Blood Sugar, Hormones & Chronic Stress

PART TWO: Blood sugar, adrenals and hormones.

Chronic Stress response degrades the endocrine (hormonal) system. When I was in the Nutritional Therapy Practitioner program, I became aware of something that I never hear from other practitioners or naturopaths when talking about hormone balance:

“any attempt to normalize hormonal imbalances is futile until blood sugar and adrenal issues are addressed” -Nutritional Therapy Association

Why are we not educated more about our blood sugar regulation, digestion and chronic stress when it comes to the discussion of hormone balance as well as menopause?

When we live life as a race, we are putting our body under constant stress then if we add a high glycemic, refined sugar food plan then we are adding another source of stress. Our stress response team, HPA Axis (hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal axis), are designed to “run from a lion” then recovery and reset. Instead we are “running from a lion” from the time we wake up until we hit the pillow at night. We are to have occasional life-threatening emergencies- not constantly. The constant activation of our emergency response system team (EMS = HPA Axis), throws us in to our “fight or flight” nervous system (Sympathetic Nervous System) so frequently that we end up being “stuck” in the “fight or flight” mode.

How does this impact our blood sugar and hormones?

Well our intelligent body responds to the threat by raising the blood sugar levels, so we can sprint away in the life or death situation at hand. This glucose emergency leads us to high blood sugar levels that become chronic as well from the chronic stress which leads to constant need to lower blood sugar (pancreas) by releasing insulin (fat storing hormone). This constant demand on the liver pancreas to lower blood glucose levels and then we add insulin resistance to our list of health challenges to solve. Our fasting blood sugar levels should be around 70-90 mg/dl but even if you are eating a low-carb, high-fat keto type of food plan… you may discover your fasting blood sugar levels are a little higher than expected! How is your level of stress each day?

Elevated stress hormone cortisol, as a response from the chief EMS team- Hypothalamus (interprets the threat or emergency) relays the emergency message to the pituitary gland who then tells the adrenals to release the main stress hormone cortisol. As I wrote about in my book LIFE IS NOT A RACE, too little of anything leads to deficiencies, and too much of anything leads to toxicity. Too much cortisol, leads to exhausting the source but the body places priority on the EMS- to deal with the threat so it is smart enough to find alternate back-up resources to make more cortisol to keep up with the demand of the chronic stress. We discover that the hormone pregnenolone is being taken away from its normal job and being converted into more cortisol. This “stealing” of other hormones to continue responded to chronic stressors leads to a hormonal cascade of events – and our imbalances we may feel and see on lab results.

Basically, I am trying to spread the fact that the body is not designed to continuously respond to stress (stressor becomes chronic) or else we experience prolonged activation of the adrenals via the HPA Axis communication team to respond to stress (“EMS”). Our chronic stress will be one or the root cause of hormone imbalances. As Nutritional Therapy Practitioners, we believe that we are bio individuals and we have our own innate intelligence to find homeostasis. Our challenge is to bring the “Train back on the right track” when we go of course… the body sometimes needs to reset and reboot to reconnect with it’s innate intelligence when homeostasis is impeded (due to chronic stress for most of us!). We have our negative feedback loop to adjust our hormones – as we need to increase or decrease the level just as a thermostat in our house.

Remember- stressors are an accumulation of stressors or red flags which are from external sources as well as internal (learn more about our beaker of stress is past blog posts)! We need to stop chasing symptoms and find the root cause for the endocrine imbalances. Our hormonal system is similar to an orchestra -and we have many players involved to keep the music playing perfect. The body systems are interconnected- once one area is over activated then there will be dysfunction in the body systems and not just one area. Who is the conductor? The hypothalamus oversees and directs the hormonal “orchestra” so make sure your HPA Axis system is working at optimal level. Sometimes we just need to reboot the system with the right nutrients your body needs to reset and re-establish homeostasis on its own while trusting the innate intelligence of our body!