6 Foods that Lower Cortisol

Dr. Berg’s Healthy Keto and Intermittent Fasting Podcast

Dr. Eric Berg

Health & Fitness

4.6 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 22 November 2023

⏱️ 9 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

I’ve done a lot of videos on cortisol, especially as it relates to the adrenal body type or adrenal glands. But I haven’t done a video on the foods that lower cortisol. That’s what we’re going to talk about today.

Of course, there are a lot of benefits to reducing cortisol, but we’re not going to get into that today. Instead, I want to cover the foods that can help you lower cortisol naturally.

Cortisol adapts the body to a stress state. It's important to note that the body doesn’t know the difference between mental stress and physical stress.

A high level of sugar in your blood affects cortisol and adrenaline. In other words, consuming sugar, refined carbs, and starches keeps you in stress mode.

On the flip side, the Healthy Keto® diet and intermittent fasting help lower cortisol and promote a sense of calm.

The best foods to lower cortisol and stress:

1. Egg yolks

2. Organ meats

3. Nutritional yeast or sunflower seeds

4. Dark leafy green vegetables

5. Salmon and other fatty fish

6. Probiotics and fermented foods (sauerkraut, kefir, pickles, kimchi)

DATA:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/arti...

https://link.springer.com/article/10....

Transcript

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0:00.0	Now I've done a lot of videos on cortisol, especially as it relates to the adrenal body type or the
0:05.8	adrenal gland, but I haven't done any videos on how to lure it with foods.
0:11.0	So that's the topic of today.
0:12.2	I'm not going to get into the benefits of
0:13.6	lowering cortisol because you probably already know that. You wouldn't be here if you
0:16.5	didn't know about cortisol. But cortisol is the main stress hormone. There's another
0:20.9	hormone like compound called adrenaline. It's not a true hormone, it's a
0:24.9	neurotransmitter, and both adrenaline and cortisol work together. And so if you ever look at the
0:30.1	adrenal gland, you have an inside and outside. The inside releases adrenaline and the outside
0:36.1	releases cortisol. And both of those compounds have crossover functions, but in summary they
0:42.2	adapt the body to a stress state. Now the thing you need
0:45.7	to know is that the body does not know the difference between mental stress and physical
0:52.0	stress. It reacts with these hormones and all the
0:55.8	adaptations that occur with it for all stresses but mental stress and physical
0:59.8	stress are not necessarily differentiated. So nowadays we're not being chased by a tiger trying to get our food, we are hit with a lot of chronic
1:09.7	mental stress, which creates the same effect on these two hormones.
1:14.7	And yes, you can do a blood test or a saliva test for cortisol, which is quite extensive
1:21.1	because you would have to test it every four hours so you're basically
1:24.3	getting up in the middle of night and you're putting your saliva in this little tube and
1:28.0	then you have to send it out to the lab there is a much better way of
1:31.0	indirectly getting an idea of where your cortisol is at, using something
1:36.0	called heart rate variability which measures the autonomic nervous system.
	...

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