Our preference for certain foods may be impacted by early life stress, research shows
Northeastern University research finds a correlation between acute stress in infancy and an increased preference for inflammatory foods in subjects’ late teens and 20s.
How does your childhood impact the food you crave or choose to eat? Beyond the effect of the culture you were raised in, could an event in your infancy make you eat differently today?
According to Brie Reid, a researcher at Northeastern University, acute stress experienced within the first two years of life — stress like malnourishment, neglect or caregiver separation — has a marked correlation with the dietary choices people make in their late teens and early 20s. Specifically, those who had experienced extreme stress in their earliest years were far more likely to adopt a highly inflammatory diet than those who had not.
Inflammatory choices
Reid, an assistant professor of public health and health sciences, studies how stress and nutrition in our youngest years impact health over the course of a life.
For this study, Reid looked at 190 subjects between the ages of 12 and 21, half of whom had been institutionalized at some point in their toddler years, usually in an orphanage. These subjects were later adopted into financially stable families in the Midwest. The other half of the subjects, as a control group, were born and raised in financially stable families.
Those in the international adoptee group were “in orphanage care for the majority of their infancy, and so they are experiencing a form of neglect,” Reid says. “Even in the best orphanages, where caregivers are trying their best, there’s just the ratio of children to adults” that is insufficient for the amount of attention most children need as they develop.
“It’s a fairly extreme case, I would say, of early neglect, and a concentrated case of it,” she continues.
A July 2025 UNICEF report estimates there are about 152 million orphaned children worldwide.
In her most recent study, Reid and her team found a strong correlation between those who experienced early life stress and later exhibited a preference for an inflammatory diet. Subjects recorded everything they ate for three days, Reid says, before having blood drawn that revealed the level of inflammation markers in their bodies.
Inflammatory foods, according to Kaiser Permanente, include highly processed foods, those high in unhealthy fats and sugar, or alcohol.
Reid says that inflammation isn’t necessarily a problem but a natural response of the body to stress and trauma. “Inflammation is a way that our body protects us from pathogens or viruses,” she says, and cites fever as one kind of inflammatory immune response.
It’s when that inflammation becomes chronic, she continues, that problems can arise, and an inflammatory diet can contribute to that effect. “Inflammation’s been called the common soil of a lot of different diseases,” she says, impacting everything from cardiometabolic health to depression and bronchitis.
As opposed to providing a black-and-white description of what constitutes inflammatory or non-inflammatory foods, the researchers used an index that plots foods along a spectrum, with some foods being more inflammatory than others.
By way of counter-example, however, she points to the Mediterranean diet as a popular, low-inflammation diet.
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Inflammation, she says, “might be one of the ways that stress, or early experiences, kind of get under the skin to impact our long-term functioning.”
The effect becomes more pronounced as the subject ages, Reid continues, and begins to exhibit more control over what they choose to eat. She describes toddlers’ eating habits as very regimented and controlled by their parents, but as they move into their teens and 20s, they exert more preference over their dietary habits.
For the children who faced early life stress, those choices veered toward inflammatory foods far more significantly than their peers who had not experienced the same traumas.
Correlation, not necessarily causation
Reid says that though the relationship between early life stress and the preference for inflammatory foods is highly correlated, the research isn’t ready to identify a specific mechanism.
That said, Reid does note that chronic stress, especially early in life, can have a profound impact on the developing brain. The researchers suspect that “there might be changes in how their brains deal with impulsivity,” she says.
“We’re interested in levers that we could maybe target for intervention,” Reid notes, and says that behaviors are one of those potential levers. Even among this cohort of nearly 200 subjects, most of them were of a healthy weight. The preference for inflammatory foods appeared independently of their body mass index, she continues.
