Living A Full Life

Poop Talk: Why Going Every Day Is Non-Negotiable

• Full Life Chiropractic • Season 3 • Episode 25

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Millions of Americans suffer from bloating, constipation, and brain fog without realizing their gut is the root cause of these widespread symptoms. Dr. Enrico Dolcecore dives deep into the science of digestive wellness, explaining why gut health influences everything from your immune function to mental clarity and even your emotional state.

The most shocking revelation? We should all be having daily bowel movements from infancy through adulthood. If you're not going every day, your body is telling you something's wrong. Dr. Dolcecore breaks down the four primary factors that sabotage gut motility: poor diet, dehydration, lack of fiber, and insufficient movement - then provides practical solutions for each.

Rather than just focusing on what to eat, this episode reveals how to structure your entire day for optimal gut health. Starting with warm lemon water and light morning movement sets your digestive system up for success, while avoiding the standard American breakfast of sugary cereals and carbs prevents the sluggishness that plagues so many. You'll learn which foods nourish beneficial gut bacteria (hint: fiber and fermented foods are your friends) and which common foods and medications actually damage your gut lining.

The practical advice continues with a complete daily meal plan that makes healthy eating accessible and delicious. From protein-rich breakfasts to fermented foods at lunch and dinner, you'll discover how simple changes can transform your digestive health and, by extension, your overall wellbeing. For those needing extra support, Dr. Dolcecore explains specific supplements that target common gut issues like poor enzyme production or damaged gut lining.

Whether you're struggling with chronic digestive problems or simply want to optimize your health from the inside out, this episode provides a comprehensive roadmap to better gut health. Share your gut health journey with us and leave a review to help others discover these life-changing insights.

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Speaker 1:

If you've ever dealt with bloating, constipation or brain fog, you might not realize your gut is the root cause. Today we're breaking it all down, literally and figuratively. Welcome to another podcast of Living a Full Life. I'm Dr Enrico Dolcecori and we're going to continue on with gut health. The questions keep coming. Apparently, this is a big topic for many people. Many people deal with a lot of issues and side effects from unhealthy guts and as we go through the science and we went through the brain gut axis, the vagus nerve, the gut motility microbiome we've had a lot of gut podcasts recently and in the past and we're going to go into really what is a good, healthy diet for a good, healthy gut. That's what today's topic is all about.

Speaker 1:

Having a healthy gut is crucial for total wellness, mental clarity, immunity and even your mood, so it links to so many other things in our overall health from day to day that gut health is so important. It really matters. Your gut and your entire digestive tract have trillions of bacteria in them that make up the gut microbiome, and we talked about the link between immune function and the gut. 70% of all the cells of your immune system are in your gut, so your immune system are in your gut. So your immune system primarily is your gut, and the brain-gut axis is how we control mood, emotion, fatigue and behavior. All go between the gut and the brain as well. Energy levels are directly correlated to gut health, like your mood, and serotonin production is all done in the gut. It's a neurotransmitter that stimulates the brain's activity from the gut Amazing connection that we have there. And then, of course, skin health, inflammation, detoxification all these things are primarily made through the gut and its health. Poor gut health can have many signs from obvious symptoms like gas, bloating, irregular bowel movements, but even things like cravings, brain fog, fatigue and food intolerances can all be related to an improper gut dysbiosis or improper gut health.

Speaker 1:

So one of the top things to look at is gut motility. You can actually measure this with medical procedures for this, where you eat certain fibrous foods and they measure how long it takes for your body to digest that food, to come out through waste and during based on that time, it can be either healthy or unhealthy. So gut motility tells us how well things are moving through your digestive tract and how important it is to have daily complete bowel movements. Now for some of you we're going to hit the pause button. Yes, every single day we should be having a bowel movement from infant all the way from being breastfed on your first couple weeks of life. We're trying to build the biome and develop motility that's healthy and should be sustained for the rest of our lives. Infants will fill a diaper at least once a day, not urine just by waste products once a day, and if they're not, we consider them constipated or colicky right from early aspects of life. So if it's a problem for an infant, non-daily bowel movements are a problem for adults as well. So we need to have daily.

