Constipated? These FOODS are the Key to Healthy Digestion | Dr. Gundry

The foods that help with occasional constipation and diarrhea. All right, when it comes to constipation, we basically have two problems. Number one, and probably the biggest problem, is that we have almost no soluble fiber in our diet. Because of our highly processed food, we have stripped almost everything in our diet of any form of fiber, most particularly soluble fiber. 
Believe it or not, the vast majority of what constitutes our bowel movements is bacteria, not leftover waste. It's the bacteria that form the bulk of our bowel movements. And bacteria have to have foods that they eat to make more little baby bacteria. And those foods, unfortunately, are soluble fiber. I remember back in the good old days of the Atkins diet and now the carnivore diet, which is just a renamed Atkins diet. 
One of the biggest complaints of the Atkins diet was pretty impressive constipation and very small bowel movements. And that's because a carnivore diet or an Atkins diet pretty much deprives gut bacteria of. Of what they want to eat and grow with. And so naturally, your bowel movements become hard little pebbles. So getting more soluble fiber back into your diet is one of the first steps to fix constipation.

Where do you get them?

Well, just about any tuber you care to name has soluble fiber.

Jicama.

Jicama is easy to get in your diet. A lot of stores now already sell jicama in slices. Munch on it like carrot sticks. Use it as a dipping chip to get into avocado, guacamole. We'll talk about avocados in a minute. Sweet potatoes. Fennel root, which is actually a cousin of celery. Fennel root is great in salads. It's great sliced on its own. Fennel root is great roasted. Chicory, the chicory family of vegetables. 
I can't tell you how important that is in terms of soluble fiber. In most grocery stores, that red ball of some people call it Italian lettuce is radicchio. Radicchio is a great source of soluble fiber. Last night for dinner, I had radicchio wrapped in prosciutto, grilled, and then drizzled with balsamic vinegar. Talk about a taste delight. I had two friends over that had never had it, and both of them went crazy for it. Easy to do. Put it on a grill pan, throw it on your barbecue.

Same with asparagus.

Asparagus is another great source of soluble fiber. Asparagus is so easy. You can boil it, you can steam it. I like to grill it. Get yourself a grill pan if you live in a cold climate and do it indoors, light up the barbie and do it while you're doing other things.

So it's really easy to get this.

Stuff in your diet. Another exciting development in terms of non nutritive sweeteners, that is sweeteners that don't have any calories is allulose. Allulose is a true sugar. It's a rare sugar that has no calories. But excitingly, allulose was the first product approved by the FDA as a prebiotic fiber. And that means that allulose added to your coffee, for instance, or baking with it actually gives your gut buddies things.

They want to eat.

So these are easy ways to get soluble fiber back into your diet. Now, the second problem with our diet is, and I've done lots of videos on this, our soil is now nearly completely devoid of important minerals and micronutrients because of our farming practices. We've done intense agriculture. We've never allowed the soil to recover. 
We've killed off the soil microbiome. And interestingly enough, it's the soil microbiome that actually allows plants to absorb these nutrients if they were in the soil in the first place. So the foods that we eat may look like the foods our parents or our grandparents or our great grandparents ate, but modern produce has none of the nutritive value that it used to have. Now, there's two main minerals that really help with bowel motility. 
One of them is magnesium. Most people know that milk of magnesia makes you have a bowel movement. That's because it's concentrated magnesium. And interestingly, once all of us get a certain amount of magnesium in our diet, you will have an easy bowel movement. Now, finding that sweet spot is frequently challenging. You can add magnesium to your diet. And most adults are so deficient in magnesium that I have almost all of my patients take a magnesium supplement. There are a number of magnesium supplements out there, and quite frankly, they're all pretty similar, except some people will notice a benefit with one and not another. And half the time it's kind of.

Fun to play with.

