Stress, Eating, and Weight
We usually think of stress as a "bad" thing, something to be avoided--but is stress actually bad for our health? How does stress affect our eating and our food choices? Why do some of us gain weight when we get stressed, while others lose weight? This week, we talk to Professor Daryl O'Connor of University of Leeds all about stress, food, and our waistlines.
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Guest
Daryl O’Connor is a Professor of Psychology at University of Leeds in the United Kingdom whose research focuses on stress and its effects on personality and health outcomes.
Learn more about Professor O’Connor and his research below!
Academic Profile | Twitter | Blog: Are You Stress Aware?
The Takeaways
3:43 - Stress is a transaction between a person and their environment in which an individual assesses a noxious event as threatening, challenging, or loss provoking and further assess that they do not have the resources to meet those demands.
06:12 - Two systems are activated during a stress response causing the release of the hormones including cortisol, adrenaline, and noradrenaline.
SAM (Sympathetic Adrenal Medulla System) - fight or flight response
HPA Axis - hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis is activated
8:18 - The stress response is normal and keeps us safe and able to act in harmful or dangerous situations. The real harm of stress comes when we are exposed to it repeatedly over time in the form of chronic stress.
8:57 - Allostatic load is the cumulative burden of adaptation to chronic stress on the body which leads to dysregulation of biological systems and difficulty restoring homeostasis.
11:55 - Eustress is “good stress” which is adaptive to help us survive.
Strain is when a person is exposed to high levels of stress overtime leading to maladaptive functioning.
Cortisol Levels Throughout the Day (Graphic)
ACES - Adverse childhood experiences
25:50 - Perseverative Cognition is continuous thinking about negative events in the past or future.
Rumination is repetitive thoughts about past stressful events.
Worry - Repetitive thought about future stressful events.
Reduce your stress by:
Having a ”stress reduction toolkit.”
Scheduling a Worry Session.
Practicing meditation (you can try apps like Calm or Headspace).
Exercising or yoga.
Studies
General Adaptation Syndrome (GAS) Letter (Selye)
Effects of Childhood Trauma on Cortisol Levels in Suicide Attempters and Ideators (O’Connor et al.)
Daily Hassles and Eating Behavior: The Role of Cortisol Reactivity Status (Newman et al)
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Juna Hey, guys, it's Juna. If you're enjoying the podcast, we would really appreciate it if you could leave us a five star rating and a review. It helps us out, but more importantly, it helps other people find the show. Thank you so much. And now to the show. Food, We Need to Talk is funded by a grant from the Ardmore Institute of Health, home of Full Plate Living.
Juna As you guys know, this podcast is ultimately a selfish endeavor on my part.
Eddie Wait, what do you mean? Aren't we doing this podcast to help people?
Juna Well, this is awkward because, yeah, I guess it does kind of help our listeners out, but I basically choose topics that I'm interested in that I need help with myself. You know.
Eddie While this is news to me. I thought we were doing an altruistic thing here.
Juna I think that's why you signed up to be a doctor. And I signed up to host a podcast to make pretty different career paths here. But today I thought it would be nice, and I thought I would choose a topic that would help you out.
Eddie Me? What is it?
Juna Well, I know you've been planning your new teaching conference. Yeah, and you've just seemed a little bit stressed.
Eddie Yeah, it is kind of stressful. We have like over 400 people coming and there's like the speakers and the technology, and it's like putting on a wedding once or twice a year. It is joyous, but it is stressful.
Juna While, as I said, this is the perfect time, we need to talk about stress and also completely irrelevant. Of course, it was very stressful for me to get out this episode on time, so I guess it ended up helping me as well.
Eddie I should have known.
Juna I know. Well, today we are going to talk about stress. Is it actually bad? The answer may surprise you. How does it affect our bodies, our health and our stress eating? Even our genes. My name is Juna Gjata.
Eddie and I'm Dr. Eddie Philips.
Juna And you're listening to Food, We Need To Talk, the only podcast that obviously reduces stress levels just by listening. Okay, guys. First, let's meet today's guest.
Daryl O'Connor My name is Daryl O'Connor. I'm professor of psychology at the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom.
Eddie If there's one thing I love about this podcast, it's how international we are.
Juna I know, right? Here's a fun fact about Professor O'Connor. He actually has a twin who also studies psychology.
Daryl O'Connor This is very true. Yes, I got a twin, an identical twin. And we actually work together as well as separately. But yeah, it's purely by chance. It's absolutely by chance that we both ended up being psychologists.
