Stress: The Third Big Reason Why You Are Fatter Than a Hunter Gatherer (Nutrition For Health and Hypertrophy Part 21)

In the previous part of this series, we talked about the second big reason for the question posed in part 17:

If it’s not carbs, not sugar, not fats, not red meat, not plants, not animals, why are we dying from diabetes, hypertension, and heart attacks and hunter gatherers aren’t? What are we doing wrong?

The first part of the answer was that the food we eat is highly palatable, far more than anything our hunter gatherer ancestors ever had access to.

The second part of the answer is that the food we eat is cheap and convenient. It requires very little effort for us to acquire, prepare, and consume it. No hunter gatherer ever had such ease and convenience.

In this part, I’m going to give you the third big reason why humans in industrialized societies are fatter than their hunter gatherer counterparts: Stress.

Stress

Humans in industrialized societies are surrounded by stressors.

People:

• Wake up to an alarm
• Get ready for your work/school (I personally hated waking up to go to school)
• Commute in traffic (especially rush hour traffic)
• Sit indoors all day with little freedom of movement
• Deal with (sometimes hostile) managers, clients, bosses, teachers, students, juniors, etc.
• Deal with frequent deadlines, exams, etc.
• Compete with each other over everything (e.g. who makes more money, who is better at xyz, etc.)
• Deal with paying rent, debt, etc.
• See outrage on news channels, social media, etc. all day
• Live through light and noise pollution
• etc.

Basically people are chronically stressed out at some level or another.

Much of this is psychological, and an increasingly large number of people deal with panic attacks (which is basically stress triggering their fight or flight response).

Humans in hunter gatherer societies have lower levels of chronic stress.

Hunter gatherers:

• “work” less hours
• don’t spend much of their time in restrictive indoor environments
• are more connected to nature
• and spend a lot more time with their family/tribe (humans in industrial societies are increasingly lonely)
• live rent free and debt free
• don’t have deadlines
• etc.

Now, I’m not going to claim that hunter gatherers had zero chronic stress.

A sick child, or an injured family member, bad weather, or anything of that sort stresses them out just like it stresses us out.

However, it is reasonable to say that their chronic stress levels are far lower than ours.

Stress and Appetite

Too much chronic stress is bad for you for a variety of reasons, but I’m only going to stick to how it causes people to gain fat. This is a series on nutrition, and stress is not a nutrition topic (only ancillary related), so I will keep it simple and non-technical.

For most people, stress causes their appetite for highly palatable foods to go up. It does not seem to cause appetite for less palatable foods to go up too much.

When you are stressed out, you will want to eat highly palatable foods that provide a sense of emotional satisfaction (what is now called “comfort foods”) to feel better.

If you have a stressful day, you will want to eat pizza, or a burger, or ice cream, or chocolate, or cheesy greasy pasta, or anything else that is highly palatable and gives you some emotional uplift.

There is a lot of variability here though, and some people get a very strong appetite boost under stress, while others actually get reduced appetite.

Many people tend to lose their appetite and don’t want to eat anything at all when they are under very high stress. It all depends on your individual genetics, the type of stress, and the amount of stress (not going to get into it all because it’s outside the scope of this series).

But for most people, higher chronic stress means a higher appetite for highly palatable foods.

Given that most people in industrialized societies have chronic stress, and are surrounded by highly palatable comfort foods, stress becomes a contributing factor to why they are overweight.

In fact, for a lot of people, this becomes a cycle. They start using food as a mechanism to cope with stress, and then the body learns to react with hunger every time they feel stressed (it becomes a cue for cravings). Their waistline increases as time goes by.

It should be noted that the stress that gets you is “uncontrollable stress”. This is things like traffic, your boss yelling at you, working late to meet deadlines, etc.

Controllable stress (e.g. working hard at the gym) does not seem to trigger stress eating nearly as much. Probably because when you can control the stress, it does not trigger the fight or flight threat response system as much.

Stress eating causes more visceral fat gain.

When you gain fat under conditions of high stress, more of the fat that is stored gets stored as visceral fat (abdominal fat around your organs).

Excess visceral fat is far more dangerous to your health than excess subcutaneous fat (fat under your skin). It is more inflammatory, is associated with insulin resistance, and is strongly linked to fatty liver.

No one knows for sure why stress biases fat storage towards the abdomen (the mechanism is not fully understood although there are theories), but we can see that it happens.

The emotional comfort factor of comfort foods is in large part from the TASTE, not primarily from other food rewards (calories, nutrition, etc.).

The thing that makes you feel better when you eat a comfort food when you are stressed is primarily the taste.

This has been demonstrated by studies that measure stress reduction when rats are fed:

• a sugar drink (has calories)
• an artificially sweetened drink (saccharin, no calories)
• sugar put directly into their stomach through a tube (all the rewards of sugar, minus the taste)

They found that both the sugar drink and the zero calorie artificially sweetened drink both produce similar stress dampening responses, while the sugar put directly in the rat’s stomach is “without effect”.

So the primary factor that makes you feel better when you eat a highly palatable comfort food is taste, not the caloric or other rewards. (Although I will say that this is a study on rats and not people, and may not perfectly transfer over to people.)

The researchers also found that sexual activity also helps relieve stress (they needed research for this? Dorks).

Practical Recommendations

1) Become financially independent.

From my experience, a large amount of stress comes from financial factors.

Having to work a job you hate because you need money, stressed about paying rent, your child’s school fees, etc.

I don’t think I’ve been very stressed out after I hit financial independence.

If you want to be financially independent, online business is king.

I can promise you that your stress levels will PLUMMET once you’re making $30-50k a month from the internet.

You do what you want, say what you want, wear what you want, don’t have to commute, don’t have a boss you must beg to for securing a few leaves because you want to travel, etc.

2) Minimize chronic stress.

Figure out what stresses you out a lot and try to fix these factors.

For example, if you can’t sleep well because you have a lot of money invested in risk assets (equities, crypto, etc.) and are worried about them losing value, it means that you have too much money at risk and need to restructure your portfolio.

Maybe sell some of the equities or crypto and put it into something safer like bonds or fixed deposits or gold.

3) Use better ways to cope with stress

When you are stressed, use other healthier ways to make yourself feel better than just eating.

• Talk to your friends/family (too much loneliness is poison for the soul)
• Get a workout in – do some cardio or lift some weights.
• Go for a walk. GET A SWEAT GOING.
• Have some sex

4) Use low calorie sweeteners, salt and lemon water, etc. instead of comfort foods.

If you’re craving comfort foods, try using a zero or low calorie food that has the same flavor first. You might not need to eat the comfort food once you do.

For example, if you’re craving chocolate, try having some berries or a zero calorie drink first. The sweet flavor will make you feel better and make the cravings far more controllable.

If you’re craving something salty (like potato chips), try drinking some salt and lemon water. Give your tongue the flavor without giving your body the calories.

You can save yourself HUNDREDS of calories when you are stressed out if you substitute the highly palatable comfort foods with low calorie substitutes that have the same taste profile.

That’s all for this piece.

In the next part of the series, I’ll cover the fourth biggest reason why you are fatter than a hunter gatherer.

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