Speaker 1:

The highlight of that sentence is daily bowel movements. It's so common for people to be coming into our office, even as functional medical doctors and chiropractors coming into our office, saying I don't go to the bathroom for three, four or five days, maybe once a week, and they live their life like that and they wonder why. It relates to a lot of stress being backed up, constipated, fatigue, bloating, all these things lying back because of an improper gut biosis or some other things that might be going on. So the things that slow down the motility over time is poor diet. This is probably the most common thing for children. Why would their gut start to slow down? It's usually because of poor diet. This is probably the most common thing for children. Why would their gut start to slow down? It's usually because of poor diet. So a breastfed infant it's got the best diet on the planet, is pretty much getting breast milk and all the proteins that come from that, digesting it, and then we start to introduce foods and as we introduce foods, bowel movement should pick up because now we're introducing fibers, carbohydrates and other things and fats to the diet that may not have been there before. So that should actually increase motility. If it decreases it or causes constipation, then we can pinpoint exactly what foods it is that's causing it and you'll see it's usually processed foods. Very rarely does a fruit or a meat back a child up. It can, it absolutely can, but it's it's rare.

Speaker 1:

Dehydration is another reason. We just don't drink enough water every day, probably the second most common reason why people don't go to the bathroom they just don't drink enough water. They're not hydrated properly. It's a low and then a low fiber diet. And number four is lack of movement. Movement is key in motility, both for our gut system, our cardiovascular system, our lymphatic system, our venous return system. All these systems require movement in order to create that flow. Even cerebral spinal fluid requires movement to move properly and wash and clean through the body and go back and forth on the lymphatic system and cerebral spinal fluid. So movement is so important with all this. So you think this podcast is all going to be about a high fiber diet, but food is going to be actually the least thing we talk about here today, because it's the other things that are leading to poor gut health. But let's talk about the diet. Let's talk about what an ideal day looks like and how we should base our diet around this. It should come with habits, actually more than just the foods that we focus on.

Speaker 1:

You need to start your day right, and starting your day right may be priming yourself and your gut for good health, and the people that are listening to this that may take this into consideration are ones that are suffering from poor gut health. The rest of us are like, hey, whatever, I'm not going to change my ways because I'm not suffering, and typically it takes pain to make change for people. It takes some kind of symptom or something that go wrong. We take our good health for granted and we wait until things go awry to make changes. It's just normal human nature. So for those of you suffering, I hope this podcast brings in some tips and strategies to help you immediately.

Speaker 1:

So we'd start our day off with warm lemon water or ginger tea to stimulate digestion. It's a great way. So you pour some water not cold, lukewarm room temperature squeeze some fresh lemon into it, drink that glass as your first glass of water of the day. The alkalinity creates an electrolyte balance in the water and increases hydration right off the bat, and your gut loves absorbing that. Then we need to start the day with light movement. We have to move around. I have to go for a walk. Take the dog out for a walk immediately. A five-minute walk, 10-minute walk, whatever it takes. Immediately during the morning we don't. We get up, we rush, we create a stressful environment to get things packed, to get out the door, to sit in the car for half an hour in traffic to get to where we need to get to, or an hour, and then we go and sit down and work and there's really no movement to start our day. So we're starting our day very stressful. And then avoid heavy carbohydrates or sugars first thing in the morning.

