You feel short on patience and highly irritable. You’re hangry. It’s not just a cute word, and you’re not being dramatic. Biologically, you are fighting an incredible stress response.

Viren conducted one of the first real-world hanger experiments after his wife said he was hangry all the time. “You can demonstrate that hanger is a real phenomenon,” says Viren. But he says ...

A 2021 study found male fruit flies became more aggressive when food became scarcer. Dietary stress was shown to directly influence the flies’ behavior. Several studies also show that hunger can ...