Effect of meal content on heart rate variability and cardiovascular reactivity to mental stress

Abstract

Little is known about transient effects of foods and nutrients on reactivity to mental stress. In a randomized crossover study of healthy adults (n = 20), we measured heart rate variability (respiratory sinus arrhythmia), blood pressure, and other hemodynamic variables after three test meals varying in type and amount of fat. Measurements were collected at rest and during speech and cold pressor tasks. There were significant post-meal changes in resting diastolic blood pressure (−4%), cardiac output (+18%), total peripheral resistance (−17%), and interleukin-6 (−27%). Heart rate variability and hemodynamic reactivity to stress was not affected by meal content. We recommend that future studies control for time since last meal and continue to examine effects of meal content on heart rate variability.

Evidence that meal fat content does not impact hemodynamic reactivity to or recovery from repeated mental stress tasks

“…These findings are in agreement with a previous study in which SBP, DBP, and TPR reactivity to a stress task were not influenced by meals that were either low in fat or high in saturated or polyunsaturated fat (Sauder et al 2012) (speech and cold pressor task, ϳ2.5 h postmeal), but are in contrast with other previous findings that blood pressure (Faulk and Bartholomew 2012;Jakulj et al 2007) and TPR (Jakulj et al 2007) reactivity were greater in response to laboratory stressors presented 2 h following consumption of an HFM versus a LFM. The reason for these disparate findings is unclear as all studies used similar subject populations (young, healthy adults), stress tasks (variations of speech tasks, mental arithmetic, and cold-pressor/ ischemia) and quantities of fat (ϳ40-54 g).…”

“…While the anticipated postprandial changes in triglycerides, glucose, and insulin did occur (Table 2), they did not appear to moderate postprandial stress responses. The magnitude of postprandial lipemia in this study was similar to that in the previous study in which no impact of fat consumption on stress reactivity was observed (Sauder et al 2012).…”

“…However, endothelial function was not measured during stress, which is the period relevant to hemodynamic reactivity. Unfortunately, endothelial function was not quantified by previous authors (Faulk and Bartholomew 2012;Jakulj et al 2007;Sauder et al 2012), so it is not possible to determine whether this factor played a role in their results.…”

Noninvasive measurements to evaluate the effects of military training on the human autonomic nervous system

“…Interestingly, the communication between the vagus and ICC is bidirectional in that the vagal afferent fibers have synapse-like contact with ICC [20,21]. Our observation that the meal induced an increase in heart rate, consistent with findings in another recent study [22], could also the result of a meal-induced increase in sympathetic activity.…”

Association Between Heart Rate Variability Measures and Blood Glucose Levels: Implications for Noninvasive Glucose Monitoring for Diabetes

“…The LF parameter primarily reflects sympathetic activity, the HF parameter reflects parasympathetic activity, the TP parameter reveals overall autonomic activity, 19 and the LF/HF ratio represents sympathovagal balance or the complex interactions between the sympathetic and parasympathetic inputs. 20 The Shapiro-Wilks Normality Test revealed that all HRV parameters were highly skewed, as is typical of HRV studies [21][22][23][24] ; hence the derived HRV measures were natural logarithm transformed prior to analysis.…”