Speaker 1:

The standardized American diet has been whitewashed into believing that cereals, muffins, pancakes, carbohydrates are the way to start your day. It's the exact opposite. We should not be using heavy sugar or heavy carbohydrate in the morning. Aside from a small portion of fruit, we should be starting our day with protein, high protein and a little bit of fat, and maybe having a little bit of fruit. If you want to grab a little bit of fruit, some strawberries, some blueberries, half a banana, whatever it is. Just grab a little bit of fat and maybe having a little bit of fruit. If you want to grab a little bit of fruit, some strawberries and blueberries, a half a banana, whatever it is. Just grab a little bit of fruit. For some carbohydrates in the morning, that's fine, but it's the high protein, maybe moderately high fat morning that we want to start our gut with. It takes a little bit longer for it to digest it, there's more nutrition in it and it promotes gut motility right off the bat. There you go, that's how you start your day A nutritious breakfast that is low in carbohydrates and sugar and gets some movement in to stimulate gut motility First thing in the morning.

Speaker 1:

That's the key here, not a three o'clock in the afternoon, workout at the gym on the stair stepper. That's good too. It has its benefits there too. It's good for overall health, but it's not stimulating the. There's reasons for the madness here. Focus on these gut-loving foods every day as well.

Speaker 1:

Fiber Fiber comes from fruits, berries, apples, veggies like broccoli, spinach, legumes, oats, chia seeds. These are high-fibrous foods that you should be adding to your diet. Fiber is the feel. It feeds good bacteria and promotes motility. That's how it actually works. Fiber has no to little nutrition value for us. We consume it through the fibers in foods, usually plants and vegetables and fruits. That's where it comes through. It's the fibers that make up the plant or the fruit, like in an apple, and when you eat that, it has not much going on for you. It shouldn't accumulate or cause constipation. What it should do is feed the good bacteria. The good bacteria love fiber. It's their primary food source, aside from simple sugars, and they eat that, and the waste products help create motility in your gut. It's a symbiotic relationship with these bacteria.

Speaker 1:

The good guys that we talked about primarily eat fiber. Number two is adding some fermented foods to your diet. This can be in any point of the day, with anything. It helps replenish and support the microbiome. We talked about this thoroughly through some previous podcasts. Sauerkraut, kimchi, kefir podcasts Sauerkraut, kimchi, kefir, yogurt, dairy-free if you're intolerant miso, miso soup, kombucha all of these things are fermented foods with a high concentration of prebiotics and probiotics. They are great in replenishing, feeding the gut properly and all the good guys.

Speaker 1:

We talked about the gut in my analogy as the military system in the body. Right, there are this huge military of good guys, but sometimes some bad guys get in there too. We don't want to be feeding the bad guys because they will proliferate. Bacteria grow very fast, same with viruses. So that's why we want to be eating a healthy, fibrous, rich diet to supplement the good guys and not feed the bad guys with simple high fructose corn syrup sugars. Any bacteria that eats sugar really fast is usually pretty bad. Anyone that eats, you know, protein really fast is usually pretty bad. Those are the bad bacteria. If they can break down human flesh, they're bad, right. They're the bad guys. That's the issue between that. So the good guys are typically fiber-based bacteria and biome type organisms.

Speaker 1:

We want prebiotic rich foods as well. You know the food for probiotics garlic, onions, leeks, bananas that are slightly green, not super sweet. Asparagus, chicory root these are all prebiotic rich foods that can be added at any time. Maybe cook with some garlic and onions, maybe add some leeks every now and then for some fun. Banana is great, the green bananas they love that sugar, that type of fructose that comes from the banana and that feeds the gut as well. And then we want to add healthy fats. We won't usually cook with healthy fats. Avocado oil, avocados, olive oil, wild salmon, flaxseed, adding a fish oil to your diet All these things help with nutrient absorption and motility in the gut.

Speaker 1:

And then, lastly, hydration. Back to this from where we started, critical for keeping things moving. It's typically a dehydration issue for most people, even children, if they're not going to the bathroom every day, at least once a day, then and we're talking about number two, not urine Urine you should be going and kids should be going to the bathroom five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10 times a day, depending on how much water they drink, but going with a proper bowel movement, at least once a day Children maybe might be going twice a day Make sense. That's the recap. For that we want to be focusing on fiber, fermented foods, prebiotic rich foods like garlic and onions, healthy fats and hydration. That's the fundamental basis for a good gut health.

