Stress & Hypercholesterolemia - 006

SPEAKER A The following program presents principles designed to promote good health and is not intended to take the place of personalized, professional care. The opinions and ideas expressed are those of the speakers. Viewers are encouraged to draw their own conclusions about the information presented. SPEAKER B Welcome to healthy living. I'm your host, Margot Marshall. Can stress cause high cholesterol? Can what's going on in our mind really affect our body? You might be surprised by the answer. SPEAKER C Healthy Living is a 13 part production of three Abn Australia television focusing on the health of the whole person, body, mind, and spirit. You'll learn natural lifestyle principles with practical health solutions for overall good health. SPEAKER B Joining me in the studio is Jenifer Skues, a health psychologist, and Dr. John Clark. Welcome, Jenifer. Welcome, John. Nice to have you with us. And we're going to be having a talk today that I'd like you to start off with there, John. SPEAKER C Well, I want to tell you about a lady who illustrates our high cholesterol and high stress scenario. I was at a set of meetings, and there were many presenters in different rooms, and I met this lady at lunchtime, and she said, Dr. Clark, can I talk to you about my cholesterol? I said, sure, let's talk about your cholesterol. She says, I have high cholesterol, and I've been doing everything I can to get it down, and I have not been successful. She says, I've been exercising. Oh, that's a good thing. She says, I've been eating a vegan diet. In other words, a plant based diet. Well, that's a good thing. She says, I've been getting extra fiber like oat bran. Well, that's a good thing. She was on the right track, but she says, I cannot get my cholesterol down. So I was a bit puzzled. Okay, you're eating a lot of good things here, and this is working well for you, but it's not bringing your cholesterol down. And so I started asking questions. I said, well, knowing that there was many meetings going on, have you come to any of my meetings? She says, Well, I would have liked to have, but I wasn't able to because I was interested in these other meetings over here where one of the presenters is talking about stress. I said, well, that's interesting. I did notice his name on the board and his topics. I bet it's interesting. She says, yes, it is. I said, how's it going for you? She says, well, it's going well, and it was going well until he asked us to take out a piece of paper and a pen. And then he says, start writing about your most troubled relationship. She said, at that point, my mind went immediately to my ex husband, and all I could do is cry. SPEAKER B Okay, big clue going on there. So this is right on our topic today about stress causing high cholesterol. Jenny, this is your specialty. It is. SPEAKER A I do a lot of what we call stress management because everyone I see has high stress levels, whether it be because of their disorder or because of things that have happened. And specializing with people with trauma, a lot of them have very high stress and there are actually three stages of stress. And this was identified by a gentleman by the name of Han Sewell back in the he observed and put it into these three stages which still stands today with people who are working with stress. It gives us a really good view. Your first stage is called the alarm stage. And what happens in the alarm stage is that you can be doing something quite casually and something happens and it triggers the alarm response. For example, driving down the road and a car shoots out and nearly hits you. Well if we didn't have the alarm response we would be going here comes a car and I'm going to die. Literally. So that gives us the ability within nanoseconds to put the foot on the brake, stop the car. But in that process you have an incredible surge of adrenaline and cortisol which overloads the system. And that's fine for short term, but when it's long term it becomes a problem. But the interesting thing is in nature they've actually observed this in animals because we have what's called the fight flight response and that's what the alarm reaction is. It sets up that fight flight and that's what the adrenaline and cortisol is to fight off the stress or whatever it is or to be able to run from it. So an animal, when it's being chased by a predator in nature and say the predator catches up, maybe it's the deer and the lion. And what will happen is that deer can do a drop and it's unconscious, it's like it's dead, it's in a state of total unconsciousness. Sometimes that predator will think it'll come back later or it's already dead and we'll leave it alone. And they found that animal come out of that state and they do heavy breathing, shaking, trembling and then they get off and they shake themselves. And what they've done is reset their fight flight mechanism which is a very interesting phenomena because that means they're now ready to fight or flight again. And they found that if the person doesn't do that or sorry, if the animal doesn't do that, what will happen is that animal will be ready to picked off, it can no longer fight or flight. So that means the next predator that comes along it will be easy prey. Now they've noticed this, that's that alarm response, they've noticed this with humans. But the problem is what we do is we don't discharge that moment, not like the animal did. So we don't do things that help us to release that trauma and then we can't effectively fight or flight. And they call it the freeze mode. So we actually go into freeze where