BARCELONA -- Women are far more likely than men to dive into the Häagen-Dazs because they're depressed; men tend to overeat just because they like the food, a Minnesota researcher reported over the weekend.
''Moods don't seem to be driving men's eating, but depression is a key driver for women,'' says University of Minnesota psychologist Robert Jeffery. His year-long study of 1,800 obese men and women looked at gender differences in the eating behavior of overweight adults. He spoke at the American Psychosomatic Society meeting here.
At the start, everyone rated how difficult they found it to resist food in varied situations -- at parties, when watching TV, etc. -- or while experiencing certain emotions.
Participants also took a depression test and were asked about their medical histories. Women were nearly twice as likely as men to have a history of depression. ''Body weight is not a big issue for men,'' Jeffery says, ''but a lot of these women might be depressed because they're overweight, and the social consequences of this for women are much greater.''
Then the depression apparently prompts even more weight gain. For women, depression was strongly tied to trouble controlling eating behavior. Depression correlated with the women's inability to resist foods even more than their body weight did. For men, the heavier they were, the less confident they felt about controlling their weight; depression had no bearing on that confidence.
But could men just be denying that food is a crutch for them? Jeffery thinks not, because the relatively lighter men voiced more confidence about resisting food, and the heavier men said they had more trouble.
A year later, after counseling in a weight-loss program, women who weren't depressed lost more than twice as many pounds as the depressed women who said they had trouble resisting food. For men, neither mental health nor confidence about controlling eating predicted weight loss.
Men usually have to be much more overweight than women before they'll enter weight-loss programs, Jeffery says. Women dominate group programs, ''and programs with a lot of women ought to be addressing depression.'' Men, he says, ''tend to be a lot more naive than women'' about what puts on the pounds. ''Eating is kind of a knee-jerk thing for them.'' An informational approach might work best for men, he says.
''The sexes are getting more like one another, but this is an area where there's still a pretty big divide,'' Jeffery says.
It's unknown why depression might motivate women to eat. Sex hormones or some other biological factor are possibilities, he says.
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