As a general rule, women are far more sensitive to magnesium than men in terms of frequency of bowel movement. Some women are so sensitive to oral magnesium that I have you buy magnesium oil spray, which is readily available on the Internet and in health food stores, and you spray it on your legs or your body. It's not an oil at all, but it feels oily. And it is magnesium that is absorbed through the skin. 
And the great thing about it is it gives you the benefits of magnesium without necessarily having you run to the bathroom. I particularly like a combination of potassium and magnesium because potassium is the second mineral that's really devoid in our soil and our produce. And potassium and magnesium are really one, two punch for stabilizing even heart cell membranes. I use it a lot to prevent extra beats in my heart patients, atrial fibrillation in my heart patients. So potassium, magnesium, aspartate is readily available. Most of the time we have people take one or two a day, it's just part of their regimen. 
But you can get potassium in green bananas, but bananas are not a great source of potassium. That's an old wives tale. Avocados are a great source of potassium. So again, get yourself some jicama sticks, get yourself some guacamole that hasn't been made with tomatoes, and get your potassium from the guacamole and some fiber from the guacamole and some fiber from the jicama and you're well on your way to having relief of that constipation. Now, occasional diarrhea happens and it's often caused because your gut wall is irritated by lectins or by dysbiotic bacteria. And you're actually actively trying to get these guys out of you. 
Now what the heck is a dysbiotic bacteria? Well, as you know, you've got good guys in your gut and you got gang members in your gut, dysbiotic bacteria, and they're normal parts of your intestinal flora. And the good guys kind of keep the bad guys in check. And the bad guys are there. They're actually part of that tropical rainforest community. But you can get a disbalance between the good guys and the bad guys. 
Often it's because you have been eating antibiotic tainted food in commercial beef, commercial pork, commercial chicken, farm raised fish, that farm raised salmon. You have is loaded with antibiotics, or you took a course of antibiotics for whatever and you decimated the good guys in your gut. Interestingly, a lot of the bad guys are fairly resistant to the actions of antibiotics. So the good guys get killed off, that balance is disturbed, and now there's gang members shooting up the town. And your gut's response to that is, we got to get these guys out of us as quickly as possible. And it actually promotes putting water into your gut as a way of literally washing them down the drain. 
You got to give your good bacteria reasons to populate and grow and come out of hiding. And to do that they have to have prebiotic fiber. But here's the Important thing. I talk a lot about it in the upcoming book. You not only need prebiotic fiber to get these guys to grow, you actually have to have postbiotic messaging. And one of the exciting work that's come out of Stanford with the Sonnenberg husband and wife team is they took human volunteers. One group got prebiotic fiber. 
The other group got not only prebiotic fiber, but postbiotics, primarily in the form of yogurt. And again, postbiotics are what the bacteria produce when they eat. The prebiotic fiber group didn't have an increase in diversity of their bacteria, and they didn't have any change in their immune system response to those bacteria. 
But the group that got the prebiotic fiber plus the postbiotics had a greater diversity of bacteria, and their immune system was told to calm down. So it's the one, two punch that's actually critically important that's been missing in most of our education. So not only do you have to give these bugs what they want, but you got to give them a message to come out and eat this stuff. And those messages are postbiotics. 
And one of the easiest ways to get that is fermented foods. And it can be as simple as goat kefir, goat yogurt, sheep yogurt. It can be as simple as apple cider vinegar or any other vinegar for that matter. It can be as simple as making my fake coke with balsamic vinegar and sparkling water like San Pellegrino, or simply, you know, any other fermented food like cabbage, like kimchi, like sauerkraut. And the good news is, you don't have to have living raw sauerkraut to do the job. You're actually looking for what's in the juice, the byproducts, you. That's all you need. You need prebiotic fiber, but you also got to tell these guys to come out of hiding. And it's the signaling from fermented food.

That gets things started.

And that's really important to remember, because it's not just the prebiotic fiber.

What if you eat sauerkraut or kimchi every day for 30 days? All right, so sauerkraut and kimchi are.

Actually becoming readily accessible.

