7 WARNING Signs You Have Poor Gut Health – And How to Improve It

In a lot of cases, people with chronic digestive problems, if you're trying to do an elimination, either greatly lowering or removing alcohol sources can be a huge way to help reestablish the good flora, decrease inflammation in the GI tract. Hey, I'm Dr. A. Thanks for coming to the channel and watching this video. I've been involved teaching, researching, writing in the integrative naturopathic medical communities for over 30 years, and I've been seeing patients a long time, and I get lots of questions from patients, practitioners, You guys on YouTube and to try and answer them. The first thing I want to say is that all of these signs and symptoms I'm going to go over can be a sign of a deeper medical problem. And so if you're having these and they're not getting better with normal treatments or changing your diet or whatever, please talk to your healthcare providers and get some answers about why these digestive things are not going away. Well, let's assume they're not caused by a big bad disease or dysfunction or something like that. What would be like our Top 7 things of the hundreds that can go on that might say my digestive health is not working so good. So the first thing would be excessive or frequent gas and bloating. And I think we all know what that is, but that could be at baseline. It could be just when I eat, it could be just when I eat certain things, but gas and bloating normally should not happen in the main. It can happen for temporary things. It can happen because you ate something, but Generally, gas and bloating should not be your baseline. Number two is constipation, diarrhea, or alternating constipation and diarrhea, which we see in irritable bowel syndrome, for example. Again, those things—it's not abnormal to have variations, but it's also not normal that that should be your base. Either I'm always constipated, I always have diarrhea, or I have a rotating amount of those things. Number three is acid reflux, frequent heartburn, etc. Again, that can go on from a. Mechanical reasons. You ate a big dinner and you went right to bed and you lay down, you get some reflux, but you shouldn't have a baseline of always having burning heartburn and reflux, et cetera. Number 4 would be pain in your abdomen. Again, we all sometimes get a little upset stomach or something, but you should not have chronic constant pain in your abdomen. Number 5 would be a change in your bowel habits. This sometimes is concerning as a sign of a new disease or something, but that would be, you know, I normally have a bowel movement every day, for example. And now I'm having four bowel movements a day, or I've got diarrhea all the time, or now I stopped having bowel movements. Something of that nature. Number six is going to be weight loss that you can't explain, etc. And usually this is something you definitely want to reach out to your healthcare provider about. Weight loss that you can't explain could be you didn't realize you changed your diet significantly, or maybe you're exercising more. That's explainable. Unexplained weight loss can be because of a metabolic. It could be that you have developed a high-functioning thyroid gland that's burning up more energy than you can put in. It could be the development of type 1 diabetes, another endocrine problem, autoimmune endocrine problem. It could be cancer. It could be all sorts of things. And then number 7 would actually be skin problems, which actually can be related to maldigestion. So just really quickly, let's go through some of the things that we might want to look at that would be supportive to helping my digestion. Function in a way that is not abnormal, not poor digestive function. And if we make some of these changes and the symptoms go away, then we know they were functional. They were a function of our diet, lifestyle, things like that. If we make a bunch of changes and our symptoms don't go away, then we know that there might be a deeper issue and we really need to see a healthcare provider, get that checked out. So the first thing when you're thinking of dietary things would be the amount of food that you're eating. Maybe it's too much, maybe it's too little, maybe it's very irregular. So you might want to do a diet recall where you just write down what you eat at each meal and then look back at it and see what the regularity of the food is. Or do I— I'm having huge meals and then, you know, tiny meals, or I'm only eating once a day, which is fine if you do it right, or whatever. But the regularity is important. The next thing is the balance of your diet. For example, I had a patient come into the chronic disease clinic and they were having trouble. They were, they had fatigue, they had the skin rashes, they were having all these other problems. And they came to chronic illness clinic because of course we deal with chronic problems. But the first thing we did is we looked at their general health history and part of that is dietary recall. So I'm looking at it and I asked them, is this actually what you eat? And they read it with me and said, yeah, that's, that's a week diet recall. 