Stress and Sugar can Sabotage your Holidays
Posted by Kelli de Sante' on 12th Dec 2021
How stress, sugar, and an unhealthy microbiome can sabotage the holidays.
With some planning and skilled execution, you can have a healthy and stress-free holiday!
There are two things you can count on this time of year…a heaping load of stress and a heaping serving of sugar. The holidays are really good at winding us up and filling our tummies with all kinds of sweet desserts and treats. Stress and sugar team up at the holidays to give our microbiome a one-two punch. Well with a little preparedness we can get through the holidays feeling both mentally and physically great.
Let’s look at how both stress and sugar affect the gut and how the two team up to cause damage if we aren’t careful.
Stress
Everyone gets stressed. When you feel anxious and stressed, your brain floods your nervous system with hormones and chemicals designed to help you respond to a threat. Adrenaline and cortisol are two examples.
While adrenaline and cortisol help us in the event of an urgent, demanding, or high-pressure situation, long-term exposure to these hormones caused by stress can wreak havoc on your gut…and your overall health. If we are in a constant state of stress, due to work, family, relationships, food deficiencies, or other life circumstances, the body never gets the signal to return to a state of normalcy. This results in a weakened immune system, leaving us more vulnerable to viral infections and frequent illness. It can also contribute to weight gain and start a cycle that is tough to break. During our last blog, we talked about how human beings tend to focus on the negative instead of the positive. When we focus on the negative it can evolve into anxiety, feelings of doom, and hopelessness. Long-term anxiety and panic attacks can cause the brain to release stress hormones on a regular basis. This in turn can increase the frequency of symptoms such as headaches, dizziness, and depression. We’ve all been suffering through a pandemic, so this year we are particularly susceptible.1*
In addition to the release of these hormones, stress also brings about changes in our gastric secretion. It slows down the movement of food through the digestive tract and leads to intestinal permeability and inflammation. Particles, such as bacteria and undigested food can move more easily into the bloodstream, which can cause damaging and chronic inflammation. This results in leaky gut, and can lead to autoimmune diseases as a result1*
Sugar
It is tough this time of year because there is lots of sugar everywhere! From Christmas cookies to fudge to cakes, everyone loves to create sugary treats to eat and give to friends.
Sugar is damaging to the microbiome because it feeds the unhealthy bacteria that are present there. When we overindulge, and our bacteria get out of whack, that runs down our immune system and causes us to crave more sugar. Holiday stress can cause us to crave comfort food and this often comes in the form of sugar. But this temporary pacification can leave us feeling worse, as it causes our unfriendly bacteria to thrive. Remember, about 90 percent of our serotonin is created in the gut, and this sends signals to our brain. If our gut is unhealthy, we don’t produce as much serotonin, which can leave us feeling depressed and anxious. Then if we turn to sugar when feeling that way, it starts a hard-to-break cycle that is not good for the gut or the brain.1*
Stress and Sugar
There is another reason we reach for sugar when we are stressed. According to researchers at UC Davis, sugar has been shown to slow the secretion of stress-induced cortisol and suppress the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis in your brain which controls your response to stress, minimizing feelings of anxiety and tension…in the short term. It does make us feel better. But this euphoria or sugar high is short-lived and followed by a low as the gut and liver work to process the sugar. This temporary relief could be what makes us turn to sugar in times of stress or worry, besides its sweet taste.
Other research suggests that sugary treats have no positive effect on mood, but just the opposite. A 2017 study found that consuming a high sugar diet can increase one’s chances of mood disorders in men and recurrent mood disorders in both sexes.1*
Another study done in 2019 found consuming saturated fats and added sugars regularly was associated with higher feelings of anxiety in adults over age 60 and multiple studies have found a link between diets high in sugar and depression.1*
Having a stressful day or week is not going to have long-term negative effects on your gut just as eating a piece of cake or a hot fudge sundae on occasion won’t either. But it is the long-term stress that induces changes in our guts, by affecting our gastric secretions, the movement of our digestive tract, intestinal permeability, and chronic inflammation. And it is also the culmination of years of eating inflammatory foods such as sugary and processed nutrient-poor foods that take a toll on our bodies, leading to many modern chronic diseases. 2*
So…what can you do now?
Think ahead! Plan your menus and have home-cooked healthy foods available in your refrigerator to eat every day. Incorporate anti-inflammatory fresh whole foods into your daily diet. Of course, if you can get organic, even better. Don’t forget your daily regimen of Body Biotics™ Bio-Identical SBO Probiotics Consortia™. If you have a holiday party where you know your food choices will be limited, eat a healthy meal at home before you go, so you aren’t tempted to pig out when you get there. Limit your alcohol intake. (We talked about the effects of too much alcohol on the gut in an earlier blog).2*
Get your Christmas planning and shopping list going early to avoid stressful last-minute situations that leave you frazzled. Avoid family situations that make you unhappy or sad. Get outside and walk and get plenty of sleep.
All these things will help to boost your immune system, increase energy, help you sleep better, and balance your hormones. Think about giving your body all the healthiest things it needs to keep it operating at its best. By eating right and taking care of yourself, it is a lot easier to handle stressful situations when they arise. When you are hungover, down on yourself for eating too much sugar, or tired, it makes you irritable and stressed, and outside stressors can seem larger than they are.2*
Practice mindfulness techniques such as meditation, yoga, or walking outside to balance your nervous system. Each of those techniques involves deep breathing, which triggers the parasympathetic nervous system, oxygenates your blood, and activates digestion.2*
Give yourself a break and know you don’t have to do it all. Say no to those things that stress you out. Focus on the good in the world, not the bad. Look at the positive, not the negative as we covered last time.
Have a very happy holiday and know we are wishing you the very best. Stay healthy!
Healthiest wishes,
Kelli
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