So what the heck is that? Well, if you're new to fermented foods, fermented cabbage has been around probably since the beginning of civilization. Kimchi, as many of you know, is from Korea and has been a staple of Korean cuisine for centuries. Typically, kimchi is made from cabbage. It can be made from radishes or scallions or cucumbers, or often a combination of these vegetables. Sauerkraut traditionally is made from cabbage. 
What exactly is the reason to do this? Well, several reasons. First of all, remember that long ago there was no refrigeration. And so a vegetable like cabbage, which is actually pretty good for storing in a root cellar, eventually goes bad. But if you use fermentation, you actually break down a lot of the sugars into compounds that preserve that food for an extended period of time. Also, the fermentation process produces a lot of hugely, we now know, beneficial compounds that are good for your health. 
So let's just talk about the fermentation process for a minute. Bacteria and or yeast eat sugar, Sugar. And they turn that sugar into ATP, the energy currency, through a process called glycolysis, which we call fermentation. It's actually a very inefficient process. You and I don't use much glycolysis. We use oxidative phosphorylation, but we won't talk about that today. So in the process of glycolysis, you convert these sugar molecules, among other things, into alcohol. That's why when you ferment grapes, you get wine that has alcohol in it. When you ferment yogurts, you actually get a small amount of alcohol in it through the fermentation. And certainly with kombucha, you do get a small amount of alcohol. 
But the big benefit is that you get what are called postbiotics. Now, postbiotics are the leftover products of fermentation. Those include the dead bacterial cell walls and or the dead yeast cell walls. And if you've read my new book, Gut Check, you know that these dead bacteria or yeast carry information, and they carry information down to your gut after you swallow them, regardless of whether they're living or dead. Now, that brings me to important point. You will see in, like, Whole Foods, you will see fresh sauerkraut or fresh kimchi. 
You will also find sauerkraut or kimchi in glass jars or even cans where they have been pasteurized. The great news is that it really doesn't matter whether those bacteria are living or dead. Honest. Most of the time when we eat living bacteria in these foods, those bacteria are killed by our stomach acid. They never make it past stomach acid, but the dead bacteria does make it past stomach acid.

And it turns out it's the cell.

Wall of the bacteria that actually carries the information that tells our gut microbiome kind of who's in the house. And that's really exciting news. This was first proven a few years ago by the husband and wife team at Stanford, the Sonnenbergs. And I've talked about the study again, but it's important to hear this study. We know that prebiotics are really good for friendly bacteria. It's what our probiotics, friendly bacteria, want to eat. 
And it makes sense that if we ate a lot of prebiotic fiber, that our friendly bacteria would be really happy and our friendly bacteria would make us really happy. Not so fast. The Sonnenbergs took some humans, they gave them a ton of prebiotic fiber, and they looked at whether or not they had improved gut microbiome diversity. The more different kinds of bacteria in your gut, the better. Let's leave it at that. 
The less types of bacteria in your gut, the worse. So we looked at the microbiome diversity, and all this fiber didn't change the gut diversity. And they looked at markers of inflammation, and all this fiber didn't change the markers of inflammation. And you go, well, what the heck? I thought that, you know, that's what was needed. So then they took another group. They gave them the same prebiotic fiber, but this time they gave them fermented foods. Now, it was primarily in the form of yogurt and kefirs, but the point is, these had postbiotics in them. And lo and behold, when the prebiotic fiber was combined with the postbiotics from the fermented foods, lo and behold, the gut microbiome diversity bloomed. 
Lots of new species, and lo and behold, the markers of inflammation plummeted. So, getting back to sauerkraut and kimchi, what's going on? Well, here's the one, two punch. You now have the fermented foods, you have the postbiotics, the dead bacteria, the dead yeast, all the other short chain fatty acids that are made with fermentation. Plus you got oodles of fiber in the various forms of cabbages, radishes, scallions that the gut bacteria then eat because they've been primed with the postbiotics and the fermented food. So that's what these ancient cultures obviously knew. Now, which came first? 
Did they know that that's why they were doing it? Probably not. We didn't have these really cool tests that we have now, but they, number one, knew that they could preserve foods that they otherwise couldn't store using this technique. And, oh, by the way, people through centuries who were eating foods preserved this way were clearly healthier than people who weren't doing it. The other thing that these cultures learn Almost from day one, that plant compounds that exist in a lot of foods to prevent us from eating them. And these are the plant defense compounds, like lectins, like oxalates. 
These were eaten in the fermentation process. That actually brings me up to one of the questions that we've gotten about kimchi. Much of kimchi has red pepper flakes in them. And as you know, the peel and the seeds of peppers are loaded with lectins. And yet, I tell you, kimchi. What gives? Well, it turns out that the fermentation process eats the lectins, even in the peppers. That's why hot pepper sauces that have been fermented are perfectly safe to eat, whereas hot peppers that haven't been fermented are not safe to eat unless you peel and de seed them. 
So that explains the paradox of why I would allow you to have those pepper flakes in your kimchi because they've been fermented and rendered harmless. Now, what happens if you eat this stuff for 30 days? First of all, please, please, please. If you're not used to eating fermented foods or you're not used to eating a lot of fiber, start slow. Your gut bacteria think fiber is delicious.