7 days. I looked at it and there were 2 things about it I noticed right off the bat. Now, these might not have been part of the problem, but why not check it out? So their chronic disease symptoms were fatigue, skin rash, and some other chronic things. Well, the 2 things I noticed were, one was 80% of their macronutrients were carbohydrate. So macronutrients are carbohydrate, protein, and fat. And carbohydrates are a source of energy, but they shouldn't be your 80% source of energy. So they were not getting enough fat or protein. And again, too many sugars, too much carbohydrate. Now, what can that do? Well, number one, it's going to wag your blood sugar all over the place. And number two, it can really throw off the digestive flora in your GI tract. But the other thing was, is that the majority of those carbohydrates came from wheat-based foods, grains, but wheat specifically. So I went through it. I said, before we get too creative here with your chronic illness problem, and we checked other stuff too. Do this diet change with me. Let's do this for two months, and then let's see how you do. The first thing is we're going to go from 80% carbohydrate down to a lower percentage, and I want you to not have any wheat because that was the majority of this person's diet. Now, if it would have been some other thing, I would have said don't eat that, but this was wheat. So we got to a manageable amount of carbohydrate. We expanded the protein and the good fats. We go along, and we did some other tweaks. But two months go by, and all of this person's digestive complaints. Totally went away. Their fatigue was about 75% better and their skin rash was almost completely gone. So that's one of those things where it's a therapeutic trial and you see, did that make a difference? Now, if we got 2 months in and none of that stuff was better, we still would've adjusted the macros, but maybe, okay, go eat, go ahead and eat wheat again. I don't care. But at this point, this person said, no, I'm not gonna eat wheat anymore because obviously that was not helpful. And I'm gonna adjust my macros cuz that did help a lot. So it was about 3/4 of this person's chronic illness problem. So adjusting. And then the next thing, corollary from that story, is if you're sensitive to foods or allergic to foods, but more commonly you're sensitive to them, those things are inflammatory and they will create chronic digestive and non-digestive problems. How do you find out if you're sensitive to foods? We've got other content on that we can link here, but you can do tests for it, but no test is perfect. You can do elimination challenge, which is what we did with this person, where you just take that food out for 6 or 7 weeks and then you try it a couple times. If you get symptoms from eating the food after it's not been in your system, it's probably a problem. And there's other ways to suss out food sensitivities. Now, food allergies you usually know about. For example, somebody might have a high-level IgE allergy to shellfish or avocado or something, and they'll get, you know, throat closure or hives or some other— don't eat those foods, obviously. But there's tons of foods you don't get those symptoms from that you can have just a general inflammatory response to. So looking at the macros, looking at the balance of the food you're eating, Then looking at things you might be sensitive to, removing those, substituting for better things, that can help a lot. The next thing is to help out would be you could have disrupted your good flora by chronic illness, chronic inflammation, taking antibiotics, all sorts of things disrupt the good flora. And so some people will then go and take probiotics, and we've got other content on probiotics, but probiotics, sometimes when you first start taking them, you might get more digestive trouble because there's like a war going on with the good and the bad flora. in your GI tract. But generally speaking, if you can take probiotics and get past those first couple of days of a little bit of stomach troubles, the probiotics may help to take away some of these other problems as well. And although there's many other things that one can do, the other thing would be maybe not a food sensitivity or allergy, maybe not oriented towards your macros or the balance of your diet, and maybe not so much probiotic, but eating or drinking things that might just be hard for you to digest or poisonous to you. And so some people, Coffee makes everything better. Some people, coffee is literally a poison to their GI tract. For some people, they have sensitivities to things they might drink that they wouldn't think of. So I've had people where they can drink an herb tea like chamomile or lemongrass or something, no problem. But they have green tea, which is really supposed to be good for you, and they get really sick. Turns out they're allergic to some of the constituents of green tea or some people black tea. So watch out for sensitivity to the things we drink. And then there's things that may just be straight up Poisons such as alcohol. In a lot of cases of people with chronic digestive problems, if you're trying to do an elimination, either greatly lowering or removing alcohol sources can be a huge way to help reestablish the good flora, decrease inflammation in the GI tract, et cetera. All right, I'm Dr. A. I really appreciate these questions. Appreciate all you guys in the community, subscribers. If you haven't subscribed, please do. Like, share, do all the stuff. Check out these other videos we're gonna link here, and I'll see you guys on the next video.