Have you ever seen a woman who is lonely and she turns to chocolates or ice cream to calm herself down or to comfort herself?

There’s science behind this, buddy. Keep reading on.

A new study, DailyMail reported, has revealed that sugary treats act like emotional painkillers for lonely women.

A team in the United States assessed around 100 women and showed them images of sweet and savoury food. Compared to others, lonelier women in the sample exhibited greater brain activity in areas highly linked with food cravings.

University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) experts said that the study’s outcome shows the “vicious cycle between unhealthy eating and negative mental symptoms”.

While it is established that obesity is linked to depression and anxiety, and that binge-eating is understood to be a coping mechanism against loneliness, the scientists wanted to observe the brain pathways associated with these feelings and behaviors.

“Researching how the brain processes loneliness and how this is related to obesity and health outcomes hasn’t been done,” said Arpana Gupta, senior author of the paper, which is published in JAMA Network Open.

“These findings are interesting because it provides evidence for what we intuitively know,” Gupta said.

“When people are alone or lonely, it impacts more than how they are feeling; they underreport what they eat, their desire to eat, and their cravings especially for unhealthy foods,” she added,