Cortisol Triggering Foods vs Cortisol Lowering Foods

Transcript:

Leah: Welcome to Dishing Up Nutrition, brought to you by Nutritional Weight & Wellness. We are a family owned Minnesota company that specializes in real food nutrition education, and counseling. My name is Leah Kleinschrodt, Registered and Licensed Dietitian, and my co-pilot for this episode is the one and only Teresa Wagner, who's also a Registered and Licensed Dietitian.

Some of you out there may know Teresa from having worked with her one-on-one in counseling. If you've taken any of our classes locally at the Woodbury or St. Paul locations, you might have seen her there, but Teresa also gets to be the brains and the face and that encouraging logical voice for those who are taking our online Nutrition for Weight Loss Foundation series.

And I just wanted to mention this because I've had a couple clients who have been making their way through that program recently and they have nothing but good things to say about how well you explain things, Teresa, and just like a lot of the doable, just down to earth suggestions that you have. So I'm super happy to be back here with you today and just for you to share some more of that magic with us.

Teresa: Wow. That's really, that's really fun to hear, because you never know who's going to see it after it's done. But overall, it was a great experience to really dive deep into the principles that we go over in the class and now it's fun to have it available so people can take that class, anytime, anywhere, however it works in their schedules.

Leah: Yep.

Teresa: So today I'm excited about the show too, because we're going to tackle a topic that we touch on a little bit in that foundation series and also in our Ongoing Support & Education sessions, but we don't spend a whole lot of time in those series flushing out the details. And that topic that we're going to talk about today is cortisol, which is kind of a hot topic.

Leah: Oh, totally.

Teresa: We're seeing things in our Instagram reels and all over the place.

Leah: Yep.

Teresa: So we're going to talk about what cortisol is, what it does, and then we'll talk about what nutrition and specific foods have to do with our cortisol levels. Ultimately what we want to curate is a balanced cortisol response. Not too much, not too little, so that we can feel steady, energized, and ready to tackle whatever comes next in our lives.

Leah: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Who doesn't want to feel like that? So, and you're right, cortisol, it's a huge topic out there in a lot of blogs, podcasts, social media, like you're going to run across cortisol a lot, and most of us know cortisol as the “stress hormone”. And a lot of the times when we talk about cortisol, we're talking about it when we're under a lot of stress.

And this could be physical stress or this could be mental and emotional stress and all that is true. But again, I just want to maybe zoom out just for a second, set the stage for how we want to frame this topic today.

What is cortisol & its purpose?

So cortisol is a hormone. In the body, and it's there for a purpose. So like any other hormone, it operates best when it's in a sweet spot, not too high, not too low. So that's exactly what you were saying, Teresa. It's like we want the Goldilocks scenario. Not too much, not too little. And I think it's just cortisol gets that bad wrap.

And sometimes I think we go a little overboard with like, we just have to squash cortisol down as much as we possibly can. Like we want it to be as much like zero, as close to zero as we can. But there are times where we want cortisol to be high. We want cortisol to do its job, and we'll talk about that job a little bit more in a second.

But then we want that cortisol to come back down after its job is done. The goal is balance, not totally eliminate cortisol forever and ever.

Teresa: Right. I like the way you said that. So let's just, let's start with the basics. Even though we've kind of already established it's a hormone, right? But cortisol, as you have mentioned, it's a hormone, it's produced in the adrenal glands, which are these little glands that sit on top of our kidneys. The adrenal glands respond to signals that they're getting from the brain, specifically the hypothalamus and the pituitary areas of the brain.

So these areas of the brain are deep in the middle of your brain. And for me, I'm a very visual person, so it helps me to kind of think about what they look like. And that pituitary gland, it looks like a little pea, you know? It's just a round little thing. And the hypothalamus is actually more of a cone shape or even maybe kind of a crown. And so that circuit that we're talking about creates something called the HPA access. The hypothalamus pituitary adrenal access.

So you've got your pea, you've got your crown, and you've got your little adrenals. Which my understanding is that they're kind of almond shaped. So then if you're thinking about how this is all is working, you can think about how that access works; we get the stimulus from the brain. It's sensing what's going on in the body, and then it tells our adrenals, okay, we need some cortisol.

To summarize all of that, the brain calls on the adrenal glands to make some cortisol when the brain perceives there is some kind of stress to the body. And cortisol's main job is to mobilize fuel sources in the body to be used in our brain and in our muscles. So these fuel sources are things like glucose and free fatty acids so we can fight or flee from whatever that stress might be.

