 The nutrient deficiency that may cause occasional constipation. All right, daily bowel movements are a clear sign of healthy digestion and a finely tuned body. In fact, the shape and consistency of your poop can tell you a lot about your health. So how often should you be going? Well, in general, we have a fascinating reflex in our body called the gastrocolic reflex. That basically says that when food enters your stomach, you're actually stimulated to have peristalsis. That's that fancy word that your bowels begin to rhythmically contract to push food along your GI tract. And when food enters your stomach, that rhythmic contraction, the peristalsis, eventually reaches your colon and rectum, and your rectum gets the urge to contract and you have a bowel movement. So, normally, most people have at least one bowel movement a day. But it's not unusual or abnormal to have two or three bowel movements a day, usually accompanying when you eat. On the other hand, if you don't go at least once a day or you're going more than three times a day, something quite honestly is a miss. Now, it also matters on what's coming out your rare end. Are you giving pebbles birth into your toilet? Are you giving birth to a large coiled snake? Which I think is what you should be looking at when you look in the toilet and certainly other experts in bowels think that we should be seeing a large coiled snake like Dr. Terry Walls, who cured herself of severe MS by eating nine cups of vegetables a day and eating a remarkably low lectin limited diet. She sees a very large snake every day and most of us should. If your bowel movements float, most of the time that means your fat digestion is not proper and you should be potentially supplementing with digestive enzymes to help without. So if you're not going at all, there's something wrong. And most of the time it has to do with the health of your gut. So how does constipation occur? Well, interestingly enough, when you have irritable bowel syndrome or leaky gut intestinal permeability, it can present oddly paradoxically in one of two ways. One is frequent bowel movements, frequent cramping, frequent loose stools. That is, believe it or not, your intestines trying their best to get what they feel are irritating things out of your system. In fact, some of the interesting research at my medical school, the Medical College of Georgia recently showed that the reason beans are so good for treating constipation and frequent bowel movements and whole grains are so good has nothing to do with their fiber content, but it has to do with the lectin content irritating your bowel and it makes you express your bowels out. So the idea that it's helping you have bowel movements may actually be a sign that it's harming the inside of your bowels. Something to think about the next time you have wonderful bowel movements with whole grains and beans. Now the other possibility is that the constipation means that the wall of your gut is being damaged, the nerves of the wall of your gut are being damaged, and that your gut no longer is getting the proper peristaltic signals to have your bowels move. Interestingly enough, we now know that one of the prevailing symptoms of Parkinson's disease, which we think of as a brain disorder, is actually constipation. And exciting research in humans and in animals have shown that the reason people with Parkinson's get constipation is that the nerves in the wall of their gut are destroyed and they no longer have that peristalsis. And unfortunately the way those nerves in the wall of their gut are destroyed is because of lectins and leaky gut. So constipation paradoxically can also be a sign of leaky gut, just like frequent loose bowels and diarrhea can be a predominant sign of leaky gut. What about water? If you're consistently seeing pebbles around hard balls, we've got to look at the amount of water you're not only drinking, but also the amount of water that you're eating. Most great apes don't drink a lot of water, but they get water from the plants they eat. And the really cool thing about plants and the water they contain is that water has been through a filtration system that the plants provided in its roots. And so you're actually going to get a better bioavailable form of water by eating your water rather than drinking your water. So think about that the next time you're worried that you're not drinking enough water and yet you swear you're having a lot of water. Think about eating your water instead. That's going to do two things. Number one, it's going to get water in your digestive system, but the foods that you're eating that contain that water are loaded with prebiotic fiber that your gut buddies need to eat. Now here's the important point with that. Most people think that they're bowel movements, and I was trained in medical school that bowel movements are basically all the leftover food that you don't digest, all the waste, all the toxins that you don't want to absorb, and whatever's leftover comes out your rare end. We now know, thanks to the Human Microbiome Project, that that's not true at all. The vast majority of your bowel movement is actually living and dead bacteria. And so the more you feed your gut