Fertility and the Gut-Brain Connection: Understanding the Science and Solutions"

Your digestive system isn’t just responsible for processing your food. In fact, this very hard working system plays a vital role in so many bodily functions. One of which is playing a HUGE role in the state of your mental health and how you manage stress. Your hard working gut informs your brain about what's going on, all day every day. The communication between your gut and your brain is known as the Gut-Brain Axis and this is what informs your overall health both physically and mentally. 

There are a few parts to this. Firstly, let’s look at how poor gut health impacts how we absorb nutrients and minerals responsible for neurotransmitter and hormone production. 

One fun fact I love to tell my clients about is that the neurotransmitter serotonin which is known as the happy hormone and helps us to maintain a stable and happy mood is predominantly made in the gut. In fact 95% of serotonin is produced in the gut. Serotonin is not just there to make us feel happy though, it also helps us to control carbohydrate cravings and induces sleep. Without wanting to get too technical (because maybe you’re not a health nerd like me), the precursor to serotonin is tryptophan (well its a precursor to a precursor). This nutrient isn’t naturally produced on its own in the body meaning we need to consume it via the foods we eat. So we need to make sure we are eating foods like bananas, chicken, turkey, cheese, nuts and seeds to name a few. But thats just step one of the process.

The next step is making sure our gut can actually absorb tryptophan so it can be used to make serotonin. So when we have issues like leaky gut where the tight junctions have become looser and larger molecules are able to slip through the gut wall, this triggers an immune response causing chronic inflammation and an imbalance with hormones and microbiome. All of this impacts absorption and the amount of serotonin we are able to produce. When we have low levels of serotonin, we’re more prone to suffer from mental health issues like depression or anxiety. This makes managing stress harder.

Issues absorbing nutrients and minerals can also lead to other deficiencies like B12, iron, zinc and magnesium to name a few. And we really want optimal levels of these going into pregnancy not a deficiency. Getting pregnant isn’t the only objective here. Maintaining the pregnancy and having a healthy birth and beyond should also be a priority. All of this comes from restoring gut health and managing stress.

Next up is the role of our nervous system. Again, to keep it simple let’s focus on the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system. Both play a vital role in keeping us alive. The sympathetic nervous system (SNS) controls our fight or flight response meaning it prepares us for strenuous physical output and keeps us on edge so we can survive danger. The other, our parasympathetic nervous system (PSNS) is what helps us to rest and digest. It’s also what helps us to feel like it is safe enough to fall pregnant. 

Now as humans have evolved we are finding ourselves living in a state of SNS dominance a lot of the time. Our modern society promotes it. For a lot of us we literally never switch off. So if you are someone who is always rushing about, always on the go, always in overdrive trying to do it all, chances are your body believes you are in danger and it’s not safe for you to relax. It’s not a safe time for you to conceive. You are in a heightened state and “ ready to fight” mode.  

This is an issue because our nervous system is a communication pathway between the gut and the brain, so this message of shutting everything else down because there is imminent danger, is being fed back to your brain. Your brain then sends a message to your gut telling it to hold off digesting until the threat is over. And sometimes, your body never feels like the threat has passed. 

This overactive SNS really does a number on the state of your gut health. It increases gut inflammation which then causes an increase in intestinal permeability which impacts nutrient absorption and ultimately disrupts the state of your microbiome. 

So what does this mean for your fertility?

Increased intestinal permeability (leaky gut), inflammation and an disrupted microbiome impacts your hormones and ultimately your menstrual cycle. Oestrogen metabolism becomes an issue which causes low levels of progesterone because the balance is thrown off. SNS dominance also increases cortisol levels and because progesterone is the precursor to cortisol, when your cortisol levels increase, progesterone levels decrease. So, on many levels too much stress in a woman's life leads to a progesterone deficiency, adding to oestrogen dominance and fertility issues. This may mean that you’re not even ovulating because your hormones are so out of whack. Not what we want. No ovulation, no baby.

Systemic levels of inflammation and oxidative stress also impacts the quality of the egg and sperm.

So hopefully you can start to see how stress and gut health impacts your fertility. And not just your fertility. Studies tell us that the state of gut bacteria in newborn babies is a strong indicator of what their health will look like as they age. And given a baby inherits bacteria from the mother you can see how crucial it is that we are in tip top shape before we conceive.  

If you would like to learn more about taking charge with your fertility and optimising your health, I am launching a new holistic preconception program that will take you from feeling stressed and overwhelmed on your fertility journey to calm and healthy in both your mind and body so you can enjoy the process of trying for a baby. It does this by following a holistic 6 week preconception program that blends fertility yoga and meditation practices with evidence based naturopathic principles, giving you the tools and knowledge to move through your fertility journey in a more holistic and peaceful way.  If you would like to learn more, click HERE. 

And if you feel like you need one on one care, you can also book an initial naturopathic consultation so we can go a little deeper. We can order any tests we need and really see what’s going on for you.