Students and Nutrition: from Main Seminar to Food Cravings

With the new winter semester, the time of exams and oral examinations begins again for about two million students. And that often means: pure stress. Almost unnoticed, eating habits also change now. While some people are literally sick to their stomachs with the stress and hardly eat anything due to lack of time and overwork, others have an insatiable craving for certain, mostly unhealthy foods.

Food against stress

“When I’m in exam stress, I just need chocolate – it calms me down!” Like Miriam K. it goes to many students. The DAK surveyed Hamburg students about their eating habits during exams and found that, in addition to high-fat foods such as pizza and convenience foods, sugary foods are particularly popular with stress eaters. Female students in particular put the chocolate bar right at the top of their exam menu: Around 60 percent of the women surveyed between the ages of 20 and 29 confessed to the melt-in-the-mouth sin. With the male fellow students it was still scarcely a quarter.

Food as a reward

“Stress eating is not primarily about satisfying hunger,” explains psychologist Frank Meiners of the DAK. “Rather, stress eaters want to reward themselves for something – for example, for the strain of learning.” A behavior that can have serious health consequences in the long term. Because even if the little reward in between doesn’t seem to be a problem at first glance: “Once you’ve learned a mechanism, it’s hard to get rid of it again,” Meiners continues. Therefore, countermeasures should be taken as early as possible so that the vicious circle of stress and reward through eating does not arise in the first place.