Examples of stressors (stress increases cortisol response)

As Leah mentioned, this stress could be a physical stressor, like an injury or surgery, or it could be an illness, or it could be a hard workout. Or even eating “Franken” foods that contain 20 different ingredients each, but also common in today's society are the mental or emotional stressors. I mean, think about your day.

Did your alarm wake you up with the jolt? Was the first thing in your system\ caffeine? Do you have money worries, a busy schedule that leaves you running late to your obligations? Do you have work deadlines? Or maybe on the opposite end, maybe you've lost your job. Perhaps you're a caregiver or you aren't getting enough sleep.

Maybe you don't have enough time to allot what you need for sleep, or maybe you have a hard time falling or staying asleep. Maybe there's tension in a close relationship or maybe of past traumas.

Leah: Yeah. And you listed off a lot of things. And yet I would say that's even a short list.

Teresa: Right. There's so many.

Leah: I mean, when we work, we work with so many clients, right? Like we hear a lot of these stressors and then we hear more, more stressors that are in their lives. So, and I'm going to add one more just because I heard this recently and it made me feel so seen as a mom, as a parent.

But this was a study that was done at UCLA and this was done a little while ago. It was like 2009 or so, but they looked at cortisol responses in men versus women when these people were looking at mess and clutter in the home. And the study found that women had a higher cortisol response to the pictures of mess in the home than the men did.

Teresa: I believe that 100%.

Leah: Yes. So that, I mean, a hundred percent explains why I go into rage cleaning mode and my husband can just sit on, and my husband is wonderful. I don't want to throw him under the bus, but like why he can sit in the chair in the middle of all the mess and like watch TV and relax.

So, and, and, and in, in a little more seriousness, it does link back to some of like that mental burden that women, and especially I think mothers tend to carry a lot for their families. So even something like that can be a source of low level stress, or maybe for some people it's not so low level.

So another example, and unfortunately, the way we tend to live our lives in today's kind of hustle culture, never miss a Monday culture. We're constantly keeping the foot on the accelerator and we're not really great at using the brake pedal to rest and recharge and reset. So we're constantly poking that bear and stimulating that HPA access and stimulating that cortisol response day after day. And eventually it's going to take its toll. It might be a year down the road, it might be 10 years down the road, but it's going to happen at some point.

How can cortisol imbalance present?

Teresa: Right. And so then it's, well, okay, so how do we know we're, we all have stress? So how do we know if our cortisol is on the fritz? Here are some symptoms to watch for: feeling wired and tired. We hear that often.

Leah: Yep.

Teresa: Where it's like you just, you have all this buzzing energy, but then at the same time, so tired, feeling constantly stressed and overwhelmed, having trouble falling asleep or staying asleep because you feel like you can't wind down or shut off your brain. Feeling like you get a second wind in the evenings or you feel like you can't get recharged when you wake from your sleep at night when you wake up in the morning. You have little or no energy during the day or you know, maybe you just feel burned out and just completely depleted.

Leah: Which we were hearing a lot of that kind of going through the COVID pandemic and stuff like that. A lot of depletion and burnout, especially among like healthcare workers, first responders, and, and even people who aren't in those fields.

Teresa: Right, right. Yeah. But just think about the constant stress that they were under.

Leah: And so, yeah, it makes a lot of sense. I'm also going to add in there poor immune function and blood sugar dysregulation. So kind of two more things layered in there, because chronically high cortisol can suppress certain parts of the immune system, so it just makes it easier to succumb to a bug and get sick either like during that stressful period. I would almost argue actually, it's more like it's the aftermath after it's all done, right after that, stress is a little bit more alleviated.

And I had that happen personally recently, and actually I had a client I just talked to last week, same kind of thing. We were just kind of sharing stories about close family members dying and like you kind of get through some of that more immediate response, the grief, stuff like that. And then it's like on the back end, boom, you get hit with something.

So my kids had been sick already with a bug. I was doing pretty good, avoiding it. And then kind of once everything caved in it was like, oh, my immune system just couldn't handle it either. So that's a, you know, just one example of how that could happen. Yeah.

The low blood sugar & cortisol connection

But let's talk about the blood sugar part of and cortisol just for a minute. Because these two things are very closely intertwined and this is something that we actually have a lot of control over. So stress. Okay. Yes, like some things we can’t control. Some things we can, but blood sugar, we do have a lot of control.

