Raena Morgan: Hi, I’m Raena Morgan with iHealthTube. We’re here today talking with
James LaValle, he wrote this book called, Cracking the Metabolic Code
and we’d like to discuss some of the issues that this book addresses. For
example, how about stress—how stress affects us metabolically.
Jim LaValle: Well, I have to tell you, I really believe that stress is probably the most
important or second most important thing that’s affecting all of us. When
you look at the statistics—life is 44% more stressful than it was 20 years
ago and what people don’t understand is that stress has a real physiologic
affect on you chemistry.
Raena Morgan: It does?
Jim LaValle: Absolutely. What happens is, your brain actually works [to] both heat up
in the day and cool off at night. So this whole piece of stress is important
to realize that, your brain kind of heats up during the day and it’s supposed
to cool off at night.
Raena Morgan: Oh really? Okay.
Jim LaValle: So you get active during the day, you’re supposed to be alert; you
supposed to function all day long. But then when nighttime comes a
switch is supposed to go off and you’re supposed to go to sleep.
Raena Morgan: Okay.
Jim LaValle: The problem is when you get under chronic stress, you start to make too
many excitatory compounds and so the heat goes up too high in the day
and you can’t cool it down at night. And what that begins to do, you start
to alter your sleep pattern—very common issue for a lot of people today is
they get altered sleep patterns. Now what that leads to is significant
because now, all of a sudden, I changed the way my hormones are
signaling in my body.
Raena Morgan: So then you’re excited all the time. We see commercials on television that
tell us that there’s sleep aids out there that we can take that will prevent
this from happening—we’ll get a good night’s sleep. But you’re
approaching it from a much more natural point of view.
Jim LaValle: Well, what we do at our clinic is we try to get people to understand that if
you’re having trouble sleeping at night, it’s probably because your brain is
too excited during the day and you’re not dealing with the stresses of the
day. Some of the key signs of that [are] midday fatigue, inability to
concentrate… your short term memory is starting to go on you and you
can’t seem to figure out why. Carbohydrate craving, especially in the
evening, that’s a big one. I mean so that’s important. Then, at night you go
to sleep and you wake up at two a.m…. and “I’m, my god, I’m actually
alert and I can’t get back to sleep” or your mind is going like a rolodex
and when you go to lay down at night… you can’t even get to sleep. So
there are these deep-rooted problems that start to occur from that. Your
stress hormones start to overwhelm your chemistry, so that leads to things
like high blood pressure, which everybody’s has heard about, how stress
leads to high blood pressure. But one of the delicate things, your immune
system starts to shift.
Raena Morgan: Oh really?
Jim LaValle: Absolutely—and one of the interesting things that I’m doing research on
right now is the fact that stress hormones actually feed cancer cells. So
there’s a direct correlation—that if you’re under a lot of stress that—you
always hear that stress causes cancer, right? Well, when you’re under
stress, the stress hormones that are released excessively in your body – the
norephrine and epinephrine everybody talks about –
Raena Morgan: Right.
Jim LaValle: That stuff can actually find the tumor sites and receptor sites and it
stimulates those tumors to grow. So it’s really important for people to
understand this, this concept of “I have to get my stress under control.”
Raena Morgan: Okay. Well, thank you Mr. LaValle for being with us. I hope that you will
come back and talk with us some more about some other issues.
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