Low blood sugar may cause couples to fight more!

A quick candy bar may delay more than hunger. It could prevent major fights between husbands and wives. That's because low blood sugar can make spouses touchy, researchers propose. We need glucose for self-control; anger is the emotion that most people have difficulty controlling.

The researchers studied 107 married couples for three weeks. Each night, they measured their levels of the blood sugar glucose and asked each participant to stick pins in a voodoo doll representing his or her spouse. That indicated levels of aggressive feelings. The researchers found that the lower the blood sugar levels, the more pins were pushed into the doll. In fact, people with the lowest scores pushed in twice as many pins as those with the highest blood sugar levels, the researchers said.

The study also found that the spouses were generally not angry at each other. About 70 percent of the time, people didn't put any pins in the doll. The average for the whole study was a bit more than one pin a night per person. Three people put all 51 pins in at one time and one person did that twice.

Researchers said there's a good physical reason to link eating to emotion: The brain, which is only 2 percent of the body weight, consumes 20 percent of our calories. Eating a candy bar might be a good idea if spouses are about to discuss something touchy but that fruits and vegetables are a better long-term strategy for keeping blood sugar levels up.