Eddie In preparation for this episode, I looked up a couple of research articles and even a health psychology book by O'Connor and O'Connor.
Daryl O'Connor Well, in fact, there's quite a few papers which involve both of O'Connor's. Yes. So that's. It's wonderful. Yeah.
Juna The reason I thought this was interesting is because Darryl O'Connor actually became a psychologist, because he's a twin.
Daryl O'Connor Because a lot of psychological research, I'm sure you're aware, a lot of a lot of scientific research involved in twin studies. And that got me excited early in my undergraduate life to kind of switch career and do psychology.
Juna So you guys will notice it. Besides talking about rats in the lab, we often talk about twins in the lab, and that's because they're such a good way to study the influence of genes versus the environment. And we're going to talk about genes again a little later in the episode. But back to our main topic. Let's start by defining what we're talking about. What is stress?
Daryl O'Connor Well, stress, obviously, is a psychological construct which is different for everyone. Okay. So the way I best operationalize stress is this understanding that it's this transaction between an individual and their environment. So you'll only experience stress when you appraise some noxious event in your environment as being either threatening or tempting, challenging or loss provoking.
Eddie Wait a minute. There's a lot of things that stress me out that aren't noxious.
Juna Well, the noxious part doesn't necessarily mean that the event is a bad. It kind of just means that it's slightly beyond you.
Daryl O'Connor You will only experience stress if you believe you can't meet those demands. And that's what's called secondary appraisal. So the idea is that when you encounter for, say, something like an exam or a major talk, you will only experience that as stressful if you appraise it as threatening and that you don't believe you've got the resources to meet those demands. So that's why it's an individual cognitive appraisal, but is different for all of us.
Juna It's not that I feel threatened by coming into the studio to record because Eddie, Morgan and Maggie are very, very nice and I am not being forced to say that because they're right here staring at me, of course. But it's that I, Juna, sometimes perceive that I do not have the resources to rise to the challenge of recording this episode. A.K.A. I keep wasting way too much time on TikTok and not preparing for the upset.
Eddie But look, you pulled it through because. Well, here we are.
Juna I did, guys. It was touch and go for a while, but I did pull through.
Eddie As much as preparing for a podcast episode is definitely a modern day problem. Stress and the stress response is pretty much as ancient as it gets.
Daryl O'Connor For example, if we go back in time, if you were that that cave person on the prairie and you're approached by a wildebeest or a lion or a tiger. You needed to have the resources to see the threat and either stay or flee. Chances are, you'd want to flee a wildebeest, a tiger, a lion, because it will ultimately lead to death. So the body's stress response is such that it evolves where it's there to respond to acutely stressful events.
Juna Okay, so here's my hot take of the episode. I actually think that stress gets a really bad rap.
Eddie What? You just said, how hard it was being stressed to record this episode.
Juna Okay. Yes, but hear me out. What exactly is the stress response?
Daryl O'Connor So basically, whenever we experience stress for two things happen. First of all, we have the sound system, right, which is the sympathetic adrenal medulla system that becomes activated. And that's basically your fight or flight response. That's a basic, you know, split second. You're not aware of it. It just happens. But if the stressor persists or you really appraises something as a stressor, then the second system is activated and it's called the H.P.A. axis, the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis.
Juna And the activation of SAM and the HPA axis. They actually cause the release of hormones like cortisol, adrenaline and noradrenaline.
Daryl O'Connor When the body is flooded with these, it activates lots of different parts of our body, our brain and in different peripheral organs in order to raise the body to respond to the demands. It also leads to the release of things like energy reserves that we have in order for the body to help respond to the stressor.
Juna So when you get stressed, it's kind of like you're temporarily becoming a superhuman. So I would temporarily become super Juna because you got super, super fast and fierce. So you can either fight or you can run away. So your body will put way less energy into things like digestion and reproduction. Because, hello, we don't need those. We're going to fight or run away. Right. And it focuses on things like blood flow and access to energy.
Daryl O'Connor Basically, it upregulates the things that you need to do and it down regulate other aspects. So the whole idea is it focuses on all those key things you need to pump the blood around your body. Your heart needs to do that. We need all those then, you know, adrenaline and noradrenaline and also cortisol. They stimulate all those responses in order for us to raise our game, in order to meet the demands or in our efforts to fast the likely life or death scenario.
Eddie It makes me think of the whole mom lift car off baby story.
