CORT and obesity disorder: 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).