What Are Adrenal Glands

In this health video you will learn what are adrenal glands and how they help your digestion.

Mr. Lyle Hurd: Dr. Cass, I’d like to ask you if we could do a little series on what I call, Health Cascades. The first one is that we’ve been talking about Adrenals often on, can you explain again briefly what Adrenals are, that the cascade that begins once the adrenals are not working properly? Dr. Hyla Cass: Well let’s start with what the adrenals do, what are they? They’re these tiny glands really, maybe about the size or shape of an almond. And they sit just above the kidneys in the back, and they’re our flight or fight mechanism. And that means that they have developed a very long time ago, in fact in all animals. When there is an emergency, when you have to run from an enemy or fight an enemy, you start to pump adrenaline, right? Because you need to have increased blood flow to your muscles, increased heart rate, increased respiration, your eyes widened, your palms gets sweaty. This is the fight of flight response, the emergency response. We have this nowadays too, when the adrenals kick in. If you’re feeling stressed about you have to gibe a presentation, or you’re standing in line and you’re late and you know that the line better get moving but it’s not moving and you’re feeling stressed and your heart rate goes up and your palms get sweaty, or if you have to give a speech, that’s a really big one for a lot of people. Mr. Lyle Hurd: Or 30 phone calls you don’t plan on a day. Dr. Hyla Cass: Exactly, so here you are pumping out adrenaline then after a while what happens, you’re not only in this stress response pumping out adrenaline, but the n cortisol kicks in, which is the other stress hormone that’s put up by another part of the Adrenal gland, called the Adrenal cortex. So the adrenaline is putted out by this central part called the Adrenal Medulla but the cortex puts out the cortisol. So these are the two, that’s like the one two punch for dealing with stress. And we need it, Dr. Hanz Seleie who is a scientist out of Montreal, first posited this whole idea of the fight of flight response, and he did experiments with animals and then showed that this happened with people as well. That after a while when you have the fight or flight response going on constantly, you wind up kind of burning out and you’re not able to handle it anymore. So when a stressful event happens, you can’t get that energy up, and I’ve had people come to me, as a doctor, they’ve come to me and said “you know I’m just exhausted.” I said so “do you tend to work on deadlines and wait for the last minute to do things?”, yup, I said “have you noticed” and this is what I’ll ask” have you noticed that you sort of can’t get that energy up for the deadline anymore like you used to. You know you used to be able to do you homework, a paper in college, and now you can’t get that momentum up right at the last minute like you”, yeah exactly, I said “it’s your adrenals” they’ve given out on you. Mr. Lyle Hurd: So we need to learn a lot more about our adrenals, do you mention adrenals in any of your books? Dr. Hyla Cass: I do, I have a whole section in Natural Highs and a whole section in Eight weeks to Vibrant Health where I talk about the adrenals and their relationship of the adrenals and the thyroid gland which runs our metabolism. Mr. Lyle Hurd: And if we want to learn more about your books, we can go to DrCass.com, right? Dr. Hyla Cass: Yes Mr. Lyle Hurd: Well stress has to be one of the biggest problems that we have in our society today, I certainly would advice people to learn more about their adrenals and Natural Highs or your other books is a grate place to start. Thank you. Dr. Hyla Cass: Thanks.