with headphones, 78 percent of subjects went for the half sandwich and headphones. Which, come on, is a no-brainer. Adults exhibited similar behavior even for small or uncertain rewards, and when people chose the smaller portion, they didn't compensate by eating larger meals later.

"Basically, I got to feed kids McDonald's, which is cool as a field researcher because they love you, and that was awesome," said researcher Kristen Lane.

Follow-up research showed that the team could even replace unhealthy sides with more nutritious offerings, and participants would still go for the toy. Lane hopes that the team's research could be used to inform government policy in the future. However, it's unclear whether the novelty factor will wear off after some time.

Unfortunately, most parents don't have an unending supply of toys on hand at home.

"As a parent, there is often a natural instinct to try and protect our young children from eating 'bad' foods: those high in fat, sugar, or salt," said Fellow. "Instead we often use these food types as a treat or a reward, or even as a response to ease pain if children are upset."