The Ageless and Awesome Podcast

Gut Health Series Part 2 - Achieving Hormone Balance Through Optimal Gut Health

• Susie Garden • Episode 252

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Can maintaining good gut health actually balance your hormones? You bet it can! Join me, Susie Garden, in this enlightening episode of the Ageless and Awesome podcast as we unravel the mysteries of the estrobolome and its crucial role in oestrogen modulation. Learn how the enzyme beta-glucuronidase, produced by your gut microbiome, not only helps metabolise and remove toxins but also it's link with chronic constipation, autoimmune diseases, and even certain cancers. This episode emphasises why understanding and optimising your gut health is essential, especially for women facing hormone imbalances during perimenopause and menopause.

Discover the actionable steps to achieve optimal gut health and hormone balance. I’ll share insights on tracking your stool patterns and how they can signal underlying gut issues that may be affecting your mood, periods and hormone balance. Hear an inspiring client story that underscores the importance of open communication with healthcare providers and the power of informed self-care. We’ll delve into the significance of beta-glucuronidase levels and how to support your estrobolome and gut microbiome with practical advice you can apply immediately.

But we don’t stop there. We also explore the nutritional aspect of gut health, emphasising the need to address inflammation and heal conditions like leaky gut. Learn about the benefits of prebiotics like PHGG, and why hydration, fibre, and a diet rich in fresh, colourful fruits and vegetables are vital. I'll also touch on how farming practices, food freshness, and stress management can impact your gut and hormone health. Tune in for a wealth of information that’s not just about feeling good, but living ageless and awesome!

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Speaker 1:

Hi, I'm Susie Garden and this is the Ageless and Awesome podcast. I'm an age-defying naturopath and clinical nutritionist and I'm here to bust myths around women's health and aging so that you can be ageless and awesome in your 40s, 50s and beyond. The Ageless and Awesome podcast is dedicated to helping women through perimenopause and menopause with great health, a positive mindset and outrageous confidence. Hit, subscribe or follow now and let's get started. Hello, gorgeous one, and welcome to this week's episode of the Ageless and Awesome podcast.

Speaker 1:

And this week I'm recommencing my little series on gut health and hormones and I think I got kind of a little bit waylaid and distracted. I started this gut health series at the beginning of June, so about three, four weeks ago, and yeah, I got a little bit sidetracked. But now I am back on theme this week, and last time I did speak about skin health, the relationship between gut health and skin health, and particularly the estrobolone. So the estrobolone as a reminder or if you haven't listened to that episode yet, the estrobolone is just part of your gut microbiome. So it is, you know, part of that collection of bacteria, viruses, yeasts etc. In the gut and it's capable of metabolizing and it helps also modulate the body's estrogen, modulate the body's estrogen, and so it can impact estrogen levels, which can impact our hormone balance, our weight, our libido, our mood, our skin, all of the things. So in the last episode on this, I did focus very much on skin health, and today I'm getting a little bit more detailed in how the estrobolome modulates hormones and in particular, I want to talk about a enzyme called beta-glucuronidase. You might glaze over when I mentioned something like that, but it's actually a really important enzyme, and enzymes just help with chemical reactions in the body. We have many, many different enzymes, and beta-glucuronidase is just one of them, and the estrobolone actually produces beta-glucuronidase and I'll tell you a little bit about the function of it. I'll tell you a little bit about the function of it. Essentially, it is an enzyme that's involved with metabolism and removal of things like drugs, so that's prescription drugs and other drugs, hormones and toxins.