Low blood sugar is a huge trigger for cortisol release, and our brain specifically needs a steady supply of glucose. We can't afford interruptions to that pathway. So the, the brain is always kind of sucking up sugar in one way, shape or form. So when blood sugars start to trend low, cortisol's job is to come in and free up that glucose that we do have stored up in the liver or in the muscles. But that's in order to keep us from bottoming out and from keeping that interruption to the brain happening. But that low blood sugar is a stressor on both the body and the brain.

Teresa: Yeah. So then avoiding low blood sugar should be a priority as a strategy to combat stress.

Leah: Yep.

Teresa: So how, how do we end up with these low blood sugars anyway?

Leah: Yeah, good question.

Teresa: Skipping meals, not eating enough overall.

Leah: Yeah.

Teresa: Eating too low carb for maybe our body's needs. Eating too many refined carbohydrates and experiencing a sugar crash so your blood sugar goes high and then you crash later.

Leah: Yep.

Teresa: Exercising without refueling can bottom it out too, and I've really been enjoying this trend of memes on social media of coffee is not breakfast. Leah, I think you and Kara talked about this briefly a few weeks ago on one of the perimenopause shows. The caffeine in the coffee, it's great actually at blunting our appetite and giving us this sort of sense of energy when reality, we're still running low, we're running on fumes if we haven't eaten some food. So fasting or just subsisting on coffee or energy drinks in the morning is a good way to keep your cortisol level high and add a layer of stress.

Leah: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah, absolutely. It's just, it's, I don't want to call it fake energy because it, I mean, it does give us like that little bit of boost, but I love what you said. It's like you're still truly actually running on fumes. You don't have nutrients or, or calories to be running on. So we can't reduce cortisol without first addressing the blood sugar.

So that is one of the main areas we work on with clients right out of the gate, is making sure that their blood sugar is pretty stable throughout the day. For most people, this means we're eating something for breakfast, even if it means a couple of bites or it's maybe more of a small snack before you're ready for a bigger meal, but we're eating something right away in the morning.

Then we want to eat maybe every three, four or five hours, depending on the person throughout the day. And whenever we're eating, we want to make sure there's this balance, some protein, some healthy fats, and some real food carbs that it's on a plate, it's on a napkin. It's kind of in the mix somewhere.

The carbohydrates break down into glucose. That provides a little bump to the blood sugars. Then protein and fat kind of, I call them anchors, they anchor that blood sugar in a good place, so they keep it from going too high and it keeps it from dipping too low.

Teresa: Yeah, and I visualize, like I said earlier, I'm a visual person and so when I am thinking about it for myself or if I'm explaining it to clients, I like to visualize this as either rolling hills or a rollercoaster, right? What the body perceives as less stressful is our blood sugar coming up like a rolling hill and then coming down a little bit.

Leah: Yeah.

Teresa: And not the huge, you know what makes rollercoasters fun, right? Like the, the tall hills and then the steep declines.

Leah: Yes, oh my goodness.

Teresa: You know, we don’t, we want to keep that at the amusement park. And then with our blood sugar, we want to keep it more to those more tame rolling hills.

Leah: Yeah.

Teresa: So Leah, this is so common in the morning. What kind of suggestions do you have for clients who aren't big breakfast eaters? In the morning maybe they don't have much of an appetite, or maybe they're just out of the habit of eating breakfast.

Leah: Mm-hmm. Yeah. There could be a lot of different reasons why someone isn't eating right away in the morning or they're pushing breakfast off three, four or five hours, something like that. So that's, I mean, that's the first thing is like, let's just explore that with a client of like, what is it about breakfast that either like you don't like or it repulses you or like, what's the story there?

Or you're too busy. I mean, that's a very real answer too. And so ideas. This is where like usually my first inroad is like just suggesting something small. So it's more of that snack, again, something snack size. Instead of big breakfast, then a snack later. We kind of just flip the script a little bit.

We do a smaller snack and that could be like a little bit of a protein shake. So maybe you take a fourth of a protein shake and then you save the rest for a snack later on in the day. Or another favorite suggestion of mine is like, usually like energy balls.

Making up little, like use a little protein powder, some oats, some nut butters. Kind of mix that all together and you can add other things to it. But it does get you that protein, carb, fat combo; roll them out at a little balls. And even doing something like that, even one of those would be a way to just get some nutrition in.

