Eat your way to a less stressful life

STRESS and fatigue are nothing new. Throughout history, man has searched for ways to reduce the negative effects of both. This has led to the concentration of sugar and stimulants — for example, those found in coffee, tea, tobacco, chocolate and sweets — to give us a boost.

Consumption of these stimulating substances really took off as "worker drugs" during the Industrial Revolution.

However, whereas our ancestors struggled through hard, physically demanding lives, toiling in the fields and worrying about putting enough food on the table, these days many of us suffer as a consequence of our fast-paced but sedentary lifestyles and affluent malnutrition.

There is an abundance of food for westerners to eat, but — because much of it is refined and processed — a paucity of the nutrients we need to function at our best.

As well as consuming fewer wholefoods, we eat far less than our ancestors did because we don’t expend the same energy. As a result, we don’t get the same amounts of essential micronutrients.

According to a review in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, the most practical solution is to supplement the difference. But not many people do, so the result is most of us are sub-optimally nourished, which means our bodies’ cells cannot make energy efficiently. One of the first signs of sub-optimal nutrition is fatigue.

Just one stressful thought can trigger a complex and extensive cascade of biochemical activity throughout your body. This uses up a huge amount of nutrients.

SO, if you are not ingesting an optimal level of nutrition — and frequent stress is contributing to an even bigger deficit — you are likely to function even less effectively.

As a result you will feel more tired, find life’s challenges more stressful and suffer a host of other symptoms, from brain fog to loss of libido.

What do most people do to counteract this? They look for a pick-me-up. Or they just get stressed again, as this triggers the release of yet more stress hormones that deliver a quick burst of energy to keep them going. Ever had an "I’d kill for a cake" moment? Or perhaps you longed for a double espresso, a bar of chocolate or even a piece of toast? Whatever the object of your desire, the urge to get it probably felt overwhelming at the time.

Yet, this is a perfectly normal reaction to low energy, which is often caused by a low level of fuel in your system. For humans, our primary fuel is glucose, commonly known as sugar. We get this from eating carbohydrates. Your digestive system breaks down carbohydrates into single molecules of glucose, which are absorbed into your bloodstream and then transported into cells to make energy.

An ideal scenario is we eat the right amount of slow-releasing carbohydrates to provide a steady flow of glucose to keep our blood sugar stable and supply a ready source of energy for our body and brain.

The problem is that most of us don’t do this: we eat too much refined, fast-releasing carbohydrates and skip meals, resulting in erratic blood sugar levels that peak and trough throughout the day.

During the troughs we crave sweet foods or stimulants, or possibly even manoeuvre ourselves into more stressful situations (waiting until the last minute to hit a deadline or not leaving enough time to catch a train comfortably, for example).

Sweet foods provide sugar directly, while stimulants and stress stimulate the adrenal glands to pump out hormones that also increase blood sugar. Whichever route you take, you initiate the express delivery of energy-giving glucose to your cells.

There is a significant cost to this express delivery, though. It quickly leads to a deficiency in key nutrients and fluctuating blood sugar and energy levels. This is why you may experience a considerable dip in energy and concentration a few hours after taking in sugar or stimulants or finding yourself in a stressful situation.

Clearly, many of us wouldn’t consciously choose to feel stressed, but we can unconsciously set ourselves up for situations that fuel our adrenalin addiction, as this is how we’ve learned to operate.

Sugar and stimulants are also addictive, and not just because they fuel the highs that pick us up from the lows: they can also trigger a release of the body’s own "feel-good" chemicals — opioids and dopamine.

Animals can become addicted to sugar and show all the tell-tale withdrawal symptoms, including the shakes, when deprived of it, according to research conducted by Dr Bartley Hoebel and colleagues at Princeton University.

THIS is because the more you over-stimulate the release of dopamine, the more insensitive to its effects you become.

In a sense, you are becoming "dopamine-resistant" so you crave something to boost your own natural dopamine high — perhaps sugar, alcohol or caffeine. This upsets your blood sugar level, which affects your energy, mood and resilience to stress, as well as your ability to control your weight.

Dr Candace Pert, a former research professor in the Physiology and Biophysics Department at Georgetown University Medical Center in Washington, DC, has said: "I consider sugar to be a drug, a highly purified plant product that can become addictive. Relying on an artificial form of glucose — sugar — to give us a quick pick-me-up is analogous to, if not as dangerous as, shooting heroin."

Dr Pert was one of a group of scientists who discovered the central role endorphins, which activate opioids, play in addiction. There’s certainly plenty of research out there to support her view.

It’s clear that consuming sugar, nicotine or caffeine in colas, energy drinks, coffee, tea and chocolate — along with the stresses of 21st-century life — can seriously mess with your blood sugar. So why do we do it? The answer is millions of us are caught in the vicious cycle of blood sugar highs and lows, and we feel exhausted and stressed much of the time. Stimulants promise instant energy and short-term resilience, but in reality, they make the problem worse.

If we haven’t eaten for two hours, we grab yet another coffee. And when we drag ourselves home after a hard day’s work, we may drink even more just to stay awake, and then some alcohol to help us switch off the adrenalin and get a few hours’ sleep.

By now you probably understand why stress, sugar and stimulants can be so addictive. (You know you’re addicted if you suffer withdrawal effects after 48 hours without any of them.) As well as messing with your energy levels, they can also deplete your health.

Our bodies have a finite capacity to detoxify undesirable substances. Excessive intake of sugar and stimulants, coupled with sub-optimal nutrition, starts to overload the body’s detoxification capacity. Once you’ve exceeded this adaptive capacity, your ability to cope with the otherwise normal stresses of modern living is compromised.

This is the beginning of chronic fatigue, allergies, chemical sensitivity, low tolerance of alcohol and smoke, depression, mood swings and feeling out of control.

The body is now, effectively, in a state of red alert, and with that comes increased risk of inflammatory diseases such as asthma and eczema, joint pain and headaches.

It’s the same with our minds. We have a finite capacity to deal with situations we perceive to be stressful and difficult.

The road to recovery requires some major dietary, lifestyle and mindset changes. As a result of the body’s lack of health reserves, it becomes necessary, for a while, to clean up your act completely.

This means avoiding all stimulants and toxic substances and focusing on consuming only highly nutritious foods, plus high levels of key nutrients by taking specific nutritional supplements.

Once you’ve built up a good health reserve, there’s no need to be quite so saintly all the time. A strong body can cope with the occasional indulgence.

• This is an edited extract of Holford’s new book The Stress Cure, co-authored by Susannah Lawson