15/03/2024
🌸WHY ARE WE ALL SO ANXIOUS🌸
Viewing anxiety through a clinical nutrition lens can look like the following. Can you relate to any of these?
Clinical and pre-clinical research demonstrates that:
🌸Hormones greatly impact our mood whether we like it or not. Anxiety is something we come to expect is a part of going through perimenopause & menopause. But is it?
🌸Those with depression have compositional and functional changes in gut microbiota. This is basically an imbalance in gut bacteria & 'gut bugs' that lack diversity & populations (dysbiosis). How does dysbiosis contribute to depression?
🌸Anxiety is a huge driver of IBS (a collection of symptoms remember, not a disease within itself). We get anxious about our IBS, which may make our IBS worse.
Anxiety & digestive dysfunction can be a vicious cycle. Being anxious about how your gut will react to trigger foods (whether identified yet or not), eating out and not being in control or aware of the ingredients, being anxious about toilet urgency or toilet locations when travelling or in social situations... leads to needing to use the toilet (usually diarrhoea).
Other factors:
🌸We take medications which impact our gut health
🌸We take stimulants like caffeine to 'give us energy'
🌸We drink alcohol, substances and smoke which impacts our gut and our mental health
🌸We live in a world where we are increasingly dealing with stress. Stress that we're not really 'dealing with'
🌸We eat processed food because we are 'too tired and stressed'
🌸We eat sugar which activate the rewards centre of our brain (our mesolimbic dopamine system). Sugar makes us feel good, albeit temporarily
🌸Then we feel bad for all the eating, drinking and our substance use/abuse
If you find all of this interesting, follow along as we switch gears at Luminous Nutrition and look deeper into how food can support or hinder our mental health.
Why am I addressing this topic? Because almost every single client I see, has experienced negative mental health outcomes at some point.
