NCT05191030

Cortisol and Food Insecurity

Food Insecurity, Poor Diet, and Metabolic Syndrome: Cortisol's Amplifying Role

• Status: Completed
• Phase: N/A
• Study type: Interventional
• Enrollment: 453 (actual)
• Sponsor: University of California, Los Angeles · Academic / Other
• Sex: All
• Age: 18 Years
• Healthy volunteers: Accepted

Summary

This study will use a within-subjects design in a sample of individuals with a range of food insecurity recruited from the Los Angeles community (N = 400; 50% men). These participants will then, in counterbalanced order, be exposed to a gold-standard laboratory stressor and a control condition, one month apart. Moderation analyses will test whether cortisol reactivity to the stressor acts as a modulator of the relationship between high levels of food insecurity and increased hyperpalatable food intake.

Conditions

• Food Insecurity

Interventions

Type	Name	Description
BEHAVIORAL	High-Stress Intervention	Those undergoing the High-Stress will be exposed to a gold-standard laboratory stressor, the Trier Social Stress Test (Kirschbaum et al., 1993), which reliably induces cortisol reactivity in most individuals.

Timeline

• Start date: 2022-03-11
• Primary completion: 2025-09-23
• Completion: 2025-09-23
• First posted: 2022-01-13
• Last updated: 2025-09-29

Locations

1 site across 1 country: United States