Dr. Tabatha Barber explains how hormonal birth control suppresses your body's natural hormone production, damages gut bacteria, and reduces stomach acid. This can lead to nutrient deficiencies, SIBO, yeast overgrowth, and symptoms like fatigue, acne, and eczema. She suggests considering non-hormonal alternatives instead.
This is a problem that I hear at least once a day, sometimes multiple times a day, most days of the week. The birth control pill, you guys, I'm all for the birth control pill if you need it for birth control. Literally, that's how, you know, I went back to school and was able to get my GED and got into college and eventually went on to medical school because I had a baby in 11th grade, right? So I couldn't have another baby right after that if I was going to do all the stuff I needed to do. So birth control pills helped me succeed in that fashion, but I would not have been on them as long as I was if I knew the truth about the consequences they have in your health. So I really want you to understand that even though gynecologists are trained to literally hand out birth control pills for every complaint that you have when you walk in the door, it is not a healthy option for you. You should only use it for the shortest amount of time that you need to be on it. And if there's better birth control options, you should consider them. And here's the problem. Birth control pills, along with, like, the mini pill, the NuvaRing, the Nexplanon rod, the depo shot, and some of the hormonal IUDs, those are all synthetic estrogens and synthetic progestins that destroy your health. What they do is they stop your own hormone production so that your brain and ovaries are no longer making the hormones that they make. And talk to each other and create a cycle for you. You take synthetic hormones, it shuts down your own production, your own HPO axis, hypothalamic, pituitary, ovarian axis. So that's why you get usually get a bleed. But it's a synthetic response to those hormones. And the bigger problem is that those birth control pills and those synthetic hormones chronically, over time, cause a change in your microbiome, in your gut. So it changes what bacteria live in there. It causes you to produce less stomach acid, which causes bad bacteria to multiply and overgrow and end up in your colon where it doesn't belong. You can actually end up with sibo, or small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. You can end up with yeast in your gut. And all of these issues that cause fatigue and eczema and acne and headaches, and that can turn on autoimmune conditions like Hashimoto's and celiac and Raynaud's and Lupus and rheumatoid and all these things you don't want. So the birth control pill is a big deal. In addition, because you make less stomach acid and it shifts your microbiome, you don't absorb your vitamins and minerals the way that you're supposed to or that you should. So even if you're trying to eat a healthy, balanced diet or even if you're taking some supplementation, you're not always getting enough vitamin D, vitamin A, B vitamins, magnesium, because your body isn't able to absorb them from this birth control pill.
