Chronic Stress and Its Effect on the Body: Pt. 2

Stress is essentially a disruption to homeostasis in your body — affecting key regulatory methods that your body uses to maintain its inner systems. The key to understanding how stress potentially could affect your gut health is to understand the role of homeostasis in your body, and how an inhibitor or disruptor of it could further damage functions and roles of organs and their interaction with each other.

Homeostasis → the internal mechanisms an organism utilizes to maintain a stable, ready internal environment, not dependent on its external environment

Since stress is a threat to your internal systems, it shows short and long term effects on the functions of the gastrointestinal tract (organs and tissues that relate to the digestion and absorption of food and nutrients). These disruptions occur within the “brain-gut axis”, which can lead to the following conditions in your digestive system:

• IBD → inflammatory bowel disease
  
  
• Alterations in gastrointestinal motility → changes in the movement of food and fluids through the digestive tract, sometimes even leading to obesity
  
  
• Increase in intestinal permeability → lets more particles escape/enter. Undigested food particles, toxins, and bacteria from the intestine are allowed to leak into the bloodstream, contaminating it (a leaky gut)
  
  
  • blood contamination leads to increased inflammatory response
    
    
• Other negative effects on intestinal microbiota, leading to further damaged gut health
  
  

More on the “brain-gut axis” → the communication between the gut and brain that shows how negative emotions/stress has an effect on gut motilityStress and depression/negative emotions can also prompt you to make unhealthy food choices.

 Remember homeostasis? These poor food choices can lead to slower gut metabolism, which in turn also affects homeostasis. So why do you lean in towards unhealthy food when stressed? Disrupted homeostasis can lead to microbiota shifts and other bacterial abnormalities that can trigger new food cravings. Not only does stress make you crave unhealthy food, it also affects how your body processes and digests food and creates energy from it, AKA your metabolic pathways.

 Women with high levels of depression and stress have reported higher levels of cortisol, which directly regulates your metabolism. High cortisol leads to slower metabolism, which can lead to weight gain and trouble digesting and absorbing the right nutrients from the food you eat, also leading to deficiencies.The easiest way to avoid these consequences is to maintain your gut microbiota.

 As you can see, gut microbiota is the leading effector in most of these outcomes, from increased membrane permeability to proper metabolism. The macronutrients you eat directly determine gut microbiota populations and if they have a healthy composition or not.The intersection between stress, food, and your gut requires effective communication across all fields to ensure a healthy system and healthy body.