And they ferment that fiber and tell.

You how happy they are by producing lots of gas and bloating and may even change your frequency of your bowel movements. Now, the good news is, if you start slow, you will adapt to that, and within 30 days, you'll be up and running on a generous dose of sauerkraut and kimchi. But please, please, please don't eat the whole jar the first day. I don't want cards and letters coming in saying, what'd you make me do that for? I'm miserable. 
Start slow and then work your way up. Studies have shown that humans who have done this actually have remarkable improvement in inflammatory markers, have remarkable improvements in gut biodiversity. And that's what's going to happen when you eat these foods for 30 days. But please, please start slow. Also, be careful. A number of these products, because Americans in general don't like sour and tangy. A lot of these products, to get them more palatable, will put a remarkable amount of sugar into their products. Now, it's okay to add a little bit of sugar to start the fermentation.

Process, but it's not okay to add.

Sugar to make it palatable to you if it really bothers you, the tartness. What I like to do is I like to use allulose, which is a true sugar that has no calories, but it is a prebiotic in itself. And so use allulose to make that taste more to your liking. Again, read the label, look for added sugar content. It'll surprise you how many of these companies have added a lot of sugar to make you like the product. 
The other last benefit, particularly if it's made with garlic and scallions. I've talked a lot about this. There are some really cool compounds in garlic and scallions called allicin, which really helps repair the lining of your blood vessels and your blood pressure brain barrier, which is called the glycocalyx. And so anytime you can get these.

Compounds in you, the better. What is bloating? Well, the truth is, bloating is a natural consequence of bacteria eating the foods they want and fermenting them and producing gases. They're producing these gases, which we now call postbiotics. These gases are actually incredibly beneficial to your health. In fact, I devoted an entire book, the Energy Paradox, to try and convince you to step on the gas. Now, the whole idea that we should try to eat foods to prevent bloating is actually one of the dumbest ideas I've ever heard. Just this past week, a beautiful study was published showing that hydrogen gas, yes, that gas that the Hindenburg blow up with is incredibly important for giving bacteria that make butyrate, which is the holy grail of short chain fatty acids that I wrote about in unlocking the keto code, the substances they need to make butyrate, and that the more hydrogen gas that you have that you produce, the better you are at making butyrate. 
You think that's not important? Well, as I've written about before, a study in Japan looking at Parkinson's patients and mild dementia patients, they did not have bacteria that made hydrogen gas as compared to people who didn't have these problems. 
They had bacteria that made hydrogen gas. When they gave these individuals hydrogen water to drink, hydrogen dissolved in water, they got better, their symptoms improved. So the idea that we don't want to form gas, that's completely wrong. Now, you hear that gas production is a marker that you have small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. Sibo. Now, where did this idea come from? First of all, up until a very few years ago, we had no idea that there were any bacteria that lived in our small intestine. 
We knew that there were bacteria in our mouth. We knew that there were bacteria in our colon, our large bowel. We even knew that there was a bacteria that liked to live in our stomach, H. Pylori. But we really had no way of sampling whether bacteria were in our intestines or not. And I won't go into why we didn't know, but let's just say we didn't have sampling techniques. 
We now know that the small intestine is rich with bacteria. And a lot of those bacteria just so happen to be fermenters of postbiotic gases, gases like hydrogen gases like methane, gases like CO2, and gases like hydrogen sulfide. And I spent a whole book trying to convince you that these gases are.

