WASHINGTON: A quick candy bar may stave off more than hunger. It could prevent major fights between husbands and wives, at least if a new study that used voodoo dolls is right.
That’s because low blood sugar can make spouses touchy, researchers propose.
In fact, it can make them “hangry,” a combination of hungry and angry, said Ohio State University psychology researcher Brad Bushman.
“We need glucose for self-control,” said Bushman, lead author of the study, which was released Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “Anger is the emotion that most people have difficulty controlling.”
The researchers studied 107 married couples for three weeks. Each night, they measured their levels of the blood sugar glucose and asked each participant to stick pins in a voodoo doll representing his or her spouse. That indicated levels of aggressive feelings.
The researchers found that the lower the blood sugar levels, the more pins were pushed into the doll.
In fact, people with the lowest scores pushed in twice as many pins as those with the highest blood sugar levels, the researchers said.
About 70 percent of the time, people didn’t put any pins in the doll, said study co-author Richard Pond Jr. at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. The average for the whole study was a bit more than one pin a night per person.
Three people put all 51 pins in at one time — and one person did that twice — Pond said.
Bushman said there’s a good physical reason to link eating to emotion: The brain, which is only 2 percent of the body weight, consumes 20 percent of our calories.
“If couples have a sensitive topic to discuss, it would be really smart to do it over dinner or, better yet, after dinner,” Bushman said.
The researchers said eating a candy bar might be a good idea if spouses are about to discuss something touchy, but that fruits and vegetables are a better long-term strategy for keeping blood sugar levels up.
Bloomberg News contributed to this report.