Why We Crave Junk Food When We're Stressed and What to Do About It

Welcome to the MindBodySpace podcast, where you can boost your resilience just by listening. To help us help you, please subscribe to this podcast and sign up for the newsletter at mindbodyspace.com/podcastnewsletter. There is now solid evidence that stress can affect our biology down to the cellular level, affecting our health, performance, and happiness. In these complex times, it's so important that we educate ourselves on useful versus toxic stress, so that we can live our best lives. Hi, I'm Dr. Juna Bobby MD, a lifestyle medicine specialist and fellowship-trained radiologist who's seen many preventable diseases from the inside out. My passion is sharing science-backed antidotes to toxic mental and physical stress so that you can focus on what's most important to you. Hi there. I want to talk to you today about choosing healthy foods when we're stressed out. Around 2,400 years ago, Greek physician Hippocrates said, "Let food be thy medicine, and let thy medicine be food." Or did he? Yale physician Dr. Newland states in his Recapturing the Art of Medicine, quote, "We don't know much about Hippocrates, but we know that his writings, approximately 70 books that comprise the Hippocratic Corpus, were not actually written by him, but by many people over a period of several centuries," end quote. Regardless, Hippocrates, an ancient Greek physician, as well as his followers, students, and colleagues, were the first documented to believe that sickness was actually due to biological forces and not because a person was morally bad. And they were right about food. We now know that the most prevalent modern chronic diseases like heart disease, diabetes, and cancer, even inflammatory diseases of the autoimmune system, and even acne, There is indisputable evidence that all of these common maladies can be prevented, mitigated, or reversed with healthy lifestyle choices. Hippocrates believed that diet and lifestyle were essential for good health, and he warned us against the dangers of overdoing it. It sounds so simple, yet we know it's 100% difficult to choose healthy foods, especially when we're stressed out. Why? Because our lifestyles have us reaching for the easy, available, on-demand sweets and salty processed foods. Otherwise known as comfort foods. When we're time poor, we reach for pre-made foods, and that's why they call them convenience foods. The truth is we have to make an extra effort to overcome our instincts to reach for those unhealthy, convenient, easy processed options that tempt us at every turn. Hippocrates and his contemporaries would be shocked by the amount of processed foods that we have available to us today. So much of the food that we eat today is high in sugar, fat, salt, and it's low in nutrients. In recent years, scientists have learned a lot about how junk food affects our brain too. They found that sugary sweet foods release dopamine. It's a neurotransmitter that's associated with pleasure and even cravings and addiction. Food scientists have also learned how to make junk food even more addictive and hyperpalatable, meaning that it tastes so good to our palate. They use a variety of techniques like adding sugar and fat and salt, even the texture of just the right crunch to make the food taste almost irresistible. Because these are lab-made foods, they have a uniform taste. And so we also know what we're getting every single time. This makes it even harder to resist because let's face it, the downside of whole foods, for example, fruits and vegetables, they can vary in taste because it depends on a variety of factors, including the season, the ripeness of the fruit or the variety of the vegetables and the way they're prepared. This makes fruits and vegetables more interesting to eat, but it can also be upsetting when we go in for a bite of what we think will be a sweet nectarine only to find that it's off-season and tasteless. So junk food has a uniformity and our brains know exactly what we're getting, and that's another reason why it can be so difficult to resist. So choosing healthy foods can feel like a losing battle, especially when we're stressed out and our emotions are out of balance, because when we're stressed we tend to reach for foods that are more processed, sugary, and salty. Why? Because with the toxic, chronic, long-lasting kind of stress—think about being late for work or getting a flat tire or feeling kind of time poor and overwhelmed every day with to-do lists—this kind of chronic everyday stress can cause elevated levels of the hormone cortisol. You might have heard about cortisol by now. It's the fight or flight hormone that's increased when we're stressed. Increases our appetite and it influences us to eat more. Researchers also believe that insulin and the appetite-increasing hormone ghrelin, also known as the hunger hormone, may be involved in chronic stress situations as well, making us crave fatty and sugary foods. And this is the reason we often think of baked goods and pizza and things like that as comfort foods, because these high fatty and sugary foods actually seem to tone down our stressed-out emotions. Of course, with chronic stress comes sleep issues as well, and then without proper sleep, we have low energy. Some of us will even exercise less. So all of this adds to lower energy levels. Lack of sleep and exercise then spirals us down even further, and we lose even more control over our emotions. This is why stress management is one of the 6 pillars of lifestyle medicine. Getting calm and having the tools to manage our minds and emotions is key to healthy eating. As long as processed foods are the norm, many of us need to make conscious decisions and create strong, healthy habits that can overcome the cravings for junk food. So what do we do? We need to train our nervous system on a daily basis. So try taking one deep, conscious breath at least once an hour throughout your day. You can add a calming phrase like, "May I be well," as you take that slow breath. This is called a mini relaxation response, and these actually add up. And over time, you'll have more access to your parasympathetic nervous system, also called the rest and digest system, which is completely opposite of your stress response. So doing these little minis throughout the day, just taking that deep breath and noticing it and saying something calm to yourself, that can help you balance your nervous system. And eventually it will allow us to access the more rational top-down brain, the prefrontal cortex, where we have the ability to make wiser executive decisions about what's more healthy for us. Training our nervous system in this way is a lifelong practice. So start making it a habit with just one breath at a time. It's really that simple, but at the same time, it can be challenging. You can also check out some of the relaxation response meditations on this podcast. Go to mindbodyspace.com/relaxationroadmap and you can download a roadmap of my best 30 relaxation episodes so that you can start to retrain your nervous system. Quote, they did not believe that sickness occurred because the person had been morally corrupt in some way. They proposed for the very first time, at least in the Western concept, that disease was a natural phenomenon that had to do with forces of nature. End quote. So remember, the next time your unhealthy habits rear their ugly head to deal with the stressors of everyday life, it's not a morally corrupt thing. It's just a habit. And the only way to deal with a bad habit is to replace it with a good habit. And you can start right now. Take that long, deep breath right now as we sign off. And let me know how it goes for you. Go to mindbodyspace.com/podcast and fill out the contact form. Thank you so much for listening. Forward this to a friend, a family member, anyone who needs to stress less, and soon enough you'll be surrounded by more zen people. Your support is literally what makes this possible. Subscribe and head on over to YouTube to my Fall Asleep Easy channel. Sign up for your updates at mindbodyspace.com and get special tips into your inbox once a month. Until next time, this is Dr. Juna Bobby MD wishing you wellness.