In the current economic climate, and especially for those employees who are in the throes of being laid off or feeling the threat of upcoming lay offs, managing stress will be an important issue to master. In this interview, Marc David, an expert in the psychology of eating, talks about the important role stress plays in digestion. Please view the video above for 5 minutes of well-spent time on the subject.
The stress response causes a number of detrimental events in your body, including:
- Decreased nutrient absorption
- Decreased oxygenation to your gut
- As much as four times less blood flow to your digestive system, which leads to decreased metabolism
- Decreased enzymatic output in your gut – as much as 20,000-fold!
Many nutrients are also excreted during stress, particularly:
- Water-soluble vitamins
- Macrominerals
- Microminerals
- Calcium (calcium excretion can increase as much as 60 to 75 mg within an hour of a stressful event)
As if that’s not enough, your cholesterol and triglycerides also go up, while gut flora populations decrease. You’re also more likely to experience increased sensitivity to food and gastroesophageal reflux, or heartburn.
But perhaps most importantly, when your body is under the stress response, your cortisol and insulin levels rise.
These two hormones tend to track each other, and when your cortisol is consistently elevated under a chronic low-level stress response, you’ll likely notice that you have difficulty losing weight or building muscle.
Additionally, if your cortisol is chronically elevated, you’ll tend to gain weight around your midsection. We’ve known for some time that body fat, and especially visceral fat (the fat that gathers around your internal organs, around your midsection) is a major contributing factor to developing diabetes and metabolic syndrome.
The bottom line?
When you eat under stress, your body is in the opposite state of where you need to be in order to digest, assimilate nutrients, and burn calories.
Learn how to manage stress and more at the Mercola site.
Take care of yourself, People! Did you find this information at all helpful?
Leave a Reply