Indeed, while comfort foods may reduce the stress response on the short-term (Pecoraro et al., 2004), long-term HFD feeding as well as obesity have been related to increased circulating CORT levels (Cano et al., 2008; van Rossum, 2017), and females have before been shown to have higher CORT levels compared to males in mice (Naninck et al., 2015). This evidence concerns the gene CORT and obesity due to melanocortin 4 receptor deficiency.