Juna Exactly. So you wouldn't want to have no stress response because otherwise you would never become Super Juna and outrun a lion or lift the car off the baby. In other words.
Daryl O'Connor A stress response that's switched on and switches off, switches on itself is completely normal, adaptive, and keeps us alive. But what is important is to draw the distinction with this idea that it's over time. It's excessive exposure to stressors. It's the repeat exposure. It's that, you know, early life, adversity, these sort of things are really damaging over time. Stress is only a problem after repeat exposure over long periods of time. That's why we do care a lot about chronic stress.
Eddie Chronic stress actually places strain on our bodies, something that researchers often call Allostatic load.
Daryl O'Connor Allostatic load is this description of when the stress response system really goes wrong. And this is this idea that after excessive and repeated exposure to chronic stress over time, many of our biological systems will start dysregulating and that dysregulation is likely to be damaging for our health.
Eddie Small historical note.
Juna Yes, the best part of this year. And also I wanna do the honors. Cue the music.
Eddie Maybe the first description of the detrimental physical effects of stress on our help came from this guy, Hans Selye, who was 29 years old when he wrote a landmark paper published as a 600 word letter in the journal Nature in 1936.
Juna An overachiever, guys. 29.
Eddie In the competitive world of academic medicine, Nature is the most prestigious journal and publishing in it has the biggest impact. He launched the field of stress research, Selye reported that when rats experience horrible things like being over exercised or cold exposure or even non-lethal poisons, all of these different stresses, their bodies all responded in the same way with changes to their physiology. Their organs were malfunctioning. They even started to grow tumors. He called it the general adaptation syndrome, and that was the preliminary description of what we call today, the stress response. If the historical music is still playing, I would like to add a local Boston based part of the story. Here's a shout out to Walter Cannon, a Harvard Medical School physiology professor who experimented on mice in a lab nearby at Mass General Hospital and in 1915 characterized the fight or flight response that Professor O'Connor just described.
Juna Amazing guys. He strikes again. The man, the myth, the legend, the historical wonderkid Dr. Eddie Phillips. We'll also link to the G.A.S letter our website. foodweneedtotalk.com where you can also find the show notes for this episode.
Eddie Well, the part that I love about the general adaptation syndrome is that it has the word adaptation in it, because when our stress response is working correctly, that's what's going on. Our bodies are adapting.
Juna Right, so even something like going to the gym, it's a stressor on your body. So lifting weights, running yoga, all of these things are actually breaking down your muscle tissue. And then over the period of weeks or months or years, you get stronger and faster because your body is trying to adapt to the stimulus and make itself better equipped to cope with that stressor in the future. This is called you stress.
Eddie You stress, high stress. We all stress.
Juna Now, that's the limitation of an auditory platform. It's actually eu-stress.
Daryl O'Connor An eu stress. Is that idea of thought adaption a good level of response that we have to stress. So that very basic idea of the stress response, it's adaptive. It's there to protect us. It's there to help us.
Juna Come on, people, let's stop demonizing stress here because it's not necessarily stress that's the problem.
Daryl O'Connor Really. What I think we should be focusing on is strain, right. The idea that exposure to stressors over time leads to strain and strain is where things become maladaptive and problematic.
Eddie Okay, I get it. Stress is not always bad. Maybe this is more just like a wording issue. Strain is what we mean when we say stress. But how exactly does a dysregulated stress response actually lead to the strain?
Juna So glad you asked Eddie, because we now get to talk about a very common evil villain when it comes to human biology, the hormone cortisol.
Eddie Oh. Cortisol, the stress hormone.
Juna So we know cortisol gets pumped out whenever you get stressed. Right. So people think, oh, cortisol is very bad. It means that you're very chronically stressed and it's like not good to have too much of it, but it's actually nowhere near that simple. The first thing you need to know about cortisol is that it follows a very specific daily schedule.
Daryl O'Connor So when we all wake up in the morning, our cortisol levels are the lowest they are for the entire day. And then they shoot to, you know, three, four or five times that waking level and then they should decline over the day.
Juna So my professor in college used to actually call this your hormonal cup of coffee.
Eddie Oh, a new Starbucks product.
Juna Corticcino. I thought we should call it. So when you first wake up in the morning, you get this big spike, it wakes you up and it gets your body ready for the day ahead. And then it goes down throughout the day and we get closer and closer to sleep. At which point it's at its lowest point.
