I often talk to clients about the impact impaired health has on their nutrient status.
If your gut health is impaired, you can't appropriately digest, absorb, and use nutrients from the food you eat.
This means that you aren’t what you eat, rather you are what your body can do with what you eat. And if you can't digest, absorb, and use nutrients from the foods you do eat, your perfect diet will not help you meet your goals, and feel better.
This is why I recommend to most of my clients that we conduct a comprehensive digestive stool analysis that explores digestive function and the gut microbiome. This testing allows us to see if you are digesting proteins and fats, and if you have the digestive enzymes to do that.
It also helps us determine the make up of your gut microbiome. For example, do you have imbalances, overgrowths, or infections in your gut? Problems like these also lead to impaired digestion.
When we are unable to get nutrients from the foods we eat, imbalances in the body develop and overtime lead to symptoms and health problems.This is because your body runs off of nutrients from the food you eat. These nutrients are fuel. When they are missing (for any reason), those imbalances develop, and symptoms and health problems follow.
Your gut bacteria also happen to be responsible for making a variety of nutrients. These include vitamin B1, Folate, vitamin B12, vitamin K, biotin, and short chain fatty acids like butyrate.
These vitamins play important roles in your body.
Vitamin B1 is important for energy metabolism.
Folate and B12 are important for methylation and therefore DNA and RNA production.
Vitamin K is important for blood clotting and bone health.
Biotin is necessary for healthy skin, hair, and nails.
And short chain fatty acids confer a variety of health benefits where for example butyrate communicates with the skin microbiome for healthy skin.
When we have gut dysbiosis, which is abnormal gut bacteria (imbalances, infections and overgrowths), not only do we have impaired digestion and absorption of nutrients from foods we eat, we also end up with problems making these important nutrients in our guts.
The key here is to not only explore gut health and the microbiome, we also need to look at overall nutrient status and that is something we can test for as well.
Once we understand what's happening inside, we can implement interventions appropriate for you.
Something to keep in mind is that this is not about just taking certain vitamins. All nutrients in the body work together. Supplementing one can actually push others into deficient states.
For example, many of us supplement with magnesium, which we need and most of us are deficient. But too much magnesium can lower levels of B1 even more and this leads to issues with energy metabolism.
Another example is COQ10, which if you’re on a statin medication, you need to supplement with. However keep in mind that increasing COQ10 can lower carnitine and B5. Carnitine is needed for metabolism of fats, and B5 is important for your stress response and actually people low in B5 tend to have premature greying hair! But if you increase B5, that can increase histamine production. This can be a problem if you have allergies, or skin rashes like eczema.
I digress…
What this means is that it's important to work with a professional that knows how to pull all the pieces together. It's also important to make sure that when you do supplement it is with professional grade supplements, and the dosing of them shown to be of benefit by research.
The supplements that you buy off-the-shelf do not fit this bill. This is why you aren't you getting the results you're expecting. Often these supplements do not contain the researched and beneficial forms of the nutrients, and they certainly don't contain them in the appropriate doses.
By the way, I started researching this subject because I have a client who is experiencing hair loss. There are a variety of reasons for this, however based on her presentation, I’m suspecting it’s due to her gut dysbiosis, which we tested for, and therefore impaired biotin as well as protein status (both important for healthy hair). Impaired gut health impairs the digestion and absorption of protein, this is something else we saw confirmed in her testing… we’ll be checking her nutrient status next.
Gotta love biochemistry!
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