Constipation Cures: 5 Natural Ways to Fix Your Poo

In the modern world, many of us can get challenged in the movement category.

No, I’m not discussing HIIT, chronic cardio or Crossfit movement, but instead…our bowel movements.

Looking for constipation cures? Look no further…

The Need for Constipation Cures

Our digestive systems have atrophied from sitting at desk jobs, over-sanitization, disconnection from soil, and foods that are excessively satiating.

We also may be guilty of eating less complex plant fiber which feeds our flora. This reduces our exposure to soil microorganisms.

We are also consuming gut-irritating foods and failing to engage in positions which foster activated pelvic and rectal muscles.

Fortunately with new advances, we can solve what technology has sadly presented us and our post-industrial colons.

1. Squat As Low As You Can Go​

You cannot get more Paleo than squatting.

This may fix nearly all uptight, cramped, non-ancestral neuromuscular GI issues.

Our daily defecation routines may be highly at odds with the ubiquitous porcelain throne. Four scientific trials have reviewed how ethnic and native squatting habits have profound benefits such as ‘defecographic measurements’, stool characteristics, and reduction in straining [2,3,4,5].

Put simply: the higher the seat height, the higher the average minutes required to release the colon contents.

One study reported ‘all the subjects registered a sharp reduction of time necessary for sensation of satisfactory bowel emptying in the squatting posture compared to either of the sitting positions’.

How can we mimic the squatting position in our modern, Western bathrooms?

Squatty Potty 101:

Anything that helps your body to imitate the squatting by raising your feet higher than the floor will work.

You could try two small stools, overturned trash cans – or you can purchase the Squatty Potty, which was invented expressly for this purpose.

2. Ditch Your ‘High Temp Heat Dry’ Setting Dishwasher

The surge of inflammatory bowel disease, allergies, atopy, autism and autoimmunity is hypothesized by a growing number of researchers to be a perfect storm of environment, genotype and lifestyle factors.

Our gut microvilli are tiny tendrils of flesh which have several responsibilities.

They are both the barrier to bacteria as well as the absorbent Bounty towel for sucking up rapidly broken down and digested food in the upper gut.

The microvilli are challenged when the primary defenders for protecting the mucosa are missing or extinct as a result from frequent courses of antibiotics, high sugar diets, refined O-6 fatty acids and fat emulsifiers.

However, a new culprit has been identified in the ongoing assault of the ancestral gut: machine dishwashers.

A new study from 2015 showed that machine dishwashing was associated with a markedly increased risk of allergic disease in children compared with those in households with hand washing.

Risk for disease was however was reversed or attenuated if the children were served fermented foods or vegetables and products directly purchased from local farms.

GO FARMACY: Bugs over drugs. The scientists speculated that the dirtier and less heat-sterilized dishware promoted heightened tolerance and immunity.[6]

3. Mind Your Microbes: Take a Poo Test!

The microbes that live in the human gut are one of the hottest frontiers of modern medicine. Bacteria, fungi and other microbes may play a role in weight gain, disease, and mental health.

uBiome is a direct to consumer company that offers 16S rRNA sequencing of your 100 trillion gut bacteria and other microbial realms on your body (sinuses, mouth, genitals).

There are a couple of ways to observe your microbiota: a beautiful, big, phat phylogenetic tree which delineates the interconnected relationships between phyla, families, classes, orders and genera.

A person’s gut phylogenetic tree provides a map to explore the overall gut composition. You can compare good vs. potentially bad flora and track the diversity at each node.

Christopher Kelly (NourishBalanceThrive) and I developed a uBiome app to visualize these elegant, evolutionary trees in your gut: uBiome Phylogenetic Tree app.

Compare your test results against the optimum, ancestral core.

Antibiotics come along with a host of (negative) side effects:

• Just one round of antibiotics may annihilate ¼ to ⅓ of human gut species.[7]
• Some microbiomes in some lucky people recover in a few weeks, some in a few years and some never at all.
•  Numerous studies now document causation or exceptional association between repeated use of antibiotics and the diseases of Western civilization: inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), irritable bowel syndrome, Clostridium difficile colitis, asthma, obesity, type 2 diabetes and celiac disease.[8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18]
• Antibiotics potently reduce protective ‘gut guardians’ whilst allowing pathogens to set up shop and ‘bloom’. The long term consequences include gut lining destruction, intestinal permeability, and metabolic endotoxemia.

On the other hand, over the last 20 years, growing evidence shows fiber (also known scientifically as ‘prebiotics’), probiotics and fecal microbiota transplants significantly improve or even reverse these seemingly-unrelated conditions.

4. Lick, Sniff, Eat, Breathe, Adore Your Soil and Soil Probiotics

Consume a variety, including:

• Bacteroides.
  Bacteroides and its cousin Barnesiella, are bacteria normally present in the body that produce vital nutrients and powerful vitamins [20]. It is no wonder when these Bacteroides and Barnesiella are low or deficient, our bodies are depleted of these vitamins and longevity enhancing nutrients.Both Bacteroides and Barnesiella are bacterial factories for fat-soluble nutrients known as menaquinones (MK), also known as Vitamin K2, that build strong hearts, blood vessels, skeletons, blood, and connective tissue [21, 22]. A high intake of MK-7, 8, 9 appears to reduce atherosclerosis in the EPIC trial [22,23]. The highest source of vitamin K2  is found in the superfood known as natto (slimy beans) which is fermented by another soil  bacteria, Bacillus subtilis. Natto is eaten by tiny Japanese centenarians with osteoporosis-free bones and plaque-free blood vessels [24].

