Stress and intestinal health – linked

Stress is as harmful for your guts as junk food and high fat diets

Stress plays a very important part of our lives; and it is much more harmful than we thought.
As suggested by latest research, gut microbiota behaves in a way that’s very similar to when we load ourselves with junk food.

The damaging effect is more notable in women, as scientists discovered after experiments on female mice. Mela mice, on the other hand, showed no stress response related to the gut flora.

As more than 80 per cent of people in U.S. experience stress, some of them on a daily basis, the research is considered to be important because it underlines the emotional and physical health imbalances it can trigger. Anxiety, depression, and obesity are just a few system responses to poor stress management.

The latest study corroborated data from a large group of male and female mice wich were subjected to stressful situations. The results indicated that stress can have different effects in men and women due to its different impact on intestinal micro-flora.

If applied to humans, the study may suggest that stress causes psychological and physical changes, more in women than in men, which may explain why women are more predisposed to stress when compared to men. The gut microbiota may be the right answer.

Further research will clarify this issue and with that perhaps scientists will get closer to finding more efficient stress management techniques.

The study was conducted by Dr. Laura Bridgewater, at the Brigham Young University in Provo, UT and team, while the findings have been recently published in the Scientific Reports journal.