In this short health talk, Dr. Dave reviews a study involving 60 women who ate both a high‑saturated‑fat meal and a low‑fat meal on separate occasions. Participants reported their perceived stress levels for the 24 hours preceding each meal. The results showed that while the high‑fat meal did increase inflammation, stress levels before eating were an even stronger predictor of post‑meal inflammation, even after a low‑fat meal. Dr. Dave emphasizes that chronic stress, not just diet, can be a major driver of health problems. He offers practical, low‑effort stress‑management techniques—such as meditation, yoga, regular physical activity, and pausing to choose a thoughtful response rather than a knee‑jerk reaction. He encourages viewers to rate situations on a scale of 8‑10 to guide better responses, and invites anyone seeking help to contact him via his Facebook page or website.
Chapters
Hey everyone, it's Dr. Dave. Hopefully you're all doing well, creating those great experiences out there every day. You know, I just read an article about stress, and stress is one of the things that's a top leading contributor to many of the health problems in North America. But it's always the biggest barrier to people having that best experience every day. There's always something that comes up, a challenge, a barrier, a problem if you will. And in this study that I read, there were 60 women. And they were eating two different kinds of meals as part of this test. During one part of the test, they were eating a high fat, high saturated fat diet, and on the second part of the test, they ate a low fat diet. And the rest of the food that was in there nutritionally was similar. They tried to keep it the same. And then they also monitored by way of questionnaire the individual stress level over the previous 24 hours before eating that specific meal. And what they found is interestingly, uh, the high-fat diet created a lot of inflammation in the body because we know that saturated fats, bad fats, are not healthy and also a leading contributor to a lot of the health problems in North America. But the interesting thing is that when they had the low-fat diet, that the stress before either of the meals was a bigger indicator of whether or not they had inflammation in their body after eating either of those meals. So the people who had high level of perceived stress the 24 hours before eating the low-fat meal still had a lot of inflammation in their body. So stress is a natural part of our lives, but it's meant to be short-term. Try to find ways for you that are effective to help not avoid stress, although that's always a good thing as well, but to learn mechanisms by which to respond differently to things that happen in your life. I don't have time in this short video to go through some of those solutions, but things like meditation and yoga, being physically active can really help with that stress. In the moment, knowing how to, uh, take time to not just do a knee-jerk reaction to a situation, but taking a few seconds to choose a response that's focused more on the outcome that you want for that situation. Try to create a 10, a 9, or an 8 out of 10 for every situation that you're in. And again, there's ways to try and do that.— and it takes work is what it is, and it takes effort and a little bit of studying and a little bit of learning, but it's worth it because the research shows that that level of stress is probably the biggest indicator of the quality of our lives as we move forward down the road. So, you know, creating experiences every day I think is very valuable because at the end of the day those are the only things that we have left, they're the only things that we can take with us, and we don't want stress getting in the way, so we want to learn how to deal with it especially when it comes to our health so that we can preserve it and improve it and be around for a long time with some good quality. Okay? So don't let stress get you down. If you have any questions, get a hold of me through our Facebook page, through the website. Learn how your nervous system can be on your side to help you deal with some of the challenges you face every day when it comes to stress, and we'd be happy to help you out. All right? Thanks for listening. I'll catch you next time.
