Completely fails to answer the question 'Why do people stress eat?'<p>As close as it comes is "people who responded to stress with high cortisol levels in an experimental setting were more likely to snack in response to daily hassles in their regular lives than low-cortisol responders"<p>So there's a statistical association between high cortisol responses and snacking in response to stress. That is not "why", it's a correlation, and meaningless to an ordinary person.
If "stress" = "worrying about (something that may happen in) the future", then mightn't 'over eating' be a primitive physiological response? e.g. similar to how 'threat of imminent attack' -> 'fight or flight', perhaps 'threat of something bad in future' -> 'better pack on the kilojoules now in case we can't secure an adequate food supply'.