• B. subtilis and B. clausii are known for their robust production of vitamin K2 which our ancestors have enjoyed for millennia in the form of various fermented native dishes and tasty condiments such as fish sauces, soy sauce, natto, African legume ferments, miso, Korean bean sauce ferments and kefir [25]. B. subtilis is found in soil based probiotics such as Primal Probiotics.  B. clausii is in fact one of the earliest Italian commercial probiotics sold more than 60 years ago, and is still being taken for GI ailments worldwide today [26,27].

Where do you find Bacteroides and Bacillus strands?

Where are these missing microbes found — Bacteroides, Barnesiella, Bacillus subtilis?

In nature: in babies, rats, chickens, mothers, food, and dirt. [30, 31]

If our exposures to the outdoors and fresh, organic garden produce and root vegetables are less than ideal, then several dirt-based probiotic products are available. Primal Probiotics contains a few strains of my favorite soil based organism (SBO) probiotics: Bacteroides and Bacillus subtilis.

AO Biome’s Mother Dirt is an environmental probiotic mist to spray on our hands, nose, faces and bodies. It emulates deep outdoor exposures and contact with a strain of bacteria found naturally in dirt and the natural environment.

Consider checking these out!

5. Fuel Your Gut Flora with Bionic Fiber

Modern guts lack diversity of flora secondary to fiber-poor diets, refined carbohydrates, sugar and antibiotics, leaving the most predatory strains to move into ‘empty homes’.

Bionic fiber is a modern blend of extracts and plant fiber which I’ve combined to emulate ancestral exposures of high complex plant fiber foods that we no longer forage or snack on. Acacia, pectin, psyllium and inulin promote higher levels of protective flora.

A friend of mine started taking Bionic Fiber prior to her appointment with me because her test results showed low levels of Bacteroides.

After Bionic Fiber, the flora showed a ‘bloom’ in the beneficial Bacteroides strains by 50% and a doubling of Barnesiella.

Both Bacteroides and Barnesiella are considered beneficial flora and love to eat and ferment yeast, fatty foods, and cooked, easy to digest complex plant fiber that are found in non-starchy roots, stems, leaves and soaked or sprouted plant seeds [32,33,34].

It is hypothesized by gut researchers that Bacteroides co-evolved mechanisms to consume a diverse and wide range of foods found in the human diet as civilized humans introduced cooked and easy to digest sources of protein, fats, plant seeds, and fermented beverages over 7,000 to even 7 million years ago [35].

Don’t neglect your Bacteroidetes or it may neglect you!

Table. Pre-intervention and post-intervention uBiome 16S rRNA analysis of gut microbiota, one month after starting 10-15 grams Bionic Fiber mixture (see source).

The Bottom Line

Although our gut flora may struggle with the mishaps of modern living, solutions abound.

We are in better positions more than ever to prevent gut flora extinction and even restore what has been lost.

Consider grasping what technology offers with stool testing, use of bionic fiber, soil probiotics (oral, mist) and regressing to less suds and sterilization for the purpose of enlivening our ancestral microbial partners.

May your health be as magnificent as your microbes.

Citations

1. Sikirov, Dov. “Comparison of straining during defecation in three positions: results and implications for human health.” Digestive diseases and sciences 48.7 (2003): 1201-1205.

2. Rad, Saeed. “Impact of ethnic habits on defecographic measurements.” Archives of Iranian Medicine 5.2 (2002): 115.

3. Sikirov, Dov. “Comparison of straining during defecation in three positions: results and implications for human health.” Digestive diseases and sciences 48.7 (2003): 1201-1205.

4. Sakakibara, Ryuji et al. “Influence of body position on defecation in humans.” LUTS: Lower Urinary Tract Symptoms 2.1 (2010): 16-21.

5. Rao, Satish SC, Renae Kavlock, and Sheila Rao. “Influence of body position and stool characteristics on defecation in humans.” The American journal of gastroenterology101.12 (2006): 2790-2796.

6. Hesselmar, Bill, Anna Hicke-Roberts, and Göran Wennergren. “Allergy in children in hand versus machine dishwashing.” Pediatrics 135.3 (2015): e590-e597.

7. “#AHS14 My Talk is Up: Re-Savaging the Gut, Solving the …” 2015. 14 Sep. 2015 <http://thegutinstitute.com/2014/08/ahs14-my-talk-is-up-re-savaging-the-gut-solving-the-identity-crisis-of-the-ancestral-gut.html>

8. Hviid, Anders, Henrik Svanström, and Morten Frisch. “Antibiotic use and inflammatory bowel diseases in childhood.” Gut 60.1 (2011): 49-54.