Speaker 1:

What we want to limit is a few things like ultra-processed foods Always lead to bad things. When they're ultra-processed and in a box, they're just not going to have any nutrition to them, first of all, and second of all, they have no real benefit in the gut, the bacteria don't know what to do with it. Your gut doesn't know what to do with it. Nobody knows what to do with it. It's not real. Then we have refined sugars, the ones that are highly processed. They're usually high sugar content. Artificial sweeteners. No one knows what that is. Your bacteria don't know what that is. Your gut doesn't know what that is like. Sucralose and aspartame Alcohol body really doesn't know what that is. It's just a poison. Drinking alcohol kills off some bacteria.

Speaker 1:

Seed oils and fried foods when we eat these types of foods, nothing on the planet knows what to do with them. When you rancidly deep fry food in rancid oil like canola oil, and you coat the food in that, it's cooked in that and you eat it whatever it is whether it's fried potato, whether it's fried calamari, whether it's fried whatever and you put that into the body, the gut and the microbiome don't know what to do with it. It's not real. It doesn't exist. It doesn't exist in the universe to have deep fried anything or rancid seed oils.

Speaker 1:

Alcohol Alcohol is fermented food gone too long. That's where alcohol comes from. So eating fermented food is great for there's so much great bacteria in there. You don't want to be eating spoiled fermented fruits. You know what I mean. Have you ever seen a banana start to rot or an apple start to rot? That's the fermentation process. If you let that go for too long, you'll get an alcohol die off from that as well Controlled. When we do that, we actually get alcohol and ethanol. But what we want to do is not get to that point. When we eat our foods and typically you won't it comes with an odor, comes with a smell, tastes horrible because the bacteria in it. No one eats spoiled food, so limit those for good gut health.

Speaker 1:

Gluten and dairy you want to test these and remove them from your diet to see if it helps. That's where we start a lot of families off, especially children and even adults. We're like, hey, try to go gluten-free, dairy-free, and just do it for 14 days. See what happens. Do you feel any better? It takes about five to seven days to kind of get it through the system and then that second week you'll see if you notice any differences in gut motility, bloating, discomfort, and we can start from there. Testing is easier allergy testing, blood testing to see what the allergens are. But allergy versus sensitivity can be two different things. You may show up with no allergies and have lots of sensitivities that don't show up on the test.

Speaker 1:

So elimination diets are great at trying to find the root cause to diet issues and then eat mindfully. You know, chew your food thoroughly. Some of these kids just swallow chunks of food and makes it harder for the body to digest. That can be a simple thing of just masticating the food more to help take pressure off the gut and its digestion. Don't eat on the go. You want to take time to. Don't eat food in your car when you're driving. I mean it's hard to digest that when you're in a stress response, in a fight or flight response, you're not in a rest or digest response. And just try stop eating two to three hours before bedtime Gives that decline in peristalsis in the gut time to get ready for nighttime and may give you time to have a bowel movement before bed. If not, you go to sleep and you get all the benefits of sleep, and when you wake up in the morning, maybe some coffee might help you move and get the motility going there as well.

Speaker 1:

Now there's some things we can do on top of a healthy diet and movement that can help with our gut, and it comes with supplementation. If we need these things digestive enzymes, magnesium, citrate, probiotics that are strain diversity, l-glutamine for gut lining repair, bpc-157 peptides there's a few supplements we can look into. We don't want to take all of them all at once. We want to introduce them with a strategy. So if we get heartburn, difficulty eating, bloating, getting full fast, we may have an enzyme issue where digestive enzymes can play a huge role. Eating them right before a meal to help digest food, that's one. Magnesium citrate stimulates peristalsis and movement of gut motility. Caffeine does as well.

