HH346: Stress Can Increase Your Risk Of Diabetes

Welcome back to another episode of health hacks as I continue talking about stress and how it impacts our health and longevity, and I'm into the fourth week of this topic, the fourth and final week. So if you haven't seen the previous episodes, please do go back and check out this series, which started at episode number 445 and we are now up to episode number 454 and today I want to talk to you about the fact that stress hormones can cause insulin resistance, increasing your risk of type two diabetes. And I see this in lab results all the time. I have this really wonderful lab which shows me all four sex hormones, all four cortisol markers through the day, all four thyroid markers, both fasted and 90 day, insulin markers and vitamin D. And the body is all interconnected, and so having all of this information in one place is really important, because we can see how cortisol is impacting our ability to sleep well at night. From that lab, we can see how our cortisol levels are impacting our hormonal balance, and therefore symptoms that we are having. We know that when our hormones get out of balance, our sex hormones, particularly for women, estrogen and progesterone, that then starts to slow our thyroid and impact our thyroid health, and it will also impact our insulin markers and put us at risk of type two diabetes. And nobody wants that. And so what can you do about it? Well, in each episode, I've been giving you a tip of a way that you can be choosing to lower your stress, because there's many ways that we can do that, and not every way works for every person. However, one way that can be very beneficial that people may not even think about is lowering our caffeine and sugar intake. Reducing the consumption of stimulants will actually lower our levels of stress and anxiety. And sugar is highly inflammatory. It puts stress on the body, and we get hopped up. I've seen that in my own kids. Some people are very sensitive to sugar, and it can get us all hopped up, and then we crash. And caffeine can have the same effect on us, and it causes that roller coaster ride, which is very similar to the roller coaster ride that we have with insulin. And so when we reduce those from our diet, it starts to reduce those roller coaster rides in our body, calm our heart rate, calm our levels of anxiety, and therefore lower our risk of negative side effects of things like the increasing the risk of type two diabetes. So how much sugar are you ingesting every day? How much caffeine are you surviving on every day? Are you going to caffeine for energy and for survival, because you're feeling exhausted, and if you are, that could also be a clue that perhaps you're deficient in your minerals. And when we adjust your mineral levels and bring your body up to being sufficient rather than deficient, you have the energy that you need, and you don't need to be surviving on caffeine and sugar to get you through the day, something to think about.