Wellness professionals are in agreement that stress plays a central role in our health and wellbeing. The irony is that despite this fact, many wellness programs still do not provide or offer much in the area of stress management or stress resilience training. To this point, last week the Regional Director of one of the largest health care companies in America made the following comment…
“After nearly 40 years in wellness I am absolutely convinced that ‘stress’ and lack of ‘stress management’ are the major causes of all “un-wellness” in this country. Hopefully, our journeys will help to change this pattern.”
What does the research says about the role of stress in such typical wellness programs as Diet, Nutrition, Weight Control, Smoking Cessation and Exercise.
Stress & Diet, Nutrition & Weight
Almost all wellness programs try to teach employees to eat right and to learn how to manage their food consumption; i.e., eating good nutritional foods and careful control over what is eaten. Sounds good, but not all of these programs work as well as they could. Let’s see how stress plays a role.
Todd Hare, a scientist at the University of Zurich, recently published his research in the journal Neuron (August 2015). Hare’s research showed that stress has a direct effect on the choice of foods we eat. In his research, 51 volunteers participated in the study. About one half of the volunteers in his study were placed under stress, while the other half were not placed in a stressful situation. Then, after the stressful incident, each person was asked to select a food to eat from two types of food. One half of the foods shown were very tasty, but un-healthy (e.g., cookies) and the other half were healthy (e.g. apples) but not as tasty. According to Hare’s research, those who were placed under stress picked the less healthy foods.
Concurrently with the volunteer’s decisions about what to eat, the researchers looked at how the brain was affected during the actual moment the subjects made their food selection. They used fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) and, also, collected samples of each person’s cortisol (the stress hormone) from their saliva. The results showed that the stressed subjects, when making the decision as to what to eat, had an increase in cortisol that actually changed the part of the brain that processes tastiness; it also impacted the connection to the area of the brain that processes decision making and judgment. In effect, stress changed the brain in favor of foods that were unhealthy and prone to increasing fat.
In another study, “The Effect of Emotional State on Taste Perception” by Professor Robin Dando of Cornell University studied the post game eating behavior of college hockey teams. In sports, winning or losing can make a big difference on what is eaten. Teams that lost had a higher craving for sweets than those that won. Dando concluded, “In times of negative affect, foods of a less pleasurable nature become even more unappealing to taste as more hedonically pleasing foods (sweets and salty) remain pleasurable.”
These experiments highlight the relationship between stress and the types of food we eat, but these subjects were not under chronic stress. So how does chronic stress affect diet, nutrition and weight? Cortisol is designed to move energy to where it is needed. Under chronic stress the energy being created takes the form of calories that are deposited as fat in the belly. And, as research also shows, fat is created to be used by the liver as energy. The longer one is under stress, the greater chance of packing on more fat.
The good news to be communicated in wellness programs, is that the area of the brain that produces stress hormones can be shut down through good stress mastery techniques and learning how to become stress resilient. In effect, by learning to change what we think can produce a greater sense of ease and peace. This in turn helps reduce cortisol and other stress hormones that affect us in the “gut”.
So, for those under prolonged and chronic stress, the approach should be to learn not just what to eat, but HOW to bring down stress levels to normal or optimum levels. It is also important to understand the role of stress in eating and recognize that “emotional eating” is a serious risk factor. Under stressful times, the key is to learn how to moderate and change one’s choice of foods and eating behavior.