Speaker 1:

Probiotics we talked about this thoroughly over the last three podcasts help sustain proper biome and L-glutamine helps heal gut lining. So there's a few different things that are going on there. One are we able to digest food through the enzymes that we naturally produce through our liver and bile? Two, are we having a gut motility issue or peristaltic issue? Are we having a biome issue and we need probiotics? Or do we have a damaged gut from years of eating poorly or alcohol consumption? Or even pharmaceutical consumption A lot of the pharmaceutical things that people take diabetics that are on metformin and other drugs, cholesterol medication a lot of different ones.

Speaker 1:

Nsaids. Nsaids are the number one gut lining damaging drugs that are most common in our society because they're over the counter and each time you take one it causes a little bit of gut lining bleeding, even with a simple Advil. Taking an Advil or a Tylenol will cause stomach bleeding immediately. Not enough for you to see through your stool or to throw up, but that's the damage that it instantly creates on the lining your body repairs. But if you're taking these three times a day continuously, this is where we can lead up to serious gut damage over time. So there's many different reasons for this Alcohol consumption, poor diet, nsaids, pharmaceuticals a lot of reasons why this stuff happens. And the past is the past. Now is now. Now is where you can take control and make some changes, and that's the things that you can do to try and help.

Speaker 1:

So a typical day of eating let's go through breakfast, lunch, maybe a snack, some dinner and some hydration. For breakfast, scrambled eggs with spinach, some avocado maybe throw some sauerkraut in there or onions, or cook with some garlic. Or chia pudding with berries and almond butter these are all fantastic ways to start your day. Whole grain toast with some almond butter on it, that's a great little start to the day as well. Lunch, a quinoa bowl or a brown rice bowl with grilled chicken, roasted veggies, olive oil, drizzle kimchi on the side. You're adding sour.

Speaker 1:

Some more fermented food there Dill, dill pickle. You could add that that's fermented food too. That's good Not as good as the rest of them, but that's a fermented food that's great. Snacks apple with almond butter or peanut butter on a green or a green smoothie with flaxseed and greens and fruit in it. You could do that as a snack. Dinner, wild salmon, beef, steamed broccoli, sweet potato with ghee Ghee is a type of butter.

Speaker 1:

And then for hydration, herbal teas, lemon water, filtered water, electrolytes, lmnt. Herbal teas, lemon water, filtered water, electrolytes, lmnt, emergency liquid IV. These types of things to keep you hydrated once a day can help in combination to promote a healthy gut and motility. So good health, good gut health, comes with good whole body health. I mean the things and strategies that we talked about today was mostly about motility and movement. So I invite you to add more fiber, fermented foods and hydrate every day and see what happens with your overall gut health. You know even journaling and documenting bowel movement. I know it sounds funny, but keeping notes somewhere in your phone of the motility and how often you go and making sure it is every 24 hours can be eye-opening and show that that's not normal to be going every three days.

Speaker 1:

So review the gut-brain connection that we talked about on the last episode. Maybe go back a couple episodes and listen to the probiotic one that we talked about and the microbiome and piece this all together and what you'll notice is we've strained together a phenomenal gut health trilogy or maybe it's four in a row of how to really improve your overall gut health through this, and we encourage you, if you have any questions, to reach out to us at info at fulllifetampacom. Our functional med doctor, dr Hafer, loves going through this stuff, and a lot of it can be done virtually and tests can be done delivered straight to your home. It's great to get a gut motility test. A stool sample, an allergy test whatever it is, can bring insights to finally conquering poor gut health. So if you need help, we're here for you. Stay well, stay healthy. Thanks for listening. Share this with other subscribers and leave a review. Helps other people find our podcast. Have a great week.

People on this episode

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Dr. Enrico Dolcecore

Host
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Dr. Christine Hafer

Co-host
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Dr. Crystal Corona

Co-host