Thanks for tuning in to listen. My name is Madison Diamond Bachelor science student at Brock University studying Medical Science with a minor and outdoor recreation today. I want to talk about eating stress in the relationship between mindfulness and our eating habits. This is important to understand the public health reasons due to the increase in reported stress and obesity rates in North America. So let's talk about the purpose of eating. So since beginning of time for humans, we have used eating as a social activity. We use it away to gather communities. We use it as a way to express culture to express passion to talk about the day to debrief to distress all these wonderful things that brings people together in community. So we know that but we also know that we eat so just to survive. So we need the nutrient qualities of our food. So this brings us to the two different types of eating we have health-related eating an unhealthy related eating. So your health related to eating is related to the quality of the food relating to the nutrient substances that it provides the body, but we have on health related eating which would be the social aspects of eating. So this would be the culture the community the passion that we express to eating. This on health related to eating is mostly related to the intrinsic qualities in the intrinsic motivators for eating. So this would be the sensory experiences the continent of the nutritional value of the food compared to the extrinsic motivators, which would be the price who made it and where it's from So stress is an area. I want to give some background information on before we go into discussing stress eating and how mindfulness can mediate that stress eating response so stress. It can be described as an external stimulus to the body and it can be either emotional or physiological. This is important to understand is these responses lead to biological alterations of adaptive processes. So the Adaptive processes to regulate homeostasis within the body so stress causes a spike or release inserted hormones. Therefore causing different responses of the body. If you constantly have chronic stress you will have a dysregulation in Processes which leads to keep it affects in the body and therefore has further effects on how we physiologically perform. So stress is mediated by many different responses within the body to regulate homeostasis. The one that we're going to focus on is the one between the brain and the kidneys known as the HPA axis. So this one is the one that releases cortisol in the body. So cortisol is a steroid hormone that is responsible for hypertension glucose intolerance and atherosclerosis and monks many other things. The acute response or the short-term response of cortisol in the body is to work with adrenaline to initiate your fight or flight response. This response will redirect blood flow away from non-essential organs for this response. Meaning that it will redirect blood flow away from your digestive tract. This will suppress your appetite as you're working towards getting yourself out of that situation with the increased amount of blood flow to your heart your brain in your skeletal muscles. The stress stimuli response is very interesting when it comes to cortisol. So your stress stimuli will occur and that at the same time it will stimulate this pathway that we discussed the HPA axis because the pathway is going from the brain down to the kidneys. It does take time, but there will be a spike in cortisol levels to in. of distress stimuli However, even though this is a dramatic increase in cortisol. The cortisol levels do not fall rapidly. It takes a while for the body to come back down to homeostatic levels with cortisol. This means if you are under chronic stress and you have constant stress stimuli your body is never going to be able to reach homeostatic levels of cortisol. It will constantly accumulate cortisol levels increasing your basil or your base amount of cortisol within the body. This is important to understand when it comes to the idea of chronic stress chronic stress in the increased cumulative effects of cortisol within the body leads to amplify responses each time. There is a stress stimulant. Because chronic stress causes Amplified responses due to the high cortisol levels. Your body is going to want food for fuel. This means that your body is going to Crave high-fat high-sugar Foods because cortisol works by metabolizing fat in increasing the amount of insulin to metabolize the sugars within the body. This is important to understand when were choosing foods during stress because your body is going to Crave palatable foods, which happen to be high fat high sugar because of this you're going to tend to overeat It can lead to obesity on the long-term if you're under chronic stress. How does overeating relate to obesity in the long term when we're thinking about chronic stress? Basically when you are stressed there's an increased activation in your brain reward centers. So when you're exposing yourself to the high sugar high fat foods that your cortisol levels are demanding when you're under chronic stress your body's going to associate that as a reward and then Therefore your dopamine will increase in the reward centers, which override the homeostatic measures so Your body associating the high sugar high fat foods is reward. You're in you're constantly increasing your exposure to these high sugar high fat foods. This will become a stimulus for behavior on its own leading to an addictive behavior pathway this addictive behavior pathway can lead to the over consumption of foods that are high in sugar and high fat which can lead to obesity in the long term. This brings us to the connection of how you can overeat leading to obesity based on your chronic stress levels alone So we just briefly reviewed the physiological effects of stress on the body within this we talked about why we stress eat and why we typically crave high sugar high fat foods. Now we're going to jump into mindfulness and how mindfulness can help reduce our stress eating specifically relating to these high sugar high fat foods that are dense in calories. Mindfulness has been studied for many years as a way to reduce stress and it has been found that mindfulness and meditation forms could help reduce stress. When we're thinking about mindfulness in this context of the situation, we are thinking about mindfulness as a way to reduce stress eating through the way of reducing cortisol levels in the body bringing them back down to a homeostatic level that is manageable for the body to respond to research studies published in 2013 and 2014. Both discovered that mindfulness training and mindfulness eating practices reduce the amount of binge eating and emotional eating and the related symptoms. This is backed up by a research study published in 2018 that focus on two different meditation techniques one focusing on body relaxation and the other on body awareness. They found that the body awareness meditation technique reduce perceived stress nearly six points with the average of 17.7 before meditation down to an eleven point nine. These perceived stress scores only had a range of 5.7 and 5.0 respectively. As discussed here the research shows that mindfulness training can reduce the amount of perceived stress in the body, but also can reduce binge eating. There's a connection there on the physiological level that could be related to the cortisol levels within the body as you of reducing the amount of perceived stress specifically in the case of chronic stress, you could be reducing the amount of cortisol levels within the body bringing it back down to a homeostatic level. This is important to understand when we're talking about binge eating or the compulsion to eat high sugar high fat food. By incorporating mindfulness into your everyday habits specifically your eating habits. You could see a reduction in the amount of stress eating or your changes in behaviors towards stress mindfulness is not just an important tool for weight management during stressful situations. It's important tool for long-term Health as decreasing. Your amount of cortisol levels is important for managing hypertension development of atherosclerosis and development of glucose intolerance. The goal of this podcast for for you to understand and take away that stress is important in everyday life as short-term and long-term effects on the body and your health and wellness. By incorporating little things such as mindful eating our mindfulness techniques in general. You can help decrease the amount of stress on your body and therefore decrease the adverse effects that come with increased stress and chronic stress. All resources used for this podcast will be listed in the description box. Thank you for listening and happy eating.
