Stress Awareness Month: Why We Need to Talk About Food

Each April, Stress Awareness Month invites us to reflect on how stress affects our health, relationships, and communities. We talk about mental health. We talk about inequality. Sometimes, we talk about trauma, but we rarely talk about nutrition — and we should. When it comes to the long-term impact of stress, especially early in life, food plays a powerful role. One that is too often overlooked in public health conversations.

When we talk about stress, we need to talk about food too.

Stress Doesn’t Just Pass — It Accumulates

Thanks to decades of research on allostatic load — the cumulative “wear and tear” of chronic stress on the body, we now understand that stress isn't just emotional. It's biological.

Studies show that ongoing exposure to adversity, particularly in childhood, can disrupt systems that regulate inflammation, hormones, blood pressure, and metabolism (McEwen & Stellar, 1993; Kelly-Irving, 2019). Over time, this increases the risk of conditions like heart disease, diabetes, and depression.

These effects are shaped by socioeconomic status, life events, and access to support (Gustafsson et al., 2011). But there’s one major influence that still isn’t getting the attention it deserves: Food.

The Missing Link: Nutrition and Stress

Stress influences:

• What we eat: leading to irregular meals, comfort eating, or reduced appetite

• How we digest: via gut changes, inflammation, and disrupted hunger cues

• How we metabolise: as stress hormones like cortisol affect weight, insulin sensitivity, and energy levels

• How we relate to food: especially if food was linked to instability or scarcity in childhood

This matters not just for individuals, but across communities. In environments where stress is chronic (whether due to poverty, racism, housing insecurity, or trauma) nutrition becomes both a risk factor and a potential source of resilience.

What Is Trauma-Informed Nutrition Support?

Trauma-informed nutrition support is an approach that recognises the emotional, psychological, and social factors that shape how people experience food.

It means:

• Creating safe, non-judgmental spaces to explore eating habits without shame or blame

• Understanding that food behaviours may be coping strategies, not “bad choices”

• Avoiding prescriptive or rigid nutrition advice that can trigger control issues or past experiences of food insecurity

• Encouraging body awareness, self-compassion, and gentle curiosity instead of rules

• Being aware of how systems of inequality and marginalisation affect access to food, healthcare, and autonomy

In both one-to-one practice and public health programs, this approach meets people where they are, builds trust, and honours the complex stories people carry — including those written through food.

Reimagining Public Health with Food at the Centre

What if, this Stress Awareness Month, we recognised that:

• Nutrition is inseparable from stress and trauma

• Food security is foundational to health equity

• Supporting people’s relationship with food is part of stress reduction

Programmes addressing stress, especially for families and young people, should include trauma-informed nutrition support. And public health strategies should treat food not as an isolated lifestyle choice, but as a core component of safety, self-regulation, and long-term health.

A Call for Connection

As a nutritionist working in both private practice and public health, I see the deep ways that food intersects with people’s sense of safety, control, and wellbeing.

So this April, I invite colleagues across health, education, and policy to ask:

Where is food in our conversations about stress?

Let’s bring nutrition professionals into multidisciplinary teams. Let’s link research with real-world action. And let’s not miss this opportunity to see food not just as fuel — but as part of how we heal.