I can’t tell you how often a woman reaches out to me to do a free Gut Check Call because of digestive issues and I learn that she also has hormonal imbalances as well. This is so common because we need to 1) properly digest our food, and 2) eat a nutrient dense diet to build healthy hormones.
Because I see gut-hormones issues so often, I was excited to have my friend and fellow nutrition colleague, Abby Vallejo on my podcast recently (Episode 21 on Spotify and You Tube). Abby’s story is one of childhood gut dysfunction, followed by hormonal imbalances driven by long term birth control pill use.
Abby struggled with a reactive stomach from a young age, constantly feeling nauseous after meals and unable to eat to a point of feeling full. The solution her doctor wanted to offer her was Prilosec, which luckily was not the route Abby’s mom chose to go to resolve her gut issues.
“I was just a kid trying to make sense of it all. I remember managing it by eating only until I was 75% full, thinking that was normal,” Abby recalls as she tells her story. “But deep down, I knew something wasn’t right.”
It wasn’t until Abby hit her mid-twenties that her digestive issues escalated into more severe symptoms—bloating, diarrhea, and a constant need to run to the bathroom. And then came the birth control pill. Like many young women, Abby was prescribed birth control pills to “regulate” her cycle, but it only triggered more issues—hot flashes, night sweats, bone density loss, recurrent UTIs, and a never-ending cycle of antibiotics and yeast infections.
Abby’s turning point came when she began connecting the dots on her own, realizing that her body wasn’t reacting to random factors—it was responding to her environment and the synthetic hormones she was taking.
“I finally went off the pill and began to research how hormones work and how much they impact our health. It took years, but I finally reclaimed my health by balancing my hormones and healing my gut.”
Can Gut Issues Cause Hormonal Imbalances?
Yes! I see this all the time in clients. Sometimes clients get referred to me who have worked with another functionally trained nutritionist who only ran hormone testing on them and didn’t even think about the gut. In my world, the health of all parts of the body starts with the gut, and also with digestion.
In order to build healthy hormones, the body needs 1) a nutrient dense diet, containing whole foods appropriate for you (meaning they don’t cause inflammation and immune activation) and 2) the ability to break those foods down well in order to nourish the cells and support a healthy metabolism (which is basically the body’s engine) and 3) a balanced gut microbiome (which really just means mostly good bacteria without a lot of bad gut bugs running amok).
You can run hormone testing all day long, and take hormone replacement therapy all day long, but if you don’t factor in the 3 nutrition and gut based components above, you are basically just band-aiding your hormonal issues.
What is the link between hormones and gut health?
Here’s the thing: hormones are built mostly from the healthy fat your consume in your diet and absorb in your digestive system. That means, you need to eat the right kinds of fats, in their most unaltered, purist form. This is something I teach all of my clients in depth because there is a lot to learn about this topic. Here’s the cliff notes version of which fats to absolutely avoid, because they destroy hormone health: vegetable and seed oils that come from plastic bottles on grocery store shelves. These would be the canola, vegetable, soybean, safflower, peanut types of oils. These fats are easily damaged by heat and light exposure and often extracted with chemical solvents - none of which is good for the body. They are not the healthy building blocks of hormones.
The other part of this equation is your liver. Your liver makes a digestive fluid called bile, which mostly works on breaking down the fat in your food. In order for the body to build high quality bile, it needs sufficient healthy fats, in their purest, most unadulterated form. Guess which fats don’t build quality bile? The canola and vegetable oils. When we consume mostly these fats in our diet, our bile gets sludgy and crappy and it becomes harder to actually break down all types of fat. This can set the stage for hormonal deficiencies and imbalances. The low-fat diet era (a la Weight Watchers) did not help this cause, because not eating enough fat will lead to depleted bile production over time as well. Many of my clients in their 50s and above still believe they need to follow a low fat diet to lose weight.
The Bottom Line
Even if hormonal issues are your top complaint, it would behoove you to investigate your gut function. It would also behoove you to work with a practitioner who helps you find a dietary approach that truly optimizes your health.
If you are interested in balancing your hormones from a gut-centric, nutrition-centric lens, the first step is scheduling a free 15-minute Gut Check Call with me.
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