Really good for you.

So the idea of trying to prevent this is actually counterintuitive. In fact, the fodmap diet, that diet that's designed to take away all these fermentable sugars, actually starves your microbiome to death. Absolutely, positively does. 
So I'm not sure why anyone would ever want to adapt a fodmap diet because that microbiome is gonna, what, give you not only long term health, but attention, please. Butyrate is actually what's going to help seal your leaky gut and keep it sealed by the action on the lining of our gut cells. So do not starve your cells to death. No. So you don't want to have drinks that are going to stop bloating. What you want to do is drink drinks that are going to support the health of your gut and stop drinking drinks that are going to destroy gut wall. 
Now, after all, a healthy gut, a healthy gut microbiome leads to more comfortable digestion, which is actually what you're trying to achieve. In fact, there are multiple published studies looking at people who had gas and bloating and who were told through tests that they had sibo. Half of them were put on a FODMAP diet, the other were given more of these digestible fibers. And can you guess what they found? Well, if you said there was absolutely no effect in the amount of gas and bloating or the symptomatology, regardless of.

What system was used, you'd be right.

So the idea of starving bacteria just doesn't click with studies. Now, before I reveal what drinks can help, I want to set the record straight on drinks that will not help you. In fact, these drinks will make you bloat even worse. 
Number one, wheat grass or barley grass. Now, a little bit of history. Where did the idea that wheat grass was good for you come from? Well, it actually came from Ann Wigmore, who was the founder of the Hippocrates Institute in Florida. Some of you may know that this was founded as a place for cancer patients. To get natural holistic treatments. And Ed Wingmore noticed that when dogs wanted to vomit, they ate grass. 
And she was convinced that her cancer patients, as part of their therapy, should vomit. Now, fun fact. Human beings cannot digest grass any more than dogs can. In fact, we can't absorb the nutrients from wheatgrass. Now, cows and ungulates have four stomachs. They have four fermentation chambers to break down the cellulose in plant walls and in grass. So they are what are called foregut fermenters, top of the gut fermenters. 
Gorillas and apes in general are mid gut fermenters. They do most of their fermentation in the small intestine. That ought to tell you something. We're primarily hind gut fermenters. We do most of our fermentation now in our colon. So the reason a gorilla has this giant belly is that his small intestine, or her small intestine, is devoted to being the fermentation site. So we have evidence that fermentation was designed to happen in the middle of our intestines in our small bowel. Now, interestingly, no animal can actually break apart the cell wall of a plant. Termites can't break apart wood. 
They actually have to have bacteria in their little guts to break down these plant compounds. So fermentation is actually part and parcel with breaking down plants. Now, why do we have much smaller guts than apes? It turns out that cooking fire heat is the only other known way of breaking apart the cell wall of a plant. And so cooking made pre digestion possible. So we had pre digested foods with cooking that allowed us to minimize that mid gut fermentation that great apes had. 
And in fact, there's very, very strong evidence that homo sapiens actually happened because of the advent of fire. So, yes, wheatgrass is a really great way to upset your stomach, but it's even worse than that. Wheatgrass contains gluten. So does barley grass. Gluten is one of the best ways to cause leaky gut that anyone has ever found out. Alessio Fazano from Harvard proved this when he was at the University of Maryland. 
That's the mechanism, one mechanism of causing leaky gut. So if you don't want leaky gut, which will really give you bloating, then get the wheat grass and barley grass out of it. A ton of my patients who are otherwise doing great, when we look at why they're not getting better, I can't tell you the number of people who are having a green drink with either wheatgrass or Barley grass as one of the ingredients. And when we get rid of that green drink, the. That was one of the culprits. Okay, now, number two, this is going to surprise you. In fact, most of these things I'm going to tell you will surprise you. Ginger. 
Ginger is thought of as calming for the stomach. But we do food sensitivity tests on our patients looking for IgG and IgA antibodies to 100, 200 different foods. And one of the things that popped up very quickly in all of these patients, and we've done thousands of them, is a great number of my patients with leaky gut are sensitive to ginger. They have antibodies to ginger. And when you eat something that's supposed to calm your stomach and calm your intestines, a number of my patients react to ginger. So if you're interested in ginger tea, adding ginger to your smoothies and you have gas and bloating, think about eliminating ginger as one of the culprits.

