Food quells anxieties, but is a short-term fix that leads to excess weight. Finding other ways to relieve stress is preferable

This wellbeing myth is almost true, says Dr Caroline Apovian, director of the Nutrition and Weight Management Center at Boston University Medical Centre. “Stress can lead to weight gain,” she says, “but it’s not that stress itself, by any metabolic reason, causes weight gain.” Rather, the correlation is that people often turn to overeating as a reaction to stress.

When our body feels it’s in danger, hormones are secreted, one of which is cortisol. Cortisol increases our heart rate, making us feel hyped up and anxious, motivating us to engage in reward-driven behaviour. It’s what would once have given the boost needed to run away from a woolly mammoth attack, but it’s less useful at helping us deal with modern, nonphysical stressors, such as looming deadlines. That’s where food comes in.

Having promised much but delivered not enough, especially on health, Welsh Labour will eye the 2026 vote with trepidation

Since Brexit, one of the hardest tasks in British politics has been to make accurate predictions. Just when you think you know what is going to happen, a prime minister will do something stupid like call an early election during a monsoon , proudly shake hands with dozens of Covid patients, crash the economy ( yes, you, Liz ) or squander the benefits of a 150-plus majority.

Add to this the rise of Reform UK Party Ltd and Elon Musk’s relentless desire to promote any party globally that resonates with his “ divorced dad energy ”, and you would be hard pressed to guess what awaits the UK in the 2029 general election.

Will Hayward is a Guardian columnist. He publishes a regular newsletter on Welsh politics and is the author of Independent Nation: Should Wales Leave the UK?

• Match in Sydney begins at 7.15pm (AEDT)/8.15am (GMT)
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Healy will not play today, with soreness in the same foot as her plantar fascia injury. She’s currently wearing a boot and will be seen by specialists over the next couple of days.

Hello! Already the ODIs are over, already England are six points down. Over there on the river are the Ashes, sailing away, with a good wind behind them, almost out of reach. We are a week into England’s tour of Australia and they’ve been thoroughly outclassed – tactically, with the bat and in the field. Australia have been….Australia.

• Top seeded world No 1 sees off Holger Rune 6-3, 3-6, 6-3, 6-2
• Italian will face either Alex de Minaur or Alex Michelsen next

Defending champion and top seed Jannik Sinner overcame a debilitating medical episode as well as Dane Holger Rune to reach the quarter-finals of the Australian Open for the third time with a 6-3, 3-6, 6-3, 6-2 victory.

The world No 1 had looked like continuing his serene progress through the draw when he wrapped up the opening set after 33 minutes on the back of two breaks of serve. But he started to struggle physically early in the second set, and appeared even weaker after stretching in vain for one return.

A head-scratching hat puzzle

Today’s puzzle retrospectively commemorates UNESCO’s World Logic Day, which took place last week. (The date, January 14, is both the day Kurt Gödel died and the day Alfred Tarski was born, a calendrical coincidence that links the pre-eminent logicians of the twentieth century.)

It is a logic puzzle and, as is typical for the genre, concerns a group of clever people wearing colourful headwear.

Unlike tariffs, a new form of protectionism could target climate-wrecking, untaxed corporations and their billionaire owners

• Gabriel Zucman is a French economist

How should Europe respond before Donald Trump’s policies destabilise the global economy? All countries will soon have to take a stand on the new US president’s tariff threats. While a shift away from free trade clearly carries risks, it also presents a valuable opportunity to reimagine our outdated international economic relations – if we can grasp what makes this moment unique.

In many ways, Trump’s economic agenda follows the Republican party playbook that dates back to Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential run, which launched the party’s enduring mission to dismantle Roosevelt’s New Deal. Trump claims the US was never better off than under William McKinley’s presidency (1897-1901), when the federal government, before income tax existed, was pared down to a minimum.

Gabriel Zucman is professor of economics at the Paris School of Economics and École normale supérieure – PSL, and founding director of the EU Tax Observatory

Beecher’s beautiful memoir, written partly in response to the death of her brother aged 25, describes in startling detail the highs and lows of existence

The title of Anna Beecher’s first work of nonfiction can be read in various ways – an expression of triumph, relief or anticlimax. She uses it as a punchline to the book’s opening chapter, which recounts a car accident she experienced as a graduate student in the US. Here she conjures in vivid detail the violent shock of impact, the moments of silent disbelief in the immediate aftermath as she waits for understanding to catch up with physical sensation, dreading the discovery of what happened to the occupants of the other car, now spinning on its roof.

In the event, no one is hurt, but Beecher pictures all too readily a parallel reality in which the crash resulted in several deaths, and she and her friend return home carrying the weight of that knowledge. “Our lives are punctured by moments of impossibility when the future unlatches from the present and a gap opens, which we must find a way to step over,” she writes. Her memoir is structured around these points of shock in her own life, and for the most part the experiences she relates are recognisable, even ordinary: being bullied at school, brushes with binge drinking and bulimia, various heartbreaks, a breakdown, a parent’s illness, the loneliness of leaving family and friends to move continents. “Looking back at this chain of non-disasters, from which all parties emerged bruised but alive, I now see loss,” she says. But the cumulative toll of these ruptures is so significant because they are satellites orbiting the central tragedy of her life – the death of her elder brother from cancer at the age of 25: “Little losses, against the vast loss of John.”

We All Come Home Alive by Anna Beecher is published by W&N (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com . Delivery charges may apply

Rents spiral and neighbourhoods lose charm as cities report tourist flat boom and surge in housing speculation

Ciutat Vella, the old city of Barcelona, was once quirky and mysterious.

Now it has become a parody of itself, a place from which the local population has been exiled in the interests of tourism and maturing investments. Doorways have sprouted combination key safes, a telltale sign of an apartment given over to tourist lets. A 100-year-old apothecary and shirtmaker that stood on La Rambla for two centuries have been replaced by shops selling flamenco dolls and ceramic bulls.

Nam Arum’s debut documentary weaves intimate home videos and family stories into an interrogation of the aftermath of Chun Doo-hwan’s dictatorship

The personal and the political collide in Nam Arum’s astonishingly assured debut, an astute chronicle of South Korean politics through the lens of family memories. Weaving intimate home videos with poignant archival footage, the film-maker makes tangible the invisible link between the private and the public spheres.

As a family portrait, Nam’s documentary refreshingly moves on from the usual emphasis on generational differences, focusing instead on how youthful idealism metamorphoses over the years. As part of the pro-democracy 386 generation who came of age during Chun Doo-hwan ’s military dictatorship, Nam’s parents were politically active as students. Their paths following their marriage, however, took contrasting turns. Once an optimistic investigative journalist, her father chose to become a civil servant instead, and with each change of government he was arbitrarily shuffled between departments. Nam’s mother, on the other hand, devotes her time to women’s rights groups.