that adrenaline response is and that moment in time is frozen in the brain, in the body and every cell of the body. Now, when we maintain that, we go into stage two, which is resistance, and that means we're resisting the stress and we're stuck in it. And it's like in a work environment, it's a good example where we can't get out of it and we've got to put up with the irritable boss or the bully or whatever. And that means we are constantly in that mode from when we go home, come back to work, and that is high stress. And that means the body is running on adrenaline and Cortisol. And as we know, and you would know, that that causes a lot of inflammation in the brain, toxicity. And it would be at this point that this person you were talking about would have started to have cholesterol problems because stress on that level changes the way the body and the physiology is working. Now, the third stage is if we continue with that, what happens is we go into burnout and exhaustion and the adrenals can become so exhausted that can no longer do their function. The person will die. So there are people, I see who the doctor is giving Cortisol to because the stress has been so prolonged and so dynamic that they are in that stage, the adrenals can no longer function. SPEAKER B And so when the adrenals actually stop functioning, you die. SPEAKER A You die. You cannot survive without adrenal function. SPEAKER B Wow. Yeah. SPEAKER A So it's a bit of an eye opener for all those who are really stressed. SPEAKER B My eyes just open very wide. I didn't realize that it was basically a vital organ then. I never knew that it is. SPEAKER A We don't realize that. And there are people out there who have actually succumbed to that or are being treated for adrenal failure. But the good news is the body can do a lot of repair work, but you've got to get out of that stress zone for the body to correct itself because we have what's called a homeostasis environment and that means the body has been created to balance itself. So we have mechanisms that will help change that. For example, if we're cold, the liver will produce heat by shaking the body to pick up again. So we have all these mechanisms, the blood sugars, insulin to correct the blood sugar level. You see, that's interesting. Yeah. The body is an amazing it is. SPEAKER B It absolutely. John, I think you had another story we'd like to hear. Could you share that with us now? SPEAKER C Yeah, and I'd like to get into the second story, but before we do that, we might just mention the mechanism here. I'm glad we've mentioned the Cortisol. As the Cortisol goes up, it makes your blood sugar go up. SPEAKER A Okay. SPEAKER C And when your blood sugar goes up, your insulin wants to push it down. So the insulin levels go up. But it's insulin that is making your cholesterol go high? SPEAKER A Yeah. SPEAKER C So for this particular individual who's experiencing lots of stress, and I'm assuming she's ongoing at the second or maybe third stage that you're mentioning there, she's going to have her high cholesterol until she can well, how is she going to shake herself and snort and get the stress off? I'm sort of interested in this. SPEAKER A Well, the problem is, with stress, it doesn't matter whether it's real or imagined. And one of the things you said, it wasn't until she sat down and started writing that the stress factor kicked in again. Now, she's been sitting with that grief or that tearfulness or that stress of whatever happened with her husband. That is like the time bomb waiting to go off. And if it's imagined stress, it does as much damage and it triggers the same response as real stress. So it doesn't matter whether we imagine it or it's actually happening. And this is where trauma comes into it. She would have been carrying the trauma because when we keep going over an event that was real and stressful, we keep reigniting the stressors. And that means we're constantly doing that process and we keep going through it. There's an interesting comment. Mark Twain had some wonderful sayings and he said, I've been through some terrible things in my life and some of them actually happened. Then that's what we do. SPEAKER B We go, don't we? SPEAKER A Yes. SPEAKER B We constantly relive or worry about things that might happen. Might happen that might, and maybe they will, and often they don't. SPEAKER A So we can do it for future events that we fear and are stressful, as well as go over old events. That means we're not here in the present. SPEAKER B Heard a saying once that said, worry is the interest paid on travel before it's due. SPEAKER A That's right. That's what we do. SPEAKER B And we do. SPEAKER A We have all these problems and it's physiology. SPEAKER C And so that brings us to our second story here. And I worked with a lady for a while in my teaching across the United States, where she would do a cooking school, and she had high cholesterol. Now, this lady was living what she taught. She made the food. It was good food, food that would not be likely to raise cholesterol, but her cholesterol was quite high. And then as we got to know her, we discovered something in her life that was very traumatic. She had a son. The son had gotten involved with the wrong group. He had gone south to another country. In another country. He'd gotten involved in drugs. The drug ring had figured out that maybe he was leaking information. They thought he was, quote, unquote, a narc, a person telling on them. And so they killed him. They literally threw him off a multi story building. Well, yeah. How traumatic. And she found out about this. And