9. Kronman, Matthew P et al. “Antibiotic exposure and IBD development among children: a population-based cohort study.” Pediatrics 130.4 (2012): e794-e803.

10. Hildebrand, Hans et al. “Early-life exposures associated with antibiotic use and risk of subsequent Crohn’s disease.” Scandinavian journal of gastroenterology 43.8 (2008): 961-966.

11. Mendall, Michael A, and Davinder Kumar. “Antibiotic use, childhood affluence and irritable bowel syndrome (IBS).” European journal of gastroenterology & hepatology10.1 (1998): 59-62.

12. Slimings, Claudia, and Thomas V Riley. “Antibiotics and hospital-acquired Clostridium difficile infection: update of systematic review and meta-analysis.” Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy 69.4 (2014): 881-891.

13. Valiquette, Louis et al. “Impact of a reduction in the use of high-risk antibiotics on the course of an epidemic of Clostridium difficile-associated disease caused by the hypervirulent NAP1/027 strain.” Clinical Infectious Diseases 45.Supplement 2 (2007): S112-S121.

14. Azad, Meghan B, and Anita L Kozyrskyj. “Perinatal programming of asthma: the role of gut microbiota.” Clinical and Developmental Immunology 2012 (2011).

15. Khalkhali, Hamid Reza et al. “Effects of antibiotic consumption on children 2-8 years of age developing asthma.” Epidemiology and health 36 (2014).

16. Mårild, Karl et al. “Antibiotic exposure and the development of coeliac disease: a nationwide case–control study.” BMC gastroenterology 13.1 (2013): 109.

17. Mueller, Noel T et al. “Prenatal exposure to antibiotics, cesarean section and risk of childhood obesity.” International Journal of Obesity (2014).

18. Saari, Antti et al. “Antibiotic exposure in infancy and risk of being overweight in the first 24 months of life.” Pediatrics 135.4 (2015): 617-626.

19. Gillings, Michael R, Ian T Paulsen, and Sasha G Tetu. “Ecology and Evolution of the Human Microbiota: Fire, Farming and Antibiotics.” Genes 6.3 (2015): 841-857.

20. Suchodolski, Jan S et al. “The fecal microbiome in dogs with acute diarrhea and idiopathic inflammatory bowel disease.” 7.12 (2012): e51907.

21. Sakamoto, Mitsuo et al. “Butyricimonas synergistica gen. nov., sp. nov. and Butyricimonas virosa sp. nov., butyric acid-producing bacteria in the family ‘Porphyromonadaceae’isolated from rat faeces.” International journal of systematic and evolutionary microbiology 59.7 (2009): 1748-1753.

22. Ramotar, K et al. “Production of menaquinones by intestinal anaerobes.” Journal of Infectious Diseases 150.2 (1984): 213-218.

23. Bentley, RONALD, and R Meganathan. “Biosynthesis of vitamin K (menaquinone) in bacteria.” Microbiological reviews 46.3 (1982): 241.

24. Gast, Gerrie-Cor M et al. “A high menaquinone intake reduces the incidence of coronary heart disease.” Nutrition, Metabolism and Cardiovascular Diseases 19.7 (2009): 504-510.

25. Kanai, Takanori et al. “Diet, microbiota, and inflammatory bowel disease: lessons from Japanese foods.” The Korean journal of internal medicine 29.4 (2014): 409-415.

26. Hong, Huynh A, and Simon M Cutting. “The use of bacterial spore formers as probiotics.” FEMS microbiology reviews 29.4 (2005): 813-835.

27. Sorokulova, Iryna. “Modern status and perspectives of Bacillus bacteria as probiotics.”Journal of Probiotics & Health (2013).

28. Ubeda, Carles et al. “Intestinal microbiota containing Barnesiella species cures vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus faecium colonization.” Infection and immunity 81.3 (2013): 965-973.

29. Schubert, Alyxandria M, Hamide Sinani, and Patrick D Schloss. “Antibiotic-Induced Alterations of the Murine Gut Microbiota and Subsequent Effects on Colonization Resistance against Clostridium difficile.” mBio 6.4 (2015): e00974-15.

30. “7-Steps | The Gut Institute.” 2015. 11 Sep. 2015 <http://thegutinstitute.com/7-steps>

31. “Leaky Gut Kit” 2015. 2015. 11 Sep. 2015 <http://thegutinstitute.myshopify.com/collections/leaky-gut-kit-for-rapid-results-hardcore>

32. Thomas, François et al. “Environmental and gut bacteroidetes: the food connection.”Frontiers in microbiology 2 (2011).

33. Abbott, D Wade et al. “Coevolution of yeast mannan digestion: Convergence of the civilized human diet, distal gut microbiome, and host immunity.” Gut microbes just-accepted (2015): 00-00.

34. Cuskin, Fiona et al. “Human gut Bacteroidetes can utilize yeast mannan through a selfish mechanism.” Nature 517.7533 (2015): 165-169.

35. Moeller, Andrew H et al. “Rapid changes in the gut microbiome during human evolution.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111.46 (2014): 16431-16435.

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