Teresa: Yeah. Just a few little bites.

Leah: Mm-hmm.

Teresa: Especially something like that, that's nutrient dense.

Leah: Yeah.

Teresa: Or even doing like a souped up coffee; right?

Leah: Yeah.

Teresa: Where you do a coffee, collagen powder, throw in a little bit of fat, like some coconut milk or, or cream and you know, you're getting some fuel there to start the day.

Leah: Yeah. Absolutely.

Teresa: Well, it's time for a quick break. We'll be back in a moment to continue our conversation about how you can balance cortisol with food and nutrition.

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Leah: Welcome back. Before we went to break, Teresa and I were just talking a little bit about, first we talked about low blood sugar, how that is a big stressor on the body, and one of the ways that we can actually bring cortisol levels down in the morning and not let them ride too high, too long is to eat a little something in the morning, even if it's just a small snack.

So try that on for size. If you're not somebody who is, you know, is big into getting a breakfast and in that first maybe 60 to 90 minute window in the morning. Try it out and just see how you feel. How is your energy throughout the rest of the day? How are your cravings? I see that as a big one with my clients.

It's like if we, the sooner we can kind of get some fuel in the system, actually the better the cravings are later on in the day. I'm sure you see the same thing, Teresa.

Teresa: All the time. Yeah. It's like the body knows it was missing something, so it tries to make it up later.

Leah: Yeah, it a hundred percent. And so we talked about low blood sugar, but there's another side of the spectrum too.

The high blood sugar connection to cortisol

Teresa: Yeah. And we haven't talked about it yet, so let's get into the high blood sugar. Maybe this is no surprise to our listeners, but high blood sugar is also a stressor on the body and will increase cortisol levels. It's a little less of an immediate effect though.

Unlike low blood sugar, which is an immediate danger to the brain and to the body. And we know this because the signal is so obvious, right? If anybody's ever experienced a true low blood sugar, that does not feel good.

Leah: No, it is, it's very uncomfortable.

Teresa: Yeah. And it's protective of the body too, that we, that there is this strong signal because if it gets too low, I mean, people pass out.

Leah: Yeah.

Teresa: And if you pass out and fall down and hit your head on the corner of a table, that could be…

Leah: Yeah. That's not a good situation.

Teresa: Very serious. So the body in it’s, you know, in its wisdom, has a very clear signal for that. But in high blood sugars it's not so obvious.

Leah: Yeah.

Teresa: So when, but over time, right, when we're having those, those higher blood sugars, when we're spiking the blood sugar over and over again, spike after spike, after spike, day after day, month after month, year after year, this creates damage to the blood vessels and to the tiny nerves of our body, which stresses our system and creates a higher cortisol output.

Leah: Mm-hmm. Right. So it's not the state fair one time a year cotton candy that you eat. It's the cereal for breakfast every morning. It's the sub sandwich for lunch. It's the pasta for dinner and the ice cream for dessert. It's like, it is those high blood sugars, time after time again that eventually, like those sugars just kind of cause a lot of damage in the body; leads to high cortisol.

And then the wicked cycle is that high cortisol feeds into higher insulin levels and higher blood sugar levels. Because remember, cortisol's job is to actually get more glucose into the body so that you can either fight or flee from the problem. So now we've got a vicious circle going on. We just got kind of high blood sugars, high cortisol, and they chase each other's tails around.

But here again, we have a decent amount of control over most of the things that spike our blood sugar. So you had a great example there, Teresa. We can enjoy our coffee in ways without adding heaps of sugar or sugary creamers to the coffee. We can choose full fat yogurt and berries and pumpkin seeds for breakfast instead of cereal and toast. We can bring dinner leftovers from home for lunch instead of walking across the street to the sub sandwich shop five days a week.

And we can prepare a batch of those energy balls to, or make our own little snack packs to have in the afternoon instead of succumbing to whatever's in the break room after your coworker brought all their 4th of July desserts to work because they didn't want it in their house.

Teresa: Right? Yes. Those are the carbohydrates that spike the blood sugar the most. Therefore, those are the, those are the carbohydrates that will affect cortisol the most.

Leah: Yep.

Teresa: And they're going to be made of things like that come from grain type flours, right? Like our breads, pastas, crackers, cookies, baked goods, cereals, and more. But let's not think that just because they're gluten-free options, right?