of course, you can't get any kind of justice in some of these other countries, and it just wore on her the lack of justice. No rhyme or reason to this. And they'd done it to her son. In fact, the villains were actually from America, came back and she saw them and they sort of taunted her that they'd done this. And so she was very angry at these murders and this anger welled up in her and she kept writing it and this was the source of her stress. But then a couple of years later, she got into understanding the value of forgiveness. Went to some seminars on what forgiveness is, how to forgive others and how to be forgiven. And once she had gone through this and she actually went through the process of forgiving these villains, regardless of whether they deserved it or not, then her cholesterol came back down to normal. SPEAKER A Well, she was working on that stage one, stage two, going into stage three. So she stopped resisting the stressors and getting stressed about it and did an action that helped her to heal and she went back to off that alarm response, which is where we meant to be until we need it. SPEAKER B That's really interesting. Jenny. John, have you got some thoughts on that? SPEAKER C So what I'm seeing here is that she had a high cholesterol due to that whole sequence of events where stress raises cortisol. Cortisol raises your blood sugar, blood sugar raises your insulin and then insulin drives up the cholesterol. And then when she came to forgiveness, the cortisol went down, therefore the blood sugars came down, therefore the insulin went down and therefore her cholesterol came down. And so the whole system is affected then by stress. And so the most important thing for her, at least for her own survival, was forgiveness. SPEAKER A Well, it's her perception and she changed her perception. She changed her perception from anger and pain to forgiving. Then it's going to relieve the stress problem. SPEAKER C But how? If she doesn't have all this anger and fear and pain and so forth, who's going to get back at these guys? SPEAKER A She must have had to forgive them. And it is commonly seen where I've seen people who are in court have actually forgiven the person who murdered their daughter, for example. And of course, everyone finds that hard to comprehend. How can you do that? But that's where she had faith. And this comes back to our spiritual dynamic because faith helps a lot of healing. It helps to get you off of those alarm reactions to find a healing pathway. SPEAKER B And certainly the benefit was to her as well as to these young people. It's interesting, isn't very and I appreciated those pathways that you explained, John, and you might not hurt to say it one more time. The pathway where what's going on in our mind is actually significantly affecting what's going on in our body. And there was that pathway that started out with the stress stress and then. SPEAKER C The stress raises the cortisol, which is that stress hormone that Jenny mentioned, and the cortisol makes your blood sugar go up. People who take that as a drug called prednisone will find their blood sugars go up, and so the blood sugar goes up. And then the response to high blood sugar is insulin. And then when you get the insulin going up, it raises your cholesterol. And so it's a big sequence of events, but the end result is you can know if you're having a high cholesterol all the time and nothing else seems to be bringing it down. You might be suffering from the effects of emotional stress. And these days you think of all the stressors. I mean, everything from electronic things we carry and communication age, to the rising bills and your rent and then the new laws they put into effect to help control humanity. Everything brings stress to a higher level in this day and age. SPEAKER B Yes, that's interesting. And it's interesting how you brought out the spiritual part. But there's a consensus that people who have a good connection, a good spiritual connection, have better mental and physical health. And this has been borne out in what we've just seen. So there's a spiritual dimension in there that's very, very beneficial to us and. SPEAKER A It puts us back in that stage one off the alarm, because the ultimate is to have the balance. And when we're at peace with ourselves, we have that balance. The moment we get back into the alarm reaction, we actually drive up the adrenaline and the cortisol, which we've heard from the physiology. But it also causes a lot of inflammation in the brain, and it does a lot of other types of damage as well, not just with cholesterol. But the alarm reaction is to protect us, not to live in it. SPEAKER B That's right. SPEAKER A So if we get off that alarm reaction and this is where this lady hadn't done it for years, she'd carried this for years, but in resolving it, she's got a permanent solution to her whole physiology and body. And it's like a self healing mechanism to correct itself. SPEAKER B So we've got a mind body connection, we've got a spiritual body connection. And that all of those elements of our being, the mental, physical, spiritual, social, they're all blended in there and they all affect each other. SPEAKER A Well, I find one of the important things to do to bring your stress levels down is to correct the heart rate. SPEAKER B Oh, yes. SPEAKER A When your heart does overtime, your brain continues to perceive it as that you're under attack, you're under stress and keeps pumping adrenaline, which is against what the heart needs, and the heart then just gets worse. So when you do breathing, where you focus the breathing around