Speaker 1:

We get exposed to toxins every single day just with living normal life in Western countries, and so we have many mechanisms in our body detoxification mechanisms, and the liver is probably one of the main ones, but the liver and the gut obviously very closely related because they are linked and, yeah, if the liver is not working that well it's not producing, popping rather the waste products into the gut. And if the gut's not working properly, it's not removing those waste products particularly well. So it's really important, when we're thinking about removal of waste and toxins, that we've got the gut working well, because it's not just about, oh, we haven't emptied the gut properly, so the toxins are building up. It does impact other mechanisms that are in place in the body to remove them, including this enzyme called beta-glucuronidase, because what that does? The estrobolone actually modulates the production of beta-glucuronidase. So if we're not, if we don't have good gut health and we don't have a really nourished estrobolone, that will impact this other enzyme down the track and that can impact, as I said, the the metabolism and removal of drugs, hormones and toxins from our bodies. And what is, I guess, really important with this is that when we have increased beta-glucuronidase, you get a buildup of toxic substances in the body. And also this increase in beta-glucuronidase has been linked to an increased risk of a few medical conditions. So autoimmune conditions is one, certain cancers is another and other inflammatory disorders. So it's really important that we are looking after our gut health, because there are so many little tiny chemicals in our body that are influenced and where I've tended to see a significant increase in beta-glucuronidase is in people that have chronic constipation. Chronic constipation and when I've done gut microbiome testing in my clients, I will always test beta-glucuronidase. It's pretty much standard, I think, with most of the companies that do those tests, but I think it's a really important one, particularly for women with a history of certain cancers in their family.

Speaker 1:

I think it's really important to have a look at this number and a really important goal then, or management goal, is to reduce that beta-glucuronidase. And we have ways of doing that, and a lot of it is really just focused on improving gut health and manipulating, I guess, is a word managing, manipulating the gut microbiome. So let's backtrack a little bit and talk about the kind of symptoms that I'm on the watch for when I'm assessing someone's gut health. So if I'm looking at a client right from the beginning, from the initial consultation, when we're looking at gut health and assessing hormone health, then I'm really looking at what are the mechanisms going on in the gut, what are the symptoms, I should say, going on in the gut that might be indicating that the mechanisms aren't working very well? So the first one that I will always ask and if you're a client of mine, you know this is bloating how often you move your bowels and what is your Bristol stool chart number?

Speaker 1:

And if you've never looked at a Bristol stool chart, just Google it. It's publicly available and it is essentially a poo chart. You may see a couple of funny versions of it. There's someone that's done a whole like a photograph of a Bristol stool chart in chocolate and I know that sounds a bit weird. If you know what a Bristol chart is, this will make a lot of sense to you. It's pretty funny. So, essentially, the Bristol stool chart has a lot of illustrations of poo on it different types of poo and it has a description and it has a number next to it and I use this chart every single day that I'm in my online clinic asking my clients what is their Bristol number, because this can change over time. Asking my clients what is their Bristol number because this can change over time.

Speaker 1:

Obviously, when we're looking at elimination patterns, elimination is kind of the medical word for pooing and weeing, but when we're looking at elimination patterns, we really want to look at not so much well, sorry, as well as how often are you moving your bowels it's. What does that stool actually look like? And that gives us a really good indication of whether you're getting a good elimination of toxins from the body and if you are suffering from constipation. So that can be defined as not moving the bowels every day. Or sometimes people are moving the bowels every day, but it might be on the Bristol chart a one or a two, which means that those still can be quite, you know, hard. It can be very small, pellets can be difficult to eliminate out of the body. All of those things might be a lot of flatulence involved with it as well and bloating. There may be pain and that kind of pattern of constipation is possibly going to influence your hormone status. And that's why it's really important to really have a good knowledge of your own body.

Speaker 1:

And if you are going to go and see a healthcare practitioner about your gut health, it's really helpful for them to understand your stool pattern. So if you can kind of maybe track it over a week or two and understand you know what foods might cause issues with your elimination and how often you're moving your bowels and what your Bristol stool chart number might be, that can be really helpful. But yeah, if there is that constipation? I would? I mean, I'll be honest, I haven't looked up the research on it, but I would almost guarantee that your levels of beta-glucuronidase are probably a little higher than we want them to be and that can lead to hormone imbalance as well as those other issues that I mentioned. But, generally speaking, when people are coming to me, it's because they've got symptoms of hormone imbalance. So maybe their mood is really erratic, maybe they've got PMS, maybe they've got endometriosis or infertility. Obesity Obviously, I'm seeing a lot of clients that are carrying extra weight and, yeah, this is something that you may not have really connected that your gut health is influencing your hormone balance.

