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Humans Are Like Hamsters

When the pressure gets too much, rats and mice stop eating. When hamsters get stressed, they stuff their faces. People are like hamsters.

Physiologists at the Center for Behavioral Neuroscience at Georgia State University wanted to know why: Why do so many people, like hamsters, eat when they're feeling anxious, tense or depressed? Is there a way to block this seeming compulsion?

To investigate these questions, researchers placed an 11-week-old hamster in the cage of a larger, older, dominant adult. Syrian hamsters tend to be solitary animals, with a rigid hierarchy of dominance and submission, so putting two dissimilar hamsters together created a stressful situation, especially for the younger one. The scientists limited these togetherness sessions to just seven minutes at a time.

It didn't take long, however, for the smaller hamsters to show the effects of stress in their eating habits. They ate significantly more food, gained significantly more weight, with much of that weight gain becoming stomach fat (again, just like in humans). The changes occurred in hamsters who had been stressed as few as four times, or just 28 minutes during the 33-day experiment.

The study helps establish hamsters as an ideal model for human obesity research, particularly because both humans and hamsters share a predominant stress hormone called cortisol. (Rats and mice employ a different primary stress hormone: corticosterone.)

Researchers are planning new studies to see if blocking the release of cortisol or other stress hormones will help overwrought, overweight hamsters and, eventually, humans.

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