Feeling ‘Hangry’? Might be the cause of that short fuse – The Wall Street Journal

JOHANNESBURG — As a father of two, the idea that hunger fuels anger, makes complete sense. Some may experience the daily suicide hour but there are also moments when food to the table is a little late, and sparks can fly. The concept has in fact become so mainstream that the Oxford dictionary actually gave 'hangry' an official definition last year. So next time you feel on edge, or ready for a bout, you might just need to nibble on something to bring it all together. But as the article below suggests don't use it as an excuse to indulge in sweets. – Stuart Lowman___STEADY_PAYWALL___.Is Getting 'Hangry' Actually a Thing?.By Heidi Mitchell(The Wall Street Journal) It's 4 p.m., and for no discernible reason, any little thing can make your blood boil. Are you hangry?The portmanteau of hungry and angry has become so common in colloquial speech, it made news when US Olympic snowboarder Chloe Kim tweeted about the condition when she skipped part of her breakfast. The Oxford English Dictionary gave it an official definition this year.But is this bit of wordplay a true state of being? One expert, Michael Lowe, a psychology professor at Drexel University and a specialist in eating disorders, weighs in on hormones, early warning signs of hunger and why being hangry might be an adaptive behaviour.The sugar crashThe popularity of the term hangry has outstripped the scientific research on it, Dr. Lowe says. He agrees that food deprivation can contribute to "a hypersensitivity to react to things you wouldn't react to much or at all when you're not hungry." However, food deprivation exacerbates other feelings, too. "If we had a list of 10 negative emotions, my guess is that as people get hungrier, the scores of most of the negative emotions would go up, not just anger," he says.Just after we begin eating, blood-sugar levels rise sharply, then gradually decline for hours until we eat again. "At some point, one starts to experience falling glucose levels and stomach growling and other signs of energy deprivation that trigger an alarm in the brain," Dr. Lowe says. . But as the demand for food increases, and we ignore those alarms, our cognitive capacities become constrained and some of our mental focus shifts to food. That plus low blood sugar can lead to irritability, and could make everyday tasks tougher to perform, which can make us angrier still.He cites the famous 1945 Minnesota Starvation Experiment as an extreme example: Of the male volunteers who lost 25% of their body weight in six months, most reported irritability and a decrease in mental ability.Dr. Lowe also points to a study of eight Israeli judges who granted 65% of convicts' parole requests in the morning and after a snack break, but almost none at day's end. "Someone who is very hungry and irritable is likely to react more harshly" than his or her well-fed co-worker, he says.Caveman theoriesHangry feelings may be a result of evolution. Our distant human ancestors were hunter-gatherers who often didn't know where their next meal was coming from. To cope, humans developed an early-warning system for when blood-sugar levels dropped. They released stress hormones like cortisol and epinephrine to help propel the mind and body into action to seek sustenance."It would be useful for a hungry person to feel driven to find food well before blood-sugar levels drop so low that he or she starts to feel weak and have trouble finding a new food source," Dr. Lowe says. Those same hormones we release to motivate us to act are also linked to irritability. "The hunger/hormone relationship is complicated, but strong hunger is stressful, which likely also contributes to the hangry emotion," he says.Everyone is born with an acute sensitivity to energy level and hunger, though individual responses vary greatly. Adults go through a gradual reduction in sensitivity to hunger. They may not eat when hungry because they're dieting. Or they keep eating when they're no longer hungry because of all the delicious food around. "These experiences weaken the developmentally normal process of eating only when we are truly hungry," he says.Because children haven't been around as long, they still react dramatically to internal warnings of oncoming hunger. "Kids exhibit less self-control than adults, though I don't think there is enough scientific evidence to explain why adolescents seem to be so quick to anger when they've skipped a meal or a snack," he says.He has also done research into hunger, and concluded that there are two types. There's everyday hunger people feel five hours or so after a meal, called homeostatic hunger. There's also hedonic hunger, which happens to some people because they become accustomed to eating simply for pleasure, so they often think about food and eating independently of their actual state of food deprivation."Since we live in such a food-abundant environment, and we usually eat several times a day, few of us enter into a state of true physiological deprivation," he says. "So for many of us, 'hanger' may stem from wanting to eat for pleasure more than needing to eat for calories."Spread the wealthTo avoid feeling hangry, Dr. Lowe recommends distributing food intake evenly across the day. If you're a formal three-meals-a-day eater with no snacks and you're feeling grumpy before lunch or in the late afternoon, consider having a lighter breakfast, a piece of fruit at 11 a.m. and so on. Just make sure you take in about the same number of calories through the day or you may gain weight. And don't turn to quick fixes like cookies or other sugary snacks, which require paying too high a price in calories to reduce hangriness.Dr. Lowe adds that some people simply don't get hangry. "They are the kind of person who gets involved in an activity and doesn't even realise until mid-afternoon that they skipped lunch," he says.

Feeling ‘Hangry’? Might be the cause of that short fuse – The Wall Street Journal

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