The Gut-Fertility Connection!
Our fertility is so interconnected with our entire body and all of our systems. It's not just about our hormones and making sure our hormones are balanced. You achieve hormone balance by having good health, good overall health! This happens when all of your body systems are in balance and functioning properly.
To be honest, that is the difficult part about fertility. Trying to pinpoint the root cause of low fertility and not being able to get pregnant is. Everyone is different and when I work with my clients, I am working on their health from their head to their toes and everything in between! That’s what it takes to restore and optimize fertility's! There is no one size fits all solution or pill you can take.
Your gut microbiome is one of these key things that needs to be optimal to ensure your fertility is thriving! Your gut microbiome is said to govern our entire body and I am in agreement!
“All disease begins in the gut”
“All disease begins and ends in the gut”
What is the Gut Microbiome?
First, lets chat about what the gut microbiome is! I wrote a blog post all about the gut microbiome so I wont go into too much detail here!
Lets dive into some facts;
The gut microbiome produces 90% - 95% of your serotonin. [1]
The gut microbiome contains “...150 times more genes than our own genome..” [2]
The gut microbiome creates 70% of your immune system. [3]
Your gut microbiome determines whether you are overweight or lean. [4]
Over 70% of people in Canada have dysbiosis. [5]
The gut microbiome does so much for your entire body. We talk about “that gut feeling”, the “gut-brain connection” and so many other connections with the gut. This all stems from our gut microbiome. The more diverse your gut microbiome, the healthier you are!
Here is a list of some of the many conditions that begin in the gut. [6]
Anxiety
Depression
Infertility
Subfertility
Recurrent Miscarriages
Eczema
Rosacea
Psoriasis
Dermatitis Herpetiformis
Heart Disease
Dementia & Alzheimer's Disease
Parkinson's Disease
Autoimmune Disease
Migraines
Allergies
Asthma
Cancer
Chronic Fatigue Syndrome
Obesity
Type 2 Diabetes
Osteoarthritis
Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease
and many more!
**REMEMBER, the healthier you are overall, the better your fertility will be!!**
Your body is not thinking about reproducing if the foundations of your health are not solid. It is not a priority to reproduce but it is a priority to survive and your body, when unhealthy and out of balance, views getting healthy and back in balance as priority and will down regulate or completely shut down your fertility!
Ever since I first learnt about the gut microbiome, I was fascinated by it! At the time I was suffering with crohns, an autoimmune disease, and horrible hormone imbalances that I had been suffering my entire life. This finally made sense to me and I was totally obsessed with healing my gut. I had all the signs of dysbiosis (an imbalance in your gut microbiome) and knew that this would help me be healthy and feel amazing! With all of the personal testimonies and ancient wisdom, modern science and western medicine decided to jump on and start researching things that people in our community were talking about, and they began to find that everything we were saying was true!
3 Ways Your Gut Microbiome Impacts your Fertility
Inflammation
You don't have to have an inflammatory diseases or IBS for this to apply to you! Inflammation shows up in many different ways, such as brain fog, food intolerances, headaches, and many other mild symptoms that we, as adults, consider normal and just part of aging. That's just not the truth! Age does not impede function, inflammation does! Low or high levels of inflammation have a negative impact on your overall health, wellbeing, hormones and fertility!
Inflammation is linked to infertility and subfertility so it is important to think about!
Beta-glucuronidase
What the heck is this?!
It is a wonderful little enzyme that is produced by your gut microbiome and lives in your intestines! This little enzyme is responsible for metabolizing estrogen by basically eating in as our body is trying to excrete it.
So how does this impact your fertility? In a HUGE way! This little enzyme is a key player in keeping your estrogen and progesterone balanced! Many people, who do not have a balanced and diverse gut microbiome will not have enough bacteria to produce this little enzyme. Resulting in your liver trying to excrete excess estrogen into your poop but your body will reabsorb it instead.
Having a balanced gut microbiome will help make sure you have the perfect balance of estrogen to help you ovulate and then progesterone to sustain the pregnancy!
Thyroid
The thyroid is one power little gland located on the front of your neck. This little gland can shut down your metabolism, and wreak havoc on your fertility. We need all of our hormones, especially our thyroid to be functioning properly to allow all of our amazing reproductive hormones to function at the right time, in the right quantity to ensure women are ovulating and able to stay pregnant!
The gut-thyroid axis is a commonly talked about axis.[7] Your thyroid needs keep minerals such as iodine, selenium, and zinc to function properly. When you have dysbiosis (in balanced gut bacteria) you are not able to absorb these minerals leading to thyroid dysfunction.
If you can't absorb those minerals, your thyroid wont function properly and that will interfere with you ovulating. If you don't ovulate, you wont get pregnant!
These things effect your fertility no matter what method you are using to get pregnant. It is not just for the conventional way of making a baby ;) but also improves the success rate of IVF and all other fertility treatments. The healthier you are, the better the chance you are going to get pregnant!
My gut health was always at the forefront of my thoughts because I had a disease in my gut, crohns. I also had awful hormone imbalances, that at the time I was not as worried about. I thought painful periods were normal!! (gosh, have I learnt a lot!!). I knew all of the effects that the gut microbiome had on our entire health and I wanted to feel healthy and vibrant. I didn't want to rack up a hospital record of many of those awful conditions. I want to live long and healthy. I wanted this because I wanted a family. I wanted to be a mother and have a beautifully hectic life with my husband, dog and children. I knew I might not be able to get pregnant in my current health state and that scared the shit out of me. I began working on my gut health and things started slowly changed for the better!
Working on your gut microbiome is the single more amazing thing you can do for your health, especially if you want to get pregnant and have a healthy pregnancy and a healthy child.
Guess what ladies?
Your gut microbiome is passed from you to your child. This was another reason I took my gut health so seriously. I did not want to be responsible for bringing our baby into this world but setting them up for disease. It broke my heart to think about since I suffered my entire life, up until this point with chronic health issues. I didn't want that for me or for my future children!
How do you know if you have a healthy gut microbiome?
You may be thinking, “Do I have dysbiosis?”
I wrote a separate blog post all about determining if you have a healthy gut and what to do if you have dysbiosis!
Citations:
Strandwitz, Philip. “Neurotransmitter modulation by the gut microbiota.” Brain research vol. 1693,Pt B (2018): 128-133. doi:10.1016/j.brainres.2018.03.015
Zhu, B., Wang, X. & Li, L. Human gut microbiome: the second genome of human body. Protein Cell 1, 718–725 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13238-010-0093-z
https://drhyman.com/blog/2014/10/10/tend-inner-garden-gut-flora-may-making-sick/
https://www.viome.com/blog/14-surprising-things-you-didnt-know-about-your-gut-microbiome
https://www.canada.ca/en/public-health/corporate/publications/chief-public-health-officer-reports-state-public-health-canada/preserving-antibiotics
https://www.viome.com/blog/suspicious-gut-microbiome-19-conditions-linked-dysbiosis
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7353203/#:~:text=Gut%20microbiota%20also%20influences%20the,
altered%20levels%20of%20these%20minerals.
