The one thing that undoes your healthiest habits

When it comes to maintaining a healthy community of bacteria in your gut, you probably think that following a nutritious diet is the number one thing you need to do…

And eating right does indeed make your gut a welcoming place for beneficial bacteria. But there’s another surprising habit that may be equally important to maintaining a healthy microbiome…

Keeping your stress level in check.

In fact, research from Brigham Young University suggests that stress is just as bad for your gut as gorging on junk food daily.

So if you’re letting stress get the best of you, forget spending money on healthy foods like salmon, quinoa, kale and kefir. You might as well just break out the donuts, chips and soda now and go on a junk food binge.

I know that sounds extreme. But scientists think a high stress level is really that bad for your gut health…

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Your gut says stress sucks

In their study, Brigham Young University researchers found that stress seriously messes with the microbiome of female mice.

These researchers took eight-week-old mice and fed half of them the mouse equivalent of a junk food diet for 16 weeks. After 16 weeks, all mice were exposed to a mild stress level for 18 days.

Now, researchers took DNA samples from the mice’s poop before and after the 18 days of stress to see what impact (if any) a heightened stress level had on gut health. And here’s what they found…

When female mice ate a normal, healthy diet but were exposed to mild stress, their gut microbiota changed… and not in a good way. It ended up looking the same as mice who were eating the junk food diet.

Male mice were more resilient to stress. They didn’t experience negative changes in their gut. But researchers said their microbiota was very different from female mice from the get-go… before the experiment even started.

That opens a whole other conversation about the difference between men’s and women’s microbiomes. But let’s just say stress, in general, is taxing on your health — man or woman, mouse or human.

“Stress can be harmful in a lot of ways, but this research is novel in that it ties stress to female-specific changes in the gut microbiota,” said BYU professor of microbiology and molecular biology Laura Bridgewater. “We sometimes think of stress as a purely psychological phenomenon, but it causes distinct physical changes.”

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Putting a stop to stress

Do you know what’s scary to think about? When you’re stressed, you often resort to eating junk food to feel better, which means you’re hammering away at your gut health in two ways — through stress and a poor diet.

So how do you stop this gut-damaging cycle? Well, it’s easy enough to make an effort to eat better. But your stress level can feel like it’s out of your control. After all, there are a lot of stressors in your life that aren’t going away overnight.

That’s why you need to set aside time to de-stress daily. Some scientifically-backed ways to do that include:

• Exercising more. Exercise is a powerful stress reliever.
• Trying natural stress-relieving vitamins and herbs like B vitamins, holy basil and ashwagandha.
• Meditating. It’s one of the best ways to fight stress and illness.
• Trying yoga and Tai chi. These mind-body therapies can undo stress-related DNA damage.
• Using stress-relieving essential oils like orange oil.
• Also, consider nootropics to age better and stress less.

Sources:

1. Study shows stress could be just as unhealthy as junk food — MedicalXpress. Retrieved October 19, 2017.
2. C. Bridgewater, et al. Gender-based differences in host behavior and gut microbiota composition in response to high fat diet and stress in a mouse model — Scientific Reports, 2017.