Welcome back to the Bite Me Nutrition podcast, where

we make food work for you, not against you.

My name is Jono. I'm a dietitian.

And today I'm going to be talking about adrenal fatigue.

This is a concept I've heard in lots and

lots of different places in current clients, past clients.

I definitely get lots of things sent to

me on social media talking about adrenal fatigue.

And essentially it's a claim that says your

adrenals, which we'll go through in a moment,

can fatigue, particularly after periods of chronic stress,

basically, I guess, being overused.

And your adrenal glands are extremely important.

So if they did fatigue and they were overused, then

this would be very problematic, which is also, I think,

why adrenal fatigue is something that pops up a lot.

So just to orientate you a little bit, your

adrenal glands sit on top of your kidneys.

They're these little glands that make

a heap of different hormones.

I guess the main ones we're going to be

interested in, and usually the ones that the claims

are made the most about is your adrenal glands

role in the production of cortisol and adrenaline.

These are two hormones very closely

linked to time of stress.

They're not necessarily like any hormone.

They're neutral.

They're not good or bad.

Like every hormone, we want them in

the right amounts at the right time.

We want them to go up when we need

them to go up, and we need them to

come down when we want them to come down.

Now, if we are dealing with chronic stress,

low grade inflammation, a lot of these other

things, we might find that our baseline levels

of cortisol and our baseline levels of adrenaline

are higher chronically than we would like.

That's almost a separate issue.

But basically what the concept has come from is if

your adrenal glands are pumping out these hormones all the

time, then what can happen is they get overused.

They get overworked, and they stop being able

to make these hormones, which would be extremely

problematic, especially for things like energy levels.

Fairly quick podcast for you today.

There is no evidence to suggest

that your adrenals do fatigue.

Unfortunately, all of the claims, or fortunately, depending on

which way you want to look at it, all

of the claims that they make about your adrenal

glands use a broad array of tests.

There's no actual one that uses the gold standard

of tests, which we'll talk about in a second.

It's just a lot of well, I want

to say narrative or misrepresenting certain hormonal tests.

So that gold standard test, which we, like I

said, don't really see all that often in the

literature when people are talking about adrenal fatigue, is

kind of similar to an oral glucose tolerance test.

And that is where you're given something synthetic, something

external, and then we measure your hormonal response to

that external trigger and we basically see does your

response line up with what we'd expect. So for example.

In an oral glucose tolerance test.

You take a very high sugar solution and we

measure your insulin's response and basically the severity.

The duration.

The shape of that curve.

All of those things tell us a lot

about your insulin sensitivity similar to that in

the world of adrenal gland testing.

One thing you can look at doing is you

get given a synthetic adrenal corticotrophic hormone mouthful.

That's a hormone that your body

does create to trigger cortisol release.

So we kind of give you, not me, someone

who knows more about what they're doing, gives you

a dose of synthetic adrenal corticotrophic hormone and basically

we measure your cortisol response to that and line

it up with is it what we'd expect or

is there some differences going on there?

Now, again, like I said, because unfortunately,

none of the studies that talk about

adrenal fatigue really use this test.

They use a bunch of other tests or

kind of a combination of tests and markers

to paint a bit more of a picture.

Again, there's no evidence at all to

suggest that your adrenals can fatigue.

However, it's very important that we don't use that as

a hand wave away of the very real symptoms.

And this is absolutely why something like adrenal fatigue

as a concept is very, very appealing, because the

symptoms are real, the fatigue is real, the inability

to get going all of the time, all of

that fatigue feels kind of insurmountable.

And of course, if someone comes along

and says, hey, it's your adrenals, they're

fatigued, I've got a supplement for you.

I completely understand why you would jump

at the opportunity to fix that.

My issue is not with the person who

has jumped at the opportunity, it's the person,

it's with the person who is presenting that

unevidenced based opportunity to begin with.

It's hard to then go back and say,

actually your symptoms are definitely because of this.

And again, that's why testing and treatment

of adrenal fatigue is appealing, because people

are offering a very simple solution.

But the reality is, unfortunately for things like

chronic fatigue, and I don't necessarily mean like

chronic fatigue syndrome, I mean just always feeling

flat, always feeling like you have low energy.

It could be a lack of quality sleep, it

could be chronic stress, it could be poor diet,

maybe how much you're eating, either too much or

not enough, or the quality of that diet.

Do you have a nutrient deficiency?

Are you over exercising?

Are you under exercising?

Are there other underlying medical conditions?

There are so many potential reasons

you could be feeling this fatigue.

And so it's frustrating because I wish that,

I do wish adrenal fatigue was real and

that we could treat it with a supplement.

That would be incredible.

It would be so easy instead of having

to unpack all of the lifestyle and dietary

things that could be having an impact.

But unfortunately, we're not here to

take the easy way out, right?

We're here to take the right way.

And it's not via treating something called adrenal

fatigue, which in actual fact does not exist.

If you don't believe me, I've put a

couple of references in the show notes.

I always do.

This isn't just my opinion.

An opinion is cauliflower, is gross evidence.

Fact is, adrenal fatigue is not real.

Finally, it is very important to note adrenal

fatigue is very, very different to adrenal insufficiency.

Adrenal insufficiency is a very real medical condition.

It's very serious.

Trust me, you and all of your medical team that you would

have to be working with would know if you had it.

Often when I talk about adrenaline of

fatigue, someone likes to come along and

go, what about adrenal insufficiency?

You know, that's not real anyway.

Internet's wild place.

But adrenaline insufficiency, very real.

Probably shouldn't be getting information

about that from a podcast.

Should be talking to your specialist.

Adrenal fatigue, definitely get information about that

from a podcast, specifically this podcast.

And that is to say, not a real thing.

Hopefully that has been helpful and

you've either learned something or you've

had your confirmation bias confirmed.

Or maybe I've saved you some money on some supplements.

Either way, if that's happened, you're welcome.

You could show your appreciation by sharing this

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a friend, just shoot him a message and

go, hey, I heard you talking about this.

I think this might be interesting.

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And if you can like it on whatever

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Otherwise, I'll catch you next time.

Bye.