Number three, here's one of the big culprits.

Smoothies. Now, there are plenty of people out there who love their morning smoothies. Now, sorry, folks, smoothies are just not healthy and they are not going to help with bloating. First of all, fruit is loaded with sugar, especially the pineapples and bananas, which are common in smoothies. Interestingly enough, when we do food sensitivities, a huge number of people have sensitivities to both pineapples and bananas. 
In fact, it's interesting that these are tropical fruits. And almost all of us were never exposed to tropical fruits until about 500 years ago. They were not part of any of our ancestors diets. And it's fascinating to me that both of these fruits come up very high in the list of foods that people are sensitive to. So that sensitivity sets off a reaction in your gut that causes leaky gut. Now, let's call a spade a spade. 
Sugar is sugar. Sugar feeds bad gut bacteria. When your bad gut bacteria overrule the good, you'll get bloating and other digestive comfort. You will get cramping. And it's not the benefit to keep eating these things. Get it out of your system. Now, what about green smoothies? I am a huge fan of green smoothies because, number one, they have very little sugar. But here's another shocker that I talk about in the next book, Gut Check. There are a class of lectins that I haven't written about before because I didn't want to cause even more widespread panic. 
There's a class of lectins that are called aqua aquaporins, Water pores. And I don't have the time to tell you about them today, but spinach happens to contain an aquaporin that a number of people have an antibody to. And aquaporins are known to cause leaky gut, they're known to cause leaky brain, and they're known to cause damage to the myelin sheath if you have antibodies to them. Shocking. 
A number of my patients with Ms. When we tested them, had antibodies to the spinach aquaporin, and they were big spinach eaters, spinach smoothies, spinach salads. And eliminating spinach from their diet made a big difference. Now, I'm not telling you to eliminate spinach from your diet. Not everyone reacts to the aquaporin in spinach. But if you have an autoimmune disease or. Or if you have Ms. Or symptoms of ms, get rid of that spinach in your smoothie. Number four, lemon. 
Now, this is another shocker. I would have never believed this in a million years. Surprisingly, in my patients food sensitivity, lemons rank very high. It happens all the time. Now, is there an alternative? Yeah, you can use a lime. Most people who react to lemons do not react to limes. All right, what about drinks that can help? 
Well, first of all, have a shot of olive oil. There's more and more evidence that the polyphenols in olive oil support the growth of good bacteria and support the growth of bacteria that make butyrate. And the more butyrate you make, the healthier the wall of your gut, the better you feel. So have a shot of olive oil. Have some apple cider vinegar mixed with water, or have some psyllium husk. 
Psyllium husk, it turns out, may be the favorite food for your gut buddies. And there's some beautiful studies done out of Stanford University by the Sonnenberg husband and wife team that shows psyllium husks combined with fermented foods like yogurt or kefir really, really improve gut diversity and improves inflammatory markers in human volunteers. 
So have some psyllium husk dissolved in water. Better yet, take some basil seeds and dissolve them in water. You're going to get all this phenomenal gut buddy feeding fiber in the basal seeds and polyphenols as well. So three great options for your morning drink that'll actually improve your gut health.

Rather than hurt it.

And please, please, please avoid the fodmap diet.

It is lethal to the guys that.

You want in your gut. Believe me, it's true.

Thanks so much for watching. But don't go anywhere.