the heart area, where the lungs are behind the heart, it actually calms and evens the heartbeat. And that gets the system to get off the alarm response. It actually helps it to calm. SPEAKER B So tell us, just explain that breathing. SPEAKER A That you found that even if just putting your hand over your heart will calm it. And that's from scientific studies. So our body has good mechanisms. You're going to show us what just. SPEAKER B Put the hand right there. It actually feels lovely. SPEAKER A You can feel it, you feel it's a lovely feeling. And then when you breathe into the hand space where the heart is and you focus the breath there and then you slowly breathe out and just slow the heart rate down and even it out, the heart rate, the beat between evens out. So you've got the beat, you've got an even space, even space and that tells the brain that all is well. SPEAKER B You look like a patriotic American there with your legion but it's a beautiful feeling as soon as you touch that there it has some kind of very simple effect and that breathing well. SPEAKER A Simple things work well and that's the best destressor. And when I'm driving down the road and my alarm goes on because someone nearly hits me, that's what I do, okay? I start doing that breathing. I might even rub my chest area, put my hand over that area and. SPEAKER B Keep the other hand on the wheel. SPEAKER A If not, I stay on an alarm reaction and then I'm ready to react overreact to things because I've got too much adrenaline. SPEAKER B And cortisol I talk about overreacting years back now we read in the paper that and this had happened a few doors from us, but we read in the paper where someone killed his friend in the lounge room and it was all over which TV channel to watch, okay? And I'm trying to imagine him in prison for the years thinking was that worth it, was it really worth it? He just overreacted and ended up they got into a brawl and he killed him. SPEAKER A Well, he person would have probably been running on adrenaline most of the time they were in probably the resistance stage and something triggered them and that's where with adrenaline, cortisol, anger, aggression and you react out very dangerous. SPEAKER B You see it on the roads, road rage and things like that too, where people really do overreact to things. SPEAKER A And I suspect for your case with this lady, she'd been reacting to that stress and who knows what else was stressful in her life that would have added into when you met her. And the stress was the problem, not so much the diet and health side of it. So it's really working with both angles because people who aren't stressed do digest a lot better but if they're having all the wrong foods, eventually that can catch up with them. SPEAKER C Yes, this is true. And what's really fascinating is some of the drugs that have been used to help with high blood pressure and high cholesterol actually have a dramatic effect on the brain to suppress it in a way that the brain will no longer be responding to stressors, they're literally dumbing down the patient. But the idea is that they help the blood pressure or help the cholesterol through a neuro mechanism rather than actually affecting the physiology surrounding the blood pressure or cholesterol. SPEAKER B That's not good to hear. It is good to hear, but it's not good that it happens. SPEAKER A Good that we understand it more, because then you can recognise it and do something about it when you feel those physiological responses. SPEAKER B Yes. How much better to use your techniques, Jenny, and to know how quickly does the body respond to that breathing? SPEAKER A Probably two or three breaths in and out. That's how well you felt it when you put your hand over that area, over the heart. But it does not take long. And I find what happens, because the brain is neuroplastic wire, it likes that response. So your brain wants to keep doing it. And I find now that it goes to autopilot, that when I get a bit stressed or I'm reacting, I start doing the breathing. Not because I've thought of it, because my brain has learnt that that works and it wants me to be relaxed, you see? So we don't have to consciously do it all the time. Once we get a mechanism that works, the brain will rapidly learn it and want to do it. We redo the habit, we're changing the habit. SPEAKER C So one of the things we like to do in this program is show how it goes both ways. SPEAKER B Yes. SPEAKER C And it's interesting that in your physiology, if you are on a diet that is inflaming your system, such as our oxidized oils that we have talked about, or fried foods, or foods that are created through rotting fermenting and aging, and the inflammation is going up in your body, it's a physiological stress. And this can make your cholesterol go up. It can also make your stress go up where you're more on tippy edge, ready to react to things that are happening in your environment in ways that you wouldn't otherwise react to them had you been on a calming diet, a more nutritious diet, a diet that helped you. So you had lower inflammation? SPEAKER B Yes. So I see what you mean. It goes both ways. The things we eat can raise the stress, the stress raises the cholesterol and. SPEAKER A Stress causes brain inflammation. When the brain's inflamed, it's going to react. SPEAKER B So we're a whole person, aren't we? SPEAKER A Yeah, total. SPEAKER B All of these things, the mental, physical, spiritual, social, they all work together and if one's working against the other, it sets off this chain reaction. So all of these things are very important. SPEAKER A They