Leah: Yep.

Teresa: Those gluten-free flour, the starches that are commonly used in those baked goods, they can spike our blood sugar too. Rice flour, potato starch, tapioca flour, cassava flour, and more. Yep. So sometimes those gluten-free options, they spike our blood sugars more than the regular.

Leah: Yeah. And here's a client example from last week. She wears a continuous glucose monitor and she says she's actually run that experiment in the past where she's eaten breaded chicken tender types of things since she's done gluten-free ones. And then she's done like regular wheat flour ones, and for her, the gluten-free ones spiked her blood sugar more than the regular ones.

Teresa: That's so interesting.

Leah: Yeah, so interesting. So we don't want to trade the gluten for still a high blood sugar response and a high cortisol response. Here's just another little study that I found fascinating when I was doing research for this show. And this one was a randomized control trial, so it was actually, they took people and they like basically brought them to a lab and they gave them some stuff and determined what happened.

This was done back in 2014 in the Journal of Psychoneuroendocrinology. So they took this group of men and they, gave them either intranasal insulin, so they shot insulin up their noses, or they gave him oral cortisol. Or they gave them both things or a placebo, and then they showed them different pictures of food.

And the men who were given the cortisol before seeing pictures of these foods, they showed a higher reward response to the high glycemic foods. So in other words, when in a more stressed state, their brains were more drawn to the high glycemic foods. So think like your higher carb, higher sugar types of foods than say if they saw a picture of a carrot stick.

Teresa: And you know, that make a lot of sense, just based on my own personal experiences.

Leah: Yeah.

Teresa: But also working with so many clients over the years, in times of higher stress, the higher sugar foods tend to have a stronger pull than at other less stressful times.

Leah: Mm-hmm.

Teresa: They feel more rewarding to our brain. You know, we use it as a way to self-soothe or escape. Or destress if only it's just for a few moments.

Leah: Yeah.

Teresa: So for many of my, or I should just say for emotional eaters in general, this helps to explain why it may become so second nature. Because we have this stress. Right? And then we eat a food that provides a relief. Or an escape. And we learn then that food provides a solution to a problem. And the brain, once again, in our body's divine wisdom, like the brain creates pathways for this behavior. We wire our brain so that when we have a stress, the automatic response is to seek out that food, right?

Leah: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. It becomes your go-to.

Teresa: Yeah. Yeah. So it's just so automatic. And I've had clients say that they're like, it just, I just find myself doing it. I didn't even realize I was doing it because it just becomes so automatic. It is so much a coping mechanism. But you know, in just in thinking about this too, because we're talking about carbohydrates in this way, I certainly don't want to demonize them. I want to be careful that we don't make carbohydrates the enemy.

Leah: Yeah.

Do eat the right kinds & amounts of carbohydrates

Teresa: Many carbohydrate foods are actually helpful for combating the ups and downs of like our cortisol response. So It's just the right ones, right? And figuring out how do you, you know, even healthy coping mechanisms.

Leah: Yes, definitely. Yes, they are. We want some of those carbohydrates. And we did mention earlier in the show that even eating too low carb for your activity level, that may be a stressor on the body and that may raise cortisol. So splashing in some sweet potatoes or splashing in some wild rice or beans if you can tolerate beans or quinoa into your meals can feel really good.

Vitamin C counterbalances the cortisol response

But another reason we want to keep some of those carbohydrates around and keep them in the diet is for the vitamin C that they provide. Vitamin C is one of our main antioxidants and it is huge for counterbalancing that cortisol response.

Teresa: The adrenal glands contain a lot of vitamin C just in and of themselves, and vitamin C actually starts being released within the adrenal glands before cortisol is released. It's a neat little checks and balances system by the body to make sure that there's enough vitamin C around so that cortisol doesn't run amok.

Leah: Yeah. Yeah. I love that.

Teresa: So another example of something that we have control over; right; is this vitamin C. We can eat foods, mainly plant foods that are rich in vitamin C. Think of your favorite vitamin C sources. Is it red bell pepper, kiwi, strawberries, broccoli, oranges?

Kiwi is actually the reigning vitamin C king here with about 130 milligrams of vitamin C per one kiwi. And I got to tell you that this is golden kiwi and I, and part of the reason why I know this is for breakfast this morning, I had two golden kiwis with my cottage cheese. And I know that that probably sounds like an odd combination, but I would say try it, cut up some kiwi, throw it in your cottage cheese. It's a great combination of a high vitamin C food, a high protein food, some fiber.

