Episode 22: How Stress Affects Your Gut And Autoimmune Disease




The Ancestral RDs Podcast show

Summary: Thanks for joining us for episode 22 of The Ancestral RD podcast! If you want to keep up with our podcasts, subscribe in iTunes and never miss an episode! We’re continuing on with the adrenal fatigue theme this week, and today we'll talk about two very common health concerns that we see in our patients and how they relate to stress: Digestive disorders and autoimmune disease. Kelsey and Laura wrote pretty in depth blogs about these topics that we’ve linked to in the show notes, and today we want to go over these issues for our podcast listeners. Remember, if you'd like to submit a question for our podcast, or suggest a guest that we should host, CLICK HERE. Here's what Laura and Kelsey will be discussing in this episode: How stress can cause digestive problems like leaky gut or IBS How stress fuels inflammation and lowers immune activity How stress causes imbalanced gut flora How stress affects your risk of autoimmune disease The 5 most important steps to managing your stress Links Discussed: Does Stress Cause Digestive Problems? Could Stress Be Causing Your Autoimmune Disease To Get Worse? Sign Up For The Adrenal Fatigue Email List - Get a free 28 page eBook when you join the list! TRANSCRIPT: Laura: Hi everyone. Welcome to episode 22 of The Ancestral RDs podcast. I’m Laura and over there is Kelsey. Kelsey: Hi everybody. Laura: We’re continuing on with the adrenal fatigue theme this week. Today we’re going to be talking about two very common health concerns that we see in our patients in how they relate to stress. These common conditions are digestive disorders and autoimmune disease. Kelsey and I wrote pretty in-depth blogs about these topics that we’ll link to in the show notes, but today we want to go over these issues for our podcast listeners. We’re going to start by talking about stress and gut health, which I think a lot of people intuitively understand that stress affects the gut especially just because of the connection to IBS. Kelsey: Mm hmm. Laura: But Kelsey is going to go into super deep detail about how stress really actually affects the gut. Kelsey: Alright, cool. I think you hit the nail on the head with that, Laura. We all kind of know inherently that stress…first of all just stress in general is not good for any part of the body but especially for digestive health. I think a lot of people with IBS or any other digestive disorder tend to kind of hear from their doctors the line that it’s all in your head or you just have to relax, which can be really frustrating to hear. Obviously if you are suffering from physiological symptoms that feel very, very real to you and someone just tells you It’s all in your head, it’s like well come on, that’s not very nice. I think we tend to kind of push the stress aspect to the wayside because of that a little bit. It’s sort of a defense that someone brings that up, we just say yeah right, it feels so real, I can’t even imagine how stress would be causing these incredibly uncomfortable symptoms that I’m experiencing, so I kind of think your wrong. What I want to remind people before we jump into this in depth is that there really is an aspect of digestive health that relates to stress that you really need to pay attention to. I hope that after I go through some of these different ways that stress affects the digestive system, that you will understand the real physiological impact that the stress response has on the digestive tract so you’ll be more able to justify implementing some of the strategies that we’ll talk about later to reduce stress in order to help yourself heal or feel better with the digestive issues that you are experiencing. To start off, let’s talk a little bit about intestinal permeability. That’s one of those words that you probably have heard before but maybe you’ve heard it more referred to as leaky gut. I’m not going to go much into really what that means.