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

Participants first completed the high-stress condition in which they were exposed to a gold-standard laboratory stressor, the Trier Social Stress Test (Kirschbaum et al., 1993). Participants were given five minutes to prepare for a five-minute speech task followed by a five-minute mental arithmetic task in front of two panelists wearing white lab coats (i.e., a male and female research assistant). The speech task put the participant in a mock interview, with the panelists listening to the speech in an unresponsive, neutral manner and asking standardized probing questions. During the mental arithmetic task, participants were instructed to subtract odd numbers (i.e., 7 and 13) from a large number (i.e., 2935) as quickly as possible. If the participant made a mistake, the panelist interrupted them and instructed them to start the task again from the beginning. The panelists reminded the participant to "go faster" if they started to slow down with the task.

Participants first underwent the control condition during which they were presented with low-stress equivalents to the speech and mental arithmetic tasks from the experimental (high-stress) condition. For the speech task, participants were instructed to talk out loud to themselves for five minutes about a movie or book of their choice. Their speech was recorded using a small audio recorder device the research assistant prepared. For the mental arithmetic task, participants were instructed to count by increments of 15 starting from zero to the largest number they could reach. Participants were left in the room alone for the task for five minutes, after which the participant self-reported to the research assistant the number they reached.