Oral contraceptives make some women more likely to binge-eat due to their effects on hormones, a team of researchers have concluded after tracking over 400 women for seven weeks for a study published in the JAMA Network Open.
The team of scientists at Michigan State University (MSU) said they detected “significantly increased emotional eating” among women taking the pill, with the synthetic hormones used in some variants seeming to “heighten risk.”
According to MSU, emotional eating is when people “overconsume food in the presence of negative emotions” and is considered a category of binge-eating.
Combined oral contraceptives mimic postovulation - what the team described as “the riskiest menstrual cycle phase” for bingeing - by providing both synthetic estrogen and progestin.
The findings follow prior work linking fluctuations in the hormones to excessive and compulsive eating.
“These new findings suggest that synthetic hormones in combined oral contraceptives may also heighten risk,” the MSU team warned.
The tests involved women taking the active and inactive pills that make up a course of oral contraceptives and factored in whether the participants disclosed previous or ongoing episodes of binge-eating.
The research highlights “the potential negative impact of combined oral contraceptives in women,” said Kelly Klump of MSU’s Department of Psychology, who cautioned that the pills are likely “safe for many women” as not all the study's participants proceeded to binge-eat.
“Future studies are needed to better identify who is at risk and inform personalized medicine approaches to women’s health,” Klump recommended.