Speaker 1:

Now, obviously, when I'm seeing women with perimenopause and postmenopause, we're really wanting to optimize gut health, because that is going to dramatically improve your experience of perimenopause and menopause, because we really want to get rid of the old estrogen that's not serving us anymore. We want to bring that estrogen and progesterone balance back as much as we can. I mean, you know, this is a natural process where our sorry perimenopause is a natural process where our progesterone is going to really dive and our estrogen is going to fluctuate and surge and drop, and surge and drop. So there are things we can do to help support that, but we're not working miracles where we're really forcing up progesterone to bring it back into balance. It's really just about doing the best that we can to optimize the health of your body so that your body can really help manage itself in this time of change and transition. And I think the more you know about what's going on in your body, the better equipped you are to have conversations with your GP about it or your other healthcare professionals and also to make good choices for yourself. One of the things and I'm kind of digressing a little bit, I think it's important One of the things that I've really noticed is how many women I speak to that have pretty significant um of menstrual symptoms and this can be within the context of perimenopause and menopause or premenopause and they've never actually discussed it with their doctor.

Speaker 1:

You know, I had a client recently who said she was changing a tampon on her heavy days every half an hour and I said, well, has your doctor done any investigations? And she just looked at me and said, well, I haven't really talked to him about it and it's like okay, you know, and I get it in a GP consultation. They're very short and you know if you don't really know what's normal and what's not normal, it's really hard to know what to bring up. But you know this lady also has pretty significant gut issues and has had for over 20 years, and so you know there's no doubt in my mind that there is a link there. But also, if the period flow is that heavy, because this is a super term on every half an hour, then there's could be other underlying causes like endo or PCOS or there could be something else. So you know you really want to be across what is, I guess, normal and what isn't, and that's why you know you have such an abundance of free information, with podcasts, for example.

Speaker 1:

I would always say please make sure you're listening and getting your information from qualified people. We all know there are a large number of people saying, stating that they are experts, and when you actually look at their about page, there will be no qualifications listed. There will be, perhaps, their story of their own lived experience and I'm not downplaying that. However, I'm a big believer, with my background, in conventional medicine as well as the natural approach. I'm a big believer in looking at a really balanced approach with both research and intuitive, or if that's what you want to call it I'm not sure if that's quite the right word but, yeah, looking at research, but also looking at what actually works, and not just works for one person, what works for many, many people. And that's why working with a practitioner can really help, because we have experience in working with many, many, many people over many, many, many years, and that is what really gives you, as a practitioner, insight and the ability to manage interesting, different medical conditions and client presentations.

Speaker 1:

I'm not really going off topic here, but bear with me. Yeah, because I just do think so many women are putting up with symptoms and, um, quite distressing symptoms, actually life, um, impacting symptoms, because they don't actually realize that this is not normal and that this is something that can be supported, helped, reduced, minimized, with often just a few little tweaks Honestly, often that's all it takes. And swinging back into this gut health and this estrobolome support, I'm going to list out now some of the things that you can do to help with supporting the estrobolome and the gut microbiome, but a lot of this is you'll have heard it from me before because it's not rocket science. It's two concepts I guess I like to say. One is preserving what you've got and two is supporting very specifically the symptoms that you have. And what I mean by this, by both of these things, is what we know Smashing your microbiome with huge amounts of random probiotics is not a great game plan.

