The art of healing imbalances in the body, is to look at the root cause, and to become the detective in answering why something is happening, and this is often the case with hormone imbalance, and one of the key things I often find is the lack of bowel movements causing a knock on effect. As I started to write this article to highlight this issue causes by constipation, the foods I started to list reminded me a spat that bizarrely happened in the European Parliament….
I remember an article that came out of the European parliament about prunes and their laxative capability. The spat was between the Graham Watson a member of the European parliament at the time, and the European head of consumer policy, no they weren’t having a duel at dawn he was challenged to a prune-eating contest to test the laxative qualities of prunes.
The European Food Safety Authority had ruled that prune juice didn’t cause laxative effects, and that it had gone through significant scientific scrutiny for them to come to this conclusion. Graham Watson clearly a man who knew his prune fruit bowel moving capability, couldn’t believe this. He is quoted at the time as saying most of his constituents didn’t need it to be scientifically tested, they just knew, and so he put the challenge out. Nothing came of it, but prunes are still at the bottom of this article for you today.
Constipation can have profound impacts on detoxification in the body, when the bowel isn’t moving, daily waste is preventing from leaving the body, and this will impact significantly on your hormone balance, because you can not eliminate them effectively
The liver is the primary organ responsible for metabolising and preparing oestrogen for excretion. It does this through a well organised detoxification process involving two main phases followed by packaging the metabolites for elimination via bile into the bowel, or urine.
Although we may talk about one oestrogen there are actually 3, mainly oestradiol/E2, oestrone/E1, and oestriol/E3 which circulate in the blood stream. Excess or used hormones are taken up by liver cells which the liver inactivates making them more water soluble, and packages them so they can be excreted without being easily reabsorbed.
With bowel being a significant route of elimination, you will now understand that if its constipated and not moving every day, that this can cause a significant knock on effect with hormone balance. The microflora in the gut produce a series of enzymes that unpack oestrogen and enable it to be recycled back into circulation.
If the bowel isn’t moving the waste isn’t being removed, and that then creates a higher level of oestrogens stuck, and causes oestrogen dominating the hormone balance.
Constipation can be happening for a number of reasons:
- stress causing a change in the stomach acid
- poor bile flow
- nutrient deficiency
- dieting
- eating disorders
- gut dysbiosis
- thyroid function
- surgery
- not enough fruit and vegetables
- dehydration
Its generally a symptom of a deeper dysfunction, which then leads to increased metabolic dysfunction, because hormones are just one aspect of the knock on effect it can have.
When waste sits in the digestive tract too long you start to get an increase in inflammation, pathogens, opportunist bacteria, toxicity, and when they are stuck in bowel, now they have more opportunity to interact with the intestinal lining and burden detoxification pathways.
Your body was designed to eliminate it’s day to day waste, not store it. The body responds to the environment that we give it, adapting so it can keep functioning, it’s often not going wrong. Over time these adaptations take their toll in a variety of ways.
The question is are you actually eliminating every day? Not every other day, or every 3rd day or once a week or once a month. If you’ve been told that if moving once a week is normal to you then it’s fine, my experience tells me that it’s not. A healthy metabolism creates movement.
What can help?
- Hydration is key
- Hydrating foods:soups, stews, smoothies, juices
- If coffee helps to move your bowels, then the introduction of bitter foods will be helpful
- Eat your greens, these contain good levels of calcium, magnesium and vitamin K, and are very helpful for bowel movements, particularly bitter leaves.
- Ginger helps motility
- Artichoke is helpful for bile production
- Stewed apple
- Dried apricots
- Kiwi
- Natural yoghurt
- Kefir
- Sauerkraut and fermented foods
- and last but not least Graham Watsons favourite…..Prunes.
If the diet isn’t working then herbs and supplements are potentially needed to support the digestive process, and let me stress that no more than 3 soaked apricots or prunes, because no matter what the European head of food safety said, all hell can break out after the 3rd one.