Eddie So people who are chronically stressed, well, they must just have crazy high cortisol levels in the morning, like a venti, quintuple shot espresso instead of just a regular cup of coffee.
Juna Oh, Eddie. Oh, Eddie. You would think so, but that's actually not what researchers found.
Eddie Oh, of course not.
Daryl O'Connor But what we do know is that people exposed to high levels of stress over a long periods of time, that cortisol response in the morning seems to be diminished or what's called blunted.
Juna People who experience chronic levels of stress actually don't get their proper cup of coffee. They don't get their corticcino.
Daryl O'Connor We need this response to activate our brain and activate many biological systems to get ready for the day, for example. So there'll be time whenever high levels of cortisol can be seen as perfectly normal, if you've got a challenging situation, then you should release high levels of cortisol because you need to respond to that challenge. But the problem is that if you have lots of those challenges over time, then it's likely that the body just can't cope with that and the system switches off. Or as I like to describe it in simple terms, the system starts to break.
Eddie So it's not about having no cortisol. It's about having cortisol that is released at the right amount and at the right time.
Juna Right. So it's kind of like the boy who cried wolf. If you're constantly experiencing stressful events, your body is flooded with the signal all the time. It's like stressed stress, stress. And then after years of always getting the stress signal, your body just kind of goes, Nope, I'm not gonna respond any more.
Eddie Okay, well, not to give everyone another cortisol bump, but we need to go on a brief break.
Juna How do you why you got to do the people like that?
Eddie Sorry, guys. It'll be quick.
Eddie Food We Need to Talk is funded by a grant from the Ardmore Institute of Health, the home of Full Plate Living. Full Plate Living helps you add more whole plant based foods to meals you're already eating. These are foods you're already familiar with apples, beans, strawberries and avocados. It's a small step approach that can lead to big health outcomes. Full Plate Living includes weekly recipes and programs for weight loss, meal makeovers and better blood sugar management. Best of all, Full Plate Living is a free service of the Ardmore Institute of Health. Sign up for free at fullplateliving.org.
Eddie And we're back. So far, we've learned that the stress response is really not necessarily a bad thing. It helps us to rise to challenging occasions and adapt to outside circumstances. But when it becomes disregulated, things can get messy.
Juna Now let's talk about the thing that particularly intrigues me about stress, because as I've said, I have to make these episodes for myself in a sense. And we're going to talk about how stress affects our eating.
Eddie Oh, I know where this is going.
Juna Guys. I have a confession to make. Aha. There is no more precarious time for me and food than when I am extremely stressed.
Eddie Oh, no.
Juna Oh, yes. Oh, yes. When I get stressed, I turn into a bottomless pit, particularly for dark chocolate and sweet potatoes.
Eddie Sweet potatoes?
Juna Yeah. Don't even ask. Like I. I am obsessed with sweet potatoes, especially Japanese sweet potatoes. And I love dark chocolate. And I can never, ever feel full when I'm stressed out. And it's something I try to be cognizant of. Like I go into a stressful period, I say, I know this is going to happen and I still like can't stop it from happening.
Eddie Juna It's okay. I do the same thing, but with me, it's fudge icicles or any other kind of ice cream that's readily available.
Juna Yeah. So I always know Eddie is stressed because we'll be on the phone and like he's kind of talking weird and like, why is he talking when he's like, Oh, I'm eating a fudgsicle and like.
Eddie My second one is on.
Juna True. Well, he's on number two. I'm like, Oh, something's going down. Like something is happening. So me and you actually eat more when we're stressed. But there turns out there's actually also a subset of people that eat less when they're stressed.
Eddie Poor fellows.
Juna I know. I just like, can we switch places? But anyways, there's actually been a lot of research on people who eat more when they're stressed, and it turns out it probably has something to do with cortisol.
Daryl O'Connor We've done experiments where we get individuals into the lab and we we expose them to a stressful paradigm and then we measure the cortisol response. You can see these groups of people as a group released more cortisol when they experience stress compared to groups who eat, who release less, and then we follow them over the next week or two and we get them complete diaries before they go to bed. And they you tell us the stressors they've encountered. They tell us what they've eaten between meals. So we know between meals snacking is a real stress sensitive construct. What you find is individuals who release more cortisol in the lab in response to stress are significantly more likely to eat more high fat foods on days when they encounter stressors.
Juna So this explains why there's a dark chocolate shortage at your local Trader Joe's. Every time I, Juna Gjata have a deadline approaching.