Speaker 1:

What I always do with my clients initially is I want to clean up what's going on in the gut first, so that does not involve probiotics. So I want to clean up what's going on. I want to make sure we've got good elimination patterns. So that might be increasing hydration, because we know that will help with elimination through every detox pathway, including the kidneys as well as the gut. So we want to make sure hydration is optimal. We want to make sure that bowels are moving as regularly as makes sense for the individual person and we also want to make sure that the I'm going to say the quality of the elimination is good. So when we look at a Bristol chart, for example, we're looking for a three or a four. So if you want to Google a Bristol chart and have a look, but it's basically a smooth stool that's easy to pass, anything that's beyond that, that's more like super soft or, you know, diarrhea-like. That's not what we're looking for Even though, yes, that is going to eliminate your toxins, you're also going to be damaging your microbiome.

Speaker 1:

You're going to be having a lot of inflammation in the intestines as well, and if you're regularly getting, like mucus on the toilet paper, blood on the toilet paper, that is a good sign that you've got some inflammation that needs to be brought under control. So the first thing we want to do is really clean up the gut. So we want to soothe the gut membrane. If there is leaky gut, we want to heal the gut so that those tight junctions are nicely together. And yeah, I'm not going to go further into an explanation of that. Essentially, you could Google that or, if you want me to do a podcast on it, I will. I think I have done last year or the year before I've done a number of podcasts on leaky gut, so I'm not so much going to go into that today.

Speaker 1:

But we want to make sure that the gut is soothed, it's healed, that we want to work on really building your own good gut bacteria. So we feed them using prebiotics and we do that with food. We can do that with some supplements. I really, really love as a prebiotic something called PHGG. It's a very clean fiber. It's really easy to take, it's clear, when you put it into water, tastes like water and it's very, very clean and ideal even if you have microbiome issues, such as something called SIBO that you can use PHGG with SIBO even if you haven't treated it. So, yeah, we want to make sure that we've got good hydration, good fiber, that we are then looking at what medical conditions are present in your body. Are there some specific probiotics that have research that supports using them? And there is so much research out now and the research is still continuing to build and build, which is awesome. So, yeah, I would really recommend, if you're having those huge broad spectrum probiotics with like 10 billion bacteria in them, please stop you, just please. You're probably doing more harm than good. You're much better off looking sort of a bit more upstream and looking at supporting hydration and fiber.

Speaker 1:

Also some good nutrition. So lots of greens, lots of brightly colored fresh fruits, veggies. I was looking at some info coming out. There's a big or was I think it's just finished international microbiome conference on in Europe and some of the really interesting stuff coming out of that was about plants and how they all have their own microbiomes and there might be a microbiome in the root that's different to the microbiome in the seed, that's different to the microbiome in the fruit or in the leaf, which is really quite fascinating, and because they all have different purposes, and that their diversity is actually being impacted by poor farming practices that we tend to have in the West, and that the longer you store these fruits and veggies as well, the microbiome deteriorates, as you would expect, and that impacts our microbiome, because we're eating them and we want to make sure we're getting the best kind of food to support our microbiome. So the take-home message was that you know, having fruits and veggies that are as close to the time they got out of the soil is best. So buying your fruits and veggies from farmer's markets makes a huge difference and you know we've stored food for decades.

Speaker 1:

Like I remember my uncle had a apple farm in Stanthorpe and I remember going into the cold room and this would have been. I can't remember exactly, it would have been like late 70s, early 80s and because I only have a vague memory of it, but I remember just being amazed by it, because you'd go into the cold room on a hot day and just the pallets and pallets of apples was just amazing. We'd just go in there and eat apples and it was great, but you know they would stay there for nine months so that you know they would harvest when the apples were ready and then store them and then they would go to whichever supply they were going to. So the apple that you're eating might be eight months old or nine months old, it's not going to have nearly the antioxidant levels, it's not going to have the same microbiome magnificence as if you just picked it out of the ground or off the tree. Rather, the same day and I remember going to the um Northeast street markets in Brisbane, which is a um organic market, and having lettuce and the, and the lady that I that was running the store said this came out of the ground this morning and she said taste this and, oh my God, the. The difference between having lettuce from the shops and having something that had literally been in the ground that morning was like night and day in terms of taste, in terms of texture, in vitality, how it made me feel. So that is a really important part of supporting your microbiome is the freshness of the food that you're eating and the color, because we know that brightly colored and richly colored fruits and veggies have more antioxidants, have more polyphenols. They're awesome for supporting your gut health. So let me just reflect a little bit. We've talked about hydration, we've talked about fiber, we've talked about brightly colored fruits and veggies.