A short podcast about stress, it's relation to eating, and how mindfulness can be useful in mediation of stress-related eating and over-consumption. Developed for a project in relation to studies at Brock University (RECL 3P04, Fall 2019). References    Chao, A. M., Jastreboff, A. M., White, M. A., Grilo, C. M., & Sinha, R. (2017). Stress, cortisol, and other appetite-related hormones: Prospective prediction of 6-month changes in food cravings and weight. Obesity (Silver Spring, Md. ), 25(4), 713–720. doi:10.1002/oby.21790 (Timestamp: Physiology, 2:40)  Groesz, L.M., McCoy, S., Carl, J., Saslow, L., Stewart, J., Adler, N., Laraia, B., Epel, E. (2012). What is eating you? Stress and the drive to eat. Appetite, 58(2), 717-721. doi:10.1016/j.appet.2011.11.028 (Timestamp: Intro, 0:20)  Hebebrand, J., Albayrak, Ö., Adan, R., Antel, J., Dieguez, C., de Jong, J., Leng, G., Menzies, J., Mercer, J.G., Murphy, M., van der Plasse, G., & Dickson, S.L. (2014). “Eating addiction”, rather than “food addiction”, better captures addictive-like eating behavior. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 47, 295-306. doi:10.1016/j.neubiorev.2014.08.016 (Timestamp: Stress and Obesity)  Herman, J. P., McKlveen, J. M., Ghosal, S., Kopp, B., Wulsin, A., Makinson, R., … Myers, B. (2016). Regulation of the Hypothalamic-Pituitary-Adrenocortical Stress Response. Comprehensive Physiology, 6(2), 603–621. doi:10.1002/cphy.c150015 (Timestamp: Physiology, 3:30)   Katterman, S.N., Kleinman, B.M., Hood, M.M., Nackers, L.M., & Corsica, J.A. (2014). Mindfulness meditation as an intervention for binge eating, emotional eating, and weight loss: A systematic review. Eating Behaviours, 15(2), 197-204. doi:10.1016/j.eatbeh.2014.01.005 (Timestamp: Mindfulness Research, 7:00)   Kristeller, J., Wolever, R.Q., & Sheets, V. (2014) Mindfullness-Based Eating Awareness Training (MB-EAT) for Binge Eating: A Randomized Clinical Trial. Mindfulness, 5(3), 282-297. doi: 10.1007/s12671-012-0179-1 (Timestamp: Mindfulness Research, 7:00)   Mai, R., & Hoffmann, S. (2012). Taste lovers versus nutrition fact seekers: How health consciousness and self-efficacy determine the way consumers choose food products. Journal of Consumer Behaviour, 11, 316-328. doi:10.1002/cb.1390 (Timestamp: Eating, 1:00)   Sevinc, G., Hölzel, B. K., Hashmi, J., Greenberg, J., McCallister, A., Treadway, M., … Lazar, S. W. (2018). Common and Dissociable Neural Activity After Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction and Relaxation Response Programs. Psychosomatic medicine, 80(5), 439–451. doi:10.1097/PSY.0000000000000590 (Timestamp: Mindfulness Research, 7:15)   Stephens, M. A., & Wand, G. (2012). Stress and the HPA axis: role of glucocorticoids in alcohol dependence. Alcohol research : current reviews, 34(4), 468–483. (Timestamp: Physiology, 3:00)   Volkow, N. D., Wang, G. , Tomasi, D. & Baler, R. D. (2013), Overlaps between drug and food addiction. Obes Rev, 14: 2-18. doi:10.1111/j.1467-789X.2012.01031.x (Timestamp: Stress and Obesity)   Wharton, C., & Vaughan, L. (2010). Healthy Dining: Eating for Pleasure, Leisure, and Wellness. In L. Payne, B. Ainsworth, & G. Godbey (Eds. ), Leisure, Health, and Wellness: Making the Connections (pp. 395-403). Stress and eating behaviors. Minerva endocrinologica, 38(3), 255–267 (Timestamp: Stress, 1:50) 