Leah: Yes.

Teresa: I'm feeling pretty good.

Leah: Absolutely. I, it's funny you mentioned that because I just tried the golden kiwi for the first time, maybe two weeks ago, three weeks ago, something like that. We’ve always ever bought the green ones, and I saw the gold ones.

I was like I wonder. So just, I grabbed it, I think at Target one day when I saw it on sale. And I was, I mean, it was not, it was delicious. Yeah, it was. It was amazing. So it's like, great. I just scored another thing, like in terms of diversity, right? So, okay, so one kiwi has 130 milligrams of vitamin C.

So just for context, the recommended dietary allowance for vitamin C is 90 milligrams a day for men and 75 milligrams per day for women. So one kiwi, surpasses the RDA for men and women. And something that I, here's something that I didn't know, again, like doing a little background research for the show, is that it is recommended for people who smoke to actually increase their vitamin C.

So the RDA for people who smoke is actually 35 milligrams per day higher than the average person. And that's due to the oxidative stress that the body is under from the toxins that are in the cigarettes and in the smoke. So again, if, if you can eat one or two kiwi a day like that is I mean, huge boost to your vitamin C level.

But again, anytime you're sitting there chopping up your pepper or something along those lines, it's like, okay, just remember I've got my vitamin C in here. And it's all, I mean, it's all coming together. It's all supportive of immune health, adrenal health, all the things. 35 milligrams per day for smokers on top of that 90 milligrams.

I mean, yeah, now we're up to that 125-ish milligrams per day or so for a man. And then looking at some other research, it showed that people with diabetes, here's another group that just tend to run low in vitamin C. So really any kind of chronic disease where we have increased oxidative stress, basically like lots of little fires of inflammation throughout the body, it's going to require more vitamin C to put out those fires.

Teresa: Yeah, I agree. And you know what we missed? We didn't even talk about is citrus, the one that everybody talks about for vitamin C, right?

Leah: Oh, of course.

Teresa: Oranges and our grapefruits and the tangerine.

Leah: Yes.

Teresa: Vitamin C is one of those nutrients that has a pretty wide safety margin. So if you were doing the math as we were going along, I had 260 milligrams when the recommendation is only 75 for a woman. So really there is like a very wide safety margin for that.

Leah: Yep.

Teresa: If you do take too much vitamin C in the form of a supplement though, this can cause a little bit of problems. For some people that can cause diarrhea.

Leah: Yep.

Teresa: So in some cases we use vitamin C, or vitamin C flushes as a tool for helping people with constipation.

Leah: Right.

Teresa: So it helps to flush the stool out. Which works, it works, it can work really well.

Leah: Yes.

Teresa: If I'm sitting down with our average client, female client, forties to sixties, she's working full time, raising kids, running to activities, trying to put a balanced meal on the table each night for her family. I'm probably going to make sure she's doing the best job she can in getting her vegetables in and balancing her blood sugar, getting those fruits.

But you know, with all of that going on with the, maybe the elevated levels of stress in her life, we may decide that supplementing with vitamin C might be a good idea. I tend to go with about a thousand milligrams of extra vitamin C. Especially in the winter, because as you were saying, with that immune system, when we're running stressed, that it makes us more susceptible to getting sicknesses and any of the bugs that are going around. So that added vitamin C just helps to support our immune system and you know, supports those adrenal glands.

So I think it's somewhat of a no-brainer if she's open to it. Personally I just really love our Nutrikey Complete C-1000. So one of those tablets gives you all you need. We also have NutriDyn’s Vitamin C-1000 as well. Just simple, straightforward. Just vitamin C. That one's good. The Complete C has a little bit more to it. And that's why I tend to go with that one.

Leah: Same I the like kind of some of the frills that are attached to it.

Teresa: Yes. Yeah, I like frills too.

"Adrenal cocktails"

Leah: Yeah. So you, there's one thing before we close out our show today, I just wanted to touch on something I've seen floating around on the internet. Teresa, you said like you hadn't seen this so much, so maybe the internet's just telling me my adrenals need a lot of help. I don't know. But it's something called adrenal cocktails. And I just thought it was so fitting for our topic today.

