When your adrenal glands are healthy you are less likely to suffer hay fever in the first place, but if you do it won’t be as bad.
Your adrenal glands are quite small in sit on top of your kidneys. Their action enables your body to cope with a variety of stress – emotional and physical.
When your adrenals aren’t in good shape your body can’t cope so well with stresses – these stresses include coping with things that could create an allergy, like pollen.
What Puts Strain On Your Adrenal Glands?
Here are some common things that can put a great deal of strain on your adrenals, meaning they have less reserve to protect you from hay fever:
- Not Getting Enough Sleep – most adults need 7-8 hours/night
- Eating a lot of carbs, particularly white refined food
- Caffeine
- Too much alcohol
These aren’t the only things that put stress on your adrenal glands, but they are the really common ones that many people do.
Every time you do each of these things you are putting demands on your adrenals. What that means is you are stimulating them to produce a lot of hormones when they shouldn’t be. If you keep doing this on a regular basis your adrenals get tired and don’t perform so well on a day to day basis – one result of this can be starting with an allergy, e.g. hay fever, or your allergy getting worse.
With caffeine every time you drink it you stimulate your adrenal glands. This results in them releasing hormones like adrenalin and cortisol. Every time you do that you are putting unnecessary stress on them, and distracting them from other stresses being placed on your body.
Making healthier choices can take a while to have an impact with something like this. Last week I told you what medications you can get to tide you over. If you want to improve hayfever in a healthier way and also improve your general health, consider doing this:
- Give yourself the time you need to get a healthy amount of sleep
- As much as possible get rid of the white refined rubbish food from your diet – white flour, white rice, sugar
- Reduce caffeine to a minimum – drink to really enjoy rather than just out of habit
- Stick to less harmful levels of alcohol – 14U for women/week, 21U for men
Have an Uber Healthy
Dr Julie
PS Congratulations to Andy for winning June’s free place on Uber Slim, my online weight loss program.
If you would like a chance to win the one on offer in July make sure you’re signed up to the newsletter, so you know the one easy question to answer.