Do sweet and salty foods taste good to you?

Is your sleep maybe not the best?

Do you have some belly fat?

(Sorry, menmost of this content isn’t for you.

Scroll those videos long enough, and youll see a claim about any symptom or inconvenience youve ever experienced.

Its all due to your high cortisol, they say.

What is cortisol, anyway?

(In the United States, epinephrine is the medical name.

Andrelevant to our topic todaythey also produce cortisol.

And these cortisol levelsshouldgo upthis is a good thing!

People who dont produce enough cortisol in these situations can experience anadrenal crisis, which can be deadly.

In other words, cortisol helps our bodies respond appropriately to stress, especially serious, life-threatening physical stress.

Some of these are common and minor enough that probably everybody experiences them sometimes; who doesnt crave candy?

If youre dieting all the time, you might have a lot of these symptoms!

Others could signal serious medical issues if they are severe enough.

About five years ago, adrenalfatiguewas the bugbear of the day.

Rememberwhen Gwyneth Paltrow launched a vitamin packet specifically to address it?

On the other hand, those symptomsdomatchsort ofwith high cortisol.

But the high-cortisol myth collects other myths as it goes, so it seamlessly absorbed this one, too.

The adrenal (A) gland releases cortisol in response to ACTH.

On TikTok, though, its sometimes used as a drop-in replacement for adrenal fatigue.

Still, there are a few scapegoats.

Where the fearmongering really goes off the rails, though, is in implicating exercise.

(This is not true.)

(Other research backs this up.)

This isnot true either.

So, slightly elevated cortisol as a result of normal life stresses is not usually a medical issue.

Heres a great example that shows both what the TikToks get right and what they get wrong.

Her face became round.

Rogue cancer cells can sometimes butt into that hormonal conversation, and thats what happened to Houser.

After she got surgery to remove the tumor, her cortisol levels subsided and her symptoms went away.

If TikTok tells you to eat more kale, you may notneedto, but it wont necessarily hurt.

Those two ideas dont really fit together.

Maybe it will help, and if not, no harm, no foul.

just go see a real doctor.