microbiome, particularly your good gut buddies that like prebiotic fiber, the more they grow and divide and have little baby gut buddies. And so what you're seeing in that large coiled snake is actually your gut buddies growing and growing and growing and eating the things that you've given them to accomplish that purpose. And that's why Dr. Terry Walls, by eating nine cups of vegetables a day, sees a coiled snake in her toilet every day. And that's what you want to see, because that coiled snake tells you that your gut microbiome, the good guys, are getting what they want to eat. And the bad guys don't eat that stuff. So they're literally crowded out of the neighborhood. They're nowhere for those guys to go. And the more proportion we have of the good guys, our gut buddies, the less bad guys, the better we are. Okay, so are there other ways to get good bowel movements? Well, yeah, we have to have prebiotics. An easy way to do that is eat leaves that have lots of prebiotics. I've talked over and over again about asparagus, about inulin-containing foods, which are the chicory family, radicchio, chicory, Belgian endive, interest to escarole. Interesting, I just got back from Europe. Once again, I was in Italy and France, never had a salad that didn't have radicchio and chicory or Belgian endive in it. In fact, the most famous salad in Italy, the tricolore salad, is radicchio, Belgian endive, and arugula, one of the cruciferous vegetable family. And so get those into your diet, your gut buddies will do it. Easy ways to do it, get yourself a powdered prebiotic fiber. Multiple ones on the market. I like to have prebiotic fiber with probiotics. Probiotics are the friendly bacteria. Now remember, you could take all the probiotics in the world, but if you don't give them what they want to eat, they're not going to help you. Other easy ways to feed your friendly bacteria, artichokes. Artichokes are loaded with prebiotic fiber and inulin. Now the great news is most stores now have frozen artichokes and frozen artichoke hearts. So preparing them is easier than ever. Throw them in your salad, throw them on a baking sheet, bake them. They're crispy and delicious. Okra has got so many benefits for your gut buddies, I can't begin to tell you, plus okra absorbs lectins. Check out some of my okra recipes right here on my YouTube channel. Green bananas, green bananas support the prebiotic needing gut bacteria. Throw some green bananas in your smoothing. Buy some green bananas at the grocery store. Peel them, they should be hard to peel. Throw them in the freezer and use them that way. They'll also make great green banana ice cream. Ok, sometimes this is a problem with probiotics. But remember, the vast majority of probiotics on the market never make it into your intestines alive. They're destroyed by gastric acid. So look for probiotics that are either spore forming probiotics or that are enclosed in a capsule that are enteric coated. That means they're not broken down in your stomach, but the probiotics are delivered to your intestine. One last thought on probiotics. The vast majority of probiotics that we consume from the health food store are not native flora. They actually will grow in your intestines, but they're basically on a vacation. They'll work in your intestines for a couple of weeks and then they'll leave. Which means you have to continuously replenish them. And I see so many people make this mistake. They'll buy some probiotics and they'll go, there, I'm done. I've got new gut bug and those guys leave. So you have to continually reinforce your probiotics. But once again, you've got to give them what they want to eat. Finally, magnesium. As a heart surgeon, I can tell you that magnesium is one of the two most important compounds to make muscles work in your body. The second one is potassium. But magnesium is critical for bowel health, for bowel movement. Many people know that milk of magnesium makes you have a bowel movement. That's because milk of magnesium is concentrated magnesium and lots of magnesium makes your bowels move. On the other hand, as I mentioned, as a heart surgeon, most people, even though they have a normal magnesium level on a blood test, are magnesium deficient. And we, when we do heart surgery, have to give people huge amounts of magnesium through their veins every four hours to keep their heart rhythm normal and to keep their bowels normal after heart surgery. So, magnesium is very useful for bowel health. There are many, many magnesiums on the market. There's magnesium oxide, there's magnesium aspartate, there's potassium magnesium aspartate, there's magnesium citrate. The important thing is, find a magnesium product that agrees with you. Take anywhere, women, three to five hundred milligrams a day. If you become tolerant to that, double the dose. There's no upper limit of magnesium unless you have severe kidney failure, but that's a totally different subject. Find the dose of magnesium that regulates your bowel movements. It's still one of the greatest tricks to help regulate your bowel movements. This next one is sure to surprise you. Interestingly enough, it's been shown that cultures that get adequate sun exposure tend to live longer.