And if you've never heard of an adrenal cocktail before, the gist of it is that it's a drink mix and usually it contains some orange juice, a little coconut water, some sea salt. That's kind of like your basic, basic recipe right there. You had mentioned when you were looking it up, like cream and tartar or electrolytes or maybe like aminos or something like that.

Teresa: Yeah. Magnesium.

Leah: Magnesium. You know, so you could again like. Here, we can put some frills on it if we want to.

Teresa: Yeah.

Leah: But the idea is that this drink makes up some of the nutrients that get depleted under stress. So we get a little bit of sugar, some glucose from the orange juice, we get some vitamin C in there as well. We get some sodium. From the sea salt, we get some potassium from the coconut water. And again, like maybe there's a little magnesium in the mix there somewhere too.

So the idea is it's like this kind of little drink that you can sip on really at any point in the day. And it's not a lot. You're not making a 48 ounce jug of this stuff. It's more like, you know, you might, it might be four to six ounces, something like that, and you're just mixing it up and it's something that might be helpful for getting some of those nutrients in.

Teresa: Yeah. Yeah. I think it makes a lot of sense. And of course there is a little bit of science behind it.

Leah: Yeah.

Teresa: And I think just for, you know, maybe for just kind of the layman that's out there that's seeing these adrenal cocktails, it's like, well, why would, why would I want coconut water and orange juice and salt mixed together?

Leah: Right.

Teresa: You know? And so through the show, I hope it makes sense and maybe we didn't touch so much on the importance of having a sodium balance for the adrenals. But it is very important for that too. You know, we have these nutrients that we take in through hopefully a balanced daily diet that really helps to support our whole body. Not just the adrenals. But everything. And so, yeah. So I feel like it makes a lot of sense and I can also see having some mixes where you can add some, maybe some heavy cream or some canned coconut milk to it. So maybe with that orange juice, because we know that juice can spike our blood sugar.

Leah: Yep.

Teresa: That maybe like you were talking about with those anchors, that coconut milk or that cream could be that anchor so that that doesn't spike your blood sugar.

Leah: Yeah. That's a great idea.

Teresa: If you want to sweeten it up a little bit, maybe don't use as much orange juice. You could use the Ortho Molecular’s. We have this product, it's Reacted Magnesium Powder. It's really sweet. It's got kind of a strawberry flavor to it. Which is really good. Big tasty add-on. Just keep in mind that drinking an adrenal cocktail is probably not going to be the thing that fixes your burnout or your overwhelm.

That's going to come from removing or reducing those big stressors in your life. And you know, maybe that adrenal cocktail in combination with a relaxing, you know, routine or something could be really helpful. Yeah, and I think that also like just to point out too, is that if you're having, you know, some trouble with adrenals in your cortisol response, this takes a little bit.

This is not something that you just have an adrenal cocktail and you're feeling better. It's probably going to take several months. Maybe even a year in order to, to really, I mean, it doesn't take that long. You'll feel better. It's on a continuum. But it takes a little bit like this is something that your body has to sort of correct.

Leah: Yeah. Yeah. But well, and just like, I mean, we remind our clients too, and this could be weight loss, this could be gut stuff, anything like that. Like you probably didn't get into the situation overnight or in a week. It's like this has been brewing under the surface probably for years, maybe even decades. So yeah, it's going to just take some time to like peel the layers back a little bit and really kind of like start to rewire some of the pathways, like you were saying.

Teresa: Yes. Mm-hmm.

Leah: Yes. Right. So yeah, adrenal cocktails, maybe it's something that could be helpful to incorporate, but it's not going to replace good food in balance, stable blood sugars, getting outside, getting some sun on your skin, sleeping well, leaning on your community when the going gets tough.

So, but it was just something fun again, like I've seen on my social media. So I was like, yeah, this ties in really nicely. Like, let's, let's chat about this for a minute, but I hope this show really has given the listeners out there, given you some hope that even if you're riding a stress rollercoaster right now, there are some very tangible things in your control that you can do starting today to help reduce the burden on your brain and on your adrenals.

And if you're feeling stuck or you just need someone to help you set a clear path forward, get connected with us at Nutritional Weight & Wellness. We have a lot of helpful resources on our website, which is weightandwellness.com.

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Teresa: Our goal at Nutritional Weight & Wellness is to provide each and every person with practical real life solutions for everyday health through eating real food. It's a simple yet powerful message. Eating real food is life changing. Thank you for listening and make it a great day.