How Your Childhood Antibiotics Could Be Causing Period Problems Now | Ep. 138

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I'm Bridget Walton, a Women's Hormone Coach helping ambitious women ages 25-40 naturally restore hormone balance, fix irregular periods, feel confident in their fertility, and resolve gut health issues without restrictive dieting.

If you struggle with missing periods, PCOS symptoms, bloating, or unpredictable cycles, this women's health podcast will teach you how to support your hormones through strategic nutrition and lifestyle changes that actually fit your busy life.

On I'm Hormonal, you'll discover natural solutions for period problems, learn how gut health impacts your hormones, and get practical hormone balance tips from a functional nutrition perspective - no more guessing what your body needs.

This episode explains how previous courses of antibiotics could be impacting your gut health even if it's been a decade since you last took them. Unpredictable periods, missing periods, and hormone imbalance for women are all influenced by gut health. Learn where to start if you want to support your gut health or if you're ready to dive in, book your introductory call to get your personalized plan.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Why Childhood Antibiotics Still Matter
• 1:24 How Antibiotics Disrupt the Microbiome
• 3:27 Case Study: Cycles, Gut Tests, Setbacks
• 6:12 Stress, Sugar, Alcohol: Fuel for Imbalance
• 8:12 Inflammation, Cortisol, Hormone Crosstalk
• 10:43 Testing Strategy: When And What To Run
• 12:23 Four Practical Steps To Rebuild Gut Health
• 12:55 Support Stomach Acid With Slow Meals

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Question, why do I ask all of my new clients about their childhood antibiotic use? Answer because what happened to your gut and in your gut 20 years ago could be impacting why your periods are irregular and unpredictable today. Yes, antibiotics were necessary medicine when you needed them, but now understanding how they affected your gut microbiome, that can be the missing piece to finally fixing your cycle. Welcome to the I'm Hormonal Podcast. I'm Bridget Walton, a women's hormone coach, helping busy, ambitious women just like you through personalized, data-backed solutions. Whether you are working with me one-on-one or listening here, my goal is the same to help you stop guessing about your hormone health and start seeing real progress. Let's get into it. And I say, Great question. And then I walk them through something like what you and I are about to walk through here. So what happens when you take antibiotics? And if you've taken them before, which honestly, what kid hasn't, um, but you'll know that you take them when there's some sort of bacterial overgrowth rate, an infection, a bacterial infection. You take the antibiotic, takes care of that infection, but we also have um a cabillion different types of bacteria and other microbes living in our digestive system. And we don't want, we don't want those to go away. We need some of these good bacteria to stick around because they help us to eliminate our hormones, create our hormones, digest our food properly. There are a lot of reasons why we have, I mean, billions and billions and billions, I don't know the exact number, of bacteria in our digestive system. When you take antibiotics, though, you know, the antibiotics don't discriminate against what bacteria they are wiping out. And so that's why it can be a problem. You know, if you, when you were a kid, you had recurrent ear infections or, you know, you had so many, you got streps so many times that you had to get your tonsils taken out. Well, what happened to your gut health when you were taking all of those antibiotics? Because even though it could have been decades ago, there still could be sluggishness in your gut microbiome recovering, coming back up to where it was before. Or there could be the opportunity for this opportunistic bacteria or pathogenic bacteria to uh to flourish, to take over. And so we'll talk about what that causes in a second here. But just taking a step back, the long story short is that when you take antibiotics for an infection, well, it's probably, it's inevitably going to wipe out some of the bacteria that you do want. And that can leave open the door for issues with your gut health. I had a client who came to me. You might have heard me talk about her because um, this has been top of mind recently. It was very acute for her. But anyway, she started working with me because she was having very unpredictable periods really spread out. We took her through a gut protocol, we did a GI map, a stool test with her. After we went through that gut protocol, her cycles tightened up. They got much shorter. Then she took antibiotics because she had a sinus infection, and we saw that her gut health went back in the opposite direction that we wanted it to. She started to have bloating again. She started to have irregular or low energy, she started to have a lot of acne popping up. So we paid attention to her gut health. We went through another gut protocol, and we saw that again her cycle lengths came back into ideal range, going from an almost 90-day cycle back down to a 32-day cycle. And she was able to confirm ovulation through taking her basal body temperature every day. So that's just one example for you of how your gut health and addressing and improving your gut health can have a direct effect on what's going on with your menstrual cycle, regularity and predictability. You know, the challenge here is that if you have some type of imbalance in your gut, a lot of times these imbalances get worse over the time, right? What are some things that could make it get worse over time? Well, certainly stress. Stress will negatively impact your whole digestive process, starting first with preventing you from making an adequate amount of stomach acid. Now, stomach acid is like your body's natural antibiotic in a way, because it'll kill off those initial pathogens that come into your system. So that's just one example of how being stressed is going to impact digestion, which impacts your body's ability to keep the right bacteria in and keep the wrong bacteria out of your system. Two other things that can also impact and worsen your gut health if or when there is an imbalance would certainly be consumption of one alcohol and two sugar, depending on what it is, the bacteria or yeast that might be flourishing in your gut. Um, some of those little buggies, they eat sugars. So if you're just feeding them, feeding them, feeding them, giving them this buffet of sugar, then that can help them to flourish as well. Now, I had mentioned earlier that bloating or acne fluctuations in energy can pop up when there are imbalances in the gut. Something else that can be quite common with imbalance in the digestive system is inflammation. If you've listened to I'm hormonal before, you've heard me say this a million times because inflammation, actually, let's take a step back. What even is inflammation? We hear this term, but what does it mean? Yes, it is like swelling, right? You twist your ankle, there's inflammation. You know it because you can see that there is swelling there, your ankle's getting fat and fluffy. But what's happening on the inside is an immune reaction. Your immune system is reacting to this injury and trying to, you know, support recovery from it. A similar thing can be happening in your gut when there is a diotic overgrowth. And that can then lead to higher levels of your stress hormone cortisol, which you know can impact your hormone health directly. All of these systems are connected. But that's why it's so funