By Jamie Ducharme, News Correspondent

At one point or another, many people have reached for a pint of Ben & Jerry’s after failing a midterm or breaking up with a boyfriend or girlfriend. Emotional eating has become so embedded in American culture (exhibit A: Liz Lemon on “30 Rock”) that many people do not realize they have a problem until their health is at risk.

Northeastern psychology professor Emily Fox-Kales, who has done research on the subject of emotional eating, said food appeals to the subconscious as a cure for negative emotion.

“Food represents our earliest experience with comfort and nurturance (as infants) so we use it as a form of ‘self-soothing’ during periods of stress,” Fox-Kales said.

She said she feels some people use binge eating as an emotional crutch. Many serial emotional eaters, she said, have feelings of “having lost control.”

“If you can’t regulate your emotions properly, or you don’t want to – I call it using food as an emotional Band-Aid – you’ll get in this pattern of behavior where every time you’re upset … [you turn to food],” she said.

Massachusetts nutritionist and registered dietitian Nicole Cormier said hormonal factors can also cause emotional eating.

“Stress levels have the ability to release certain hormones that would cause you to have more cravings, so a lot of times if my clients are really stressed, even though they’re trying to eat well, their appetite won’t be balanced,” she said.

Both Cormier and Fox-Kales said they believe emotional eating has serious ramifications on individual health.

“I personally think it plays a huge impact on a person’s health,” Cormier said. “If you allow your stress levels or your emotions to take control, you’re not going to truly find balance.”

Cormier also said most of her clients who struggle with emotional eating gravitate towards notoriously unhealthy foods.

“There are usually three different paths for dealing with emotions. One is carbs in general … [another] is sweets, more like sugar and the other one is comfort foods,” she said.

Fox-Kales said she considers emotional eating a form of substance abuse.

“[Emotional eating] is under treated as a disorder because it’s not as dramatic as someone who weighs 65 pounds, but it affects far more people,” she said. “[People] are binging without doing anything to compensate for it.”

Both said, however, that beating emotional eating is very possible with some concerted effort.

Fox-Kales urges students to stop trying to severely limit their calorie consumption.

“The deprivation and restriction of dieting [acts as] an emotional dis-inhibitor, so severe dieting puts you more at risk for emotional over-eating,” she said.

Cormier said emotional eating is a very personal condition, and doesn’t have a one-size-fits-all cure.

“The best thing you can do is make sure you aren’t going too long without eating, and have balanced meals throughout the day,” Cormier said. “[Aside from that], learn about yourself a bit more, and what triggers you.”

Despite the urgings of experts like Fox-Kales and Cormier, some Northeastern students seem relatively unfazed by emotional eating.

Sophomore health sciences major Julia Cowenhoven said she finds emotional eating to be extremely common.

“I think everyone I know is guilty of having done a little binge eating when they are stressed, but not to any extremes,” she said.

Cowenhoven also said she sees little wrong with occasional emotional eating.

“In moderation, I would say emotional eating can actually be helpful sometimes,” she said. “Eating is a relatively harmless way to alleviate stress.”

Freshman music technology major Jake Farber agreed with Cowenhoven’s observations of emotional eating, noting that he finds it common among his peers, and that it “definitely affects guys as well” as girls.

And though Farber did point out that, “if you’re consuming heavy amounts of sugar and junk food, there’s no way to spin that as healthy,” he went on to say, like Cowenhoven, that he doesn’t see the harm in eating a little too much once in awhile.

Both students said they thought emotional eating happens because food is simply comforting.

“It happens because eating is rewarding when everything else seems to be going wrong,” Cowenhoven said.

Farber also said eating emotionally can be an escape.

“Food makes us feel good,” he said. “Sometimes comfort food really is the best way to save a bad day.”