Speaker 1:

Stress management will always be a part of any protocol to improve gut health, because the more stressed we are, the slower our gut will move. Generally speaking, for some people their gut will move super fast, particularly if you have IBS IBS and that slowness in the gut will help. As I said, people that have elevated beta-glucuronidase tend to have chronic constipation, so when those feces kind of sit around in the gut, we tend to see elevated levels of this enzyme. So, and remember that enzyme's responsible for some of your hormone metabolism and we definitely see period disruption, mood disruption, pms, et cetera, in people that have elevated beta-glucuronidase in their stools when we test them. We know that for sure. So, yeah, that is really, really important. You're looking after your gut health and because your estrobolone will be looked after, if you're looking after your gut health generally, there's nothing really specific we need to do for the estrobolone specifically. It's just looking after your gut health. What else do I want to say about that. So stress, brightly colored foods, lots of antioxidants, hydration, fiber Notice I haven't said have probiotics.

Speaker 1:

Now, probiotics can make people feel good, and especially for the short term. And again, as I said, I hesitate to recommend taking probiotics from a general point of view because there are so many specific uses for specific strains of probiotics. So, for example, for people with chronic constipation, there are specific strains that will really help with that, rather than taking big, big doses of broad spectrum probiotics. And I can't tell you how many times I've done stool microbiome testing on a client that has, say, for example, severe bloating and we'll often see a real, perhaps even a depletion of something like their lactobacillus and maybe an elevation of their bifidobacterium. And so if you're putting more bifidobacterium into your gut through your probiotics use, if you're just using huge doses of random probiotics, you're just contributing to the problem. You're not actually helping reduce that bifido and increasing the lacto, and that's what you want to be doing by using specific probiotics.

Speaker 1:

That's really a podcast on itself. I'm going to jot that down as a possible future podcast, but I'm really curious to see if you have any questions about that or if that raises any points of discussion, because I would love to know. I'd love to get more of an idea of the things that you need. So I think I'm going to kind of stop there. I know I've gone off on a couple of tangents today. I hope that's okay. I'm just I've kind of wrote a few notes of things I wanted to cover and then the rest of the time I've just kind of been just saying what's coming into my mind, but I hope that's helpful. I'm so passionate about women having information, women having some knowledge that will really help them to get healthier. You have not, because I get so frustrated when I see women coming in that that really should not have been going decades with the problems that they've got that have been very debilitating for them. So, yeah, anywho, I think I'm going to sign off now before I get up on another soapbox. So I hope this has been helpful.

Speaker 1:

If any questions have come up from this episode that you feel like I haven't been quite clear enough on, I would love to hear from you. You can message me at suzygardenwellness on Instagram or you can email me hello at suzygardencom, if you feel like you like to work with me. It's the beginning of July when I'm recording this and you know, my books are open, so feel free to book in for a pre-screening call to see how I might help you. The link is in the show notes. Have an awesome day and rest of the week. I will see you on Thursday with Q&A.

Speaker 1:

Thanks so much for joining me today on the Ageless and Awesome podcast. If you liked today's episode, please make sure you click the little plus button if you're on Apple Podcasts, or the follow button if you're on Spotify, so that you get each new episode delivered to you every week. If you like free stuff, then head to the show notes and click the link to receive my free Radiant Reset Hormone Detox Guide for Perimenopausal Women. Or, if you'd like to continue the discussion, head over to Instagram and DM me at SusieGardenWellness. I'd love to connect with you.

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Susie Garden

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