Eddie Wait a minute. You're behind that?
Juna Yeah, guys, that was actually me. I'm not going to say where I live just so that no one calls me out when it happens. But that that was definitely me. Now, before we start talking about how to improve our stress response and hopefully leave some of the dark chocolate for other people at the store, there is an important aspect that we haven't talked about yet.
Eddie What's that?
Juna Basically, the way your body reacts to stress is not just up to you and the situations you put yourself in. It can be influenced by your genes. As we talked about at the beginning of the episode and the way your genes are expressed, which depends on what your mom was doing while she was pregnant.
Daryl O'Connor The impact of stress can start happening before you're born. You know, I find that incredible that a mom's parental levels of stress influence, you know, child's levels of cortisol and other indications of exposure to stress in the womb. Well, the best predictors and one of the good predictors of negative outcomes later in life is birth weight. And we know the cortisol mom's cortisol levels, moms exposure to stress and parental strife generally during gestation predicts low birth weight. Low birth weight predicts lots of negative outcomes.
Eddie Even before you're out in the world, you may be predisposed to have a more aggressive stress response just because of the fetal environment. Fascinating.
Juna Even things like early childhood trauma or adversity can actually affect your stress response in profound ways for the rest of your life.
Eddie So in medicine, trauma informed care references an individual's adverse childhood events or ACES. But unlike a card game, being dealt more Aces is much worse for your health and well-being.
Juna Just a quick warning to our listeners. We will be briefly discussing suicide so you can feel free to skip forward a few minutes.
Daryl O'Connor Individuals who have either previously tried to end their lives through suicide or had thought about suicide, these suicide vulnerable individuals. We had a hypothesis which is that it's likely these individuals will have disregulated or damaged stress response systems. If you're thinking of ending your chances are it's been preceded with a period of very difficult and traumatic stress.
Juna So Professor O'Connor brought subject into the lab and expose them to a stress inducing paradigm.
Daryl O'Connor So is a really robust, stressful intervention where you put your hand in cold water, your being videotape while you're counting back from a large number 13s, you're given all those instructions. It's hugely stressful. It activates this HPA axis, and most people have this major response. But individuals with a history of suicide have this flatter response in effect. Some of these interviews nearly flatlined, as it were.
Eddie So the flatlining is not their EKG. I think what he's referring to is that there is no stress response at all. And as much as we talk about reducing stress, not having a stress response at all, that's really a bad thing. It can have profound implications for both your mental and your physical health.
Juna Professor O'Connor then ran another experiment to see if these individuals showed the same daily cortisol schedule that we usually see in healthy individuals.
Daryl O'Connor Is that waking response explained earlier where you should have this big increase when you wake up but 30 minutes and should decline for the rest of the day? Could we see that stress cortisol weight in response? Again, sadly, individuals with a history of suicide vulnerability had a lower jump in stress response in terms of the cortisol they released in the morning.
Juna Again, guys, the corticcino here this morning, cortisol, it's there for a reason. It's pretty much priming your body to get through the day. So not having it, it's not good.
Daryl O'Connor So we thought what might explain that? And this brings me all to early life adversity, particularly childhood trauma. What we showed was individuals who previously attempted suicide, 80% of them had at least one moderate to severe type of trauma in childhood. And I find that statistic extraordinary. That's saying that 80% of people who've attempted suicide, at least any type of trauma could be sexual, could be physical, could be emotional, They've had an extreme exposure to. That's like a perfect correlation.
Eddie What this underscores to me, you know, is how linked are biology is to our experiences. Sometimes I think we have a tendency to try to separate our physical state from our emotional state. But mental health, emotional health, physical health, they are all interwoven.
Juna It's true, guys. And I think a lot of these results can be upsetting, especially if you think that you have experienced a lot of adverse childhood difficulties that were probably out of your control. But there is actually some good news.
Daryl O'Connor What was promising to me was when we divided all of our groups into recent history of suicide versus lifetime history, we would show that individuals the lifetime history, that their cortisol response in response to a stressful thing in the lab was starting to return to a more conventional cortisol response, which suggests that potentially psychological and physiological interventions are potentially yielding benefit.
Eddie And here's another thing about the human body. We are incredibly resilient. So why don't we shift gears and start talking about some of these interventions that can help us all kind of heal our stress response?
Juna The first thing we're going to talk about is something which may make a lot of you roll your eyes, a.k.a. mindfulness.
Daryl O'Connor I've got to be honest, whenever I first read about the mindfulness research, you know, many, many years ago, I was very skeptical. I was thinking, okay, this is just a fad. But actually the data are really the evidence base is becoming cumulative and very supportive.
Eddie You know, I love mindfulness and I've been working on my meditation. But mindfulness doesn't have to be meditation. It basically just means being aware of the present moment, which you can do in a lot of different ways. And of course, well, these days there's even an app for it or more accurately, many apps.
Daryl O'Connor Obviously the key mindfulness apps like Headspace, etc., they get you to just get into that zone and to spend time, you know, 15 to 20 minutes, whatever it is a day engaging in mindfulness.
Juna The reason that mindfulness is so good at lowering stress is because it lowers something called preseverative cognition.
Daryl O'Connor We know that these two variables, which we collectively knew was preseverative cognition, is whenever you worry and ruminate, which you engage in repetitive thoughts of past stressful events, which is rumination, or you engage in repetitive thoughts about future stressful events, which is worry. What happens if you engage in that a lot? That's what is likely to be damaging. That's what switches on the stress response system.
Eddie When you worry about the future or dwell and regret the past, you're kind of putting your body into a stressful state, even though there's really no present stressful event. And mindfulness is the opposite of that. It's just being in the present moment.
Juna I thought that Professor O'Connor had a really good tip for this.
Daryl O'Connor When you find yourself worrying, you should engage in worry postponement. You should say, Right, I'm going to stop worrying. No, I'm not going to worry. Tonight at 7:00 for 15 minutes, it's a really effective technique. You get this 7:00 and you spend 15 minutes. You only write about it when you think, what's worrying me? Why exactly is that a concern? Then you stop it again. But you've managed the stress response, but you've also managed your worry.
Eddie I love this. First we had cortisol on a schedule. Yeah. Now we're putting our worrying on a schedule.
Juna Right. Well, if you don't, it kind of takes over your whole day, like Tik Tok or other apps that should remain unmentioned. Overall, though, we will all likely need multiple techniques to help manage our stress.
Daryl O'Connor I mean, I'm a big fan of this notion of having a psychological toolbox or having a stress management toolbox. Different things will work for different people. And also we use a combination of relaxation works, exercise work. So, you know, there are two extremes. One is very much relaxing. You know, if you think of progressive muscle relaxation, which involves deep breathing, etc., but it's been very effective in certain contexts. And then also exercise works, which is obviously engaging in high levels of the opposite of relaxation, can work.
Juna The biggest thing that Professor O'Connor says you can do is to become stress aware.
Daryl O'Connor Be aware of what stress can do to you. Stress can impact on your behavior. It can impact on your biology, it can impact on how you think. And if you're aware of that, then you will use techniques to try and reduce stress in order to prolong your life and to live a better a more stress protected life.
Eddie You know, the reason I love this is because we're not saying to get rid of stress, because well face it, that's basically impossible. We have jobs, we have families, we have podcasts to run. Yeah.
Juna We have podcasts to run here.
Eddie Time is limited and hopefully we're really challenging ourselves throughout our lives. So of course we're going to have stress, but being aware of it and making ourselves stress protected, that sounds like something we can all actually do.
Juna And then maybe there are also actually be chocolate at Trader Joes, once in a while, you.
Eddie Know, that would be awesome. I keep trying the snacks on.
Juna And that's the end of today's episode. Dr. O'Connor has written a great blog post on this called Are You Stress Aware? Which we will link to on our website foodweneedtotalk.com. you can find me being very unstressed on my Instagram @theofficialjuna on Instagram and JunaGjata on Tik Tok and YouTube. You can find Eddie.
Eddie I am scheduling my worry session. Yes, that's what I'm doing.
Juna Okay. Eddie is scheduling his worry sessions. Food, We Need to Talk is produced by PRX.
Eddie Our producer is Morgan Flannery.
Juna With production support from Jennifer Weingart and our mix engineer is Tommy Bazarian.
Eddie Jocelyn Gonzalez is executive producer for PRX Productions.
Juna Food We Need to Talk was co-created by Carey Goldberg, George Hicks, Eddie Phillips and me.
Eddie Always remember consult with your health professional for your personal health questions. Also, don't forget to leave us a review and tell a friend it helps others find us.
Juna and Eddie Thanks for listening.
Eddie Remember, if you're in need, you can reach out to the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline 1-800 2738255.