are. SPEAKER B Go on. SPEAKER A Jenny and I often work from body to brain, not brain to body, which is most psychologists will work with the brain, but I work start with the body. SPEAKER B I think that's fantastic because you can do it both ways, can't calm the. SPEAKER A Physiology, calm the brain extra benefit, bring inflammation down. So that's what we do. SPEAKER B Yeah. It's good that you have two strings to your bow, so to speak, with using the physical part and the foods and so on. And then you're able to work from the stress part and the mental part and how they both work with each other. SPEAKER A There's a lot of research in this area now, and people can access this just online or in books that will educate them and help them to understand it. Because you understand the brain and the body and the connection, you work a lot smarter. They found in science that when the brain knows how it works, it works smarter. SPEAKER B Sure. SPEAKER A So that's an important point. SPEAKER B Now, we've talked about some of the foods that raise cholesterol as well, because that's probably the focus. It's the cholesterol. We've looked at how stress can so what foods would actually be low in cholesterol or can help to lower cholesterol? We need to be very clear on this because this is what we're building up to. What would be foods that help our cholesterol to be low? SPEAKER C You have to realize why your cholesterol goes high. There's three uses of cholesterol in your body. One is for cell walls. One is also for hormones, and the third one as a digestive agent in your body. The number one way that cholesterol is used is as a digestive agent. And here's the way it works. When you eat food, it has fat in it, but your blood is made out of water. You can't mix fat and water very easily, and so you need an emulsifier, a soap, if you please. Cholesterol is that soap that helps mix water and oil. And so anything you eat that will require more soap. I e fats. It's going to raise your cholesterol. If you think about the hardest fat to wash off a plate at dish time. Dishwashing time. SPEAKER A Do think of that sometimes? Is that what I've put in my body when I used to do things? SPEAKER C Then you've just discovered the thing that will raise your cholesterol the highest. For example, if I had a pad of butter on a plate, and instead of taking a knife and flipping it off into the garbage, I decided I'm going to melt that butter with soap and water. It would take a lot of soap and water to melt that butter. And so any food that's got fat in it, be it cholesterol food or animal shortening or vegetable shortening, is going to take a certain amount of soap to emulsify. That said, when you eat foods that have oils in them that have been extracted, in other words, they went through a phase where they were in a bottle, then you're going to have much higher cholesterol. On the other hand, if you're eating foods that have the oil still packaged as God packaged them with the fiber, then it's going to have a less effect to raise your cholesterol. So in studies where they compare cheese, which is a hard fat, which would take a lot of soap, to vegetable oil. They found if you switched from cheese to vegetable oil, you could drop your cholesterol by about 20%. SPEAKER A Whoa. SPEAKER C But if you switched from cheese to eating nuts like almonds, you could drop your cholesterol by 40%. And so twice as good effect by changing from a hard fat to a fat that occurs naturally in nature. And so we look at nuts, avocados and olives and things like that as good sources of fat because they're packaged as they should be. But bottled oils, for example, if you go and get a bran muffin at your local convenience store, you look at the ingredients, it's got lots of oil. The bran isn't going to counteract that oil, because that oil is not packaged with the brand as it should be, as it would have been in a nut. And you're going to get high cholesterol from that oil being in that product. And so antifats in your diet are going to raise your cholesterol. SPEAKER A That's what amuses me with products. You go and what they do is extract everything from the seed and then they use the refined flour, then they add back gluten. But it was in there the first time. Why do you remove it? SPEAKER B We've altered so many foods. So many foods. I don't remember the figures, but there used to be x amount of foods in the supermarkets, and now there's many, many times that many. And they're not new plants or anything like that. They're just things we've altered and altered and altered and packaged them in just so many ways. And so we've done a disservice, actually, to the foods that we actually eat, if we can almost call some of them foods and they haven't served us very well. But the stress thing that you talked about today has just been amazing, because I don't know whether we really fully appreciate what our thoughts can do to our body. SPEAKER A One thought is enough to sell the whole body, so that mind body connection is very powerful. SPEAKER B Yes. Thank you both so much for what you've had to say today. That's been a really great program. Well, that's all for today. And you can view our programs on demand. If you'd like to see them again by visiting our website 3abnaustralia.org.au, just click on the watch button and you can also download our fact sheets. You might not remember everything we've said, so you can do it that way. And if you have health concern you'd like to discuss with Dr. John Clark or Jenifer, send an email to [email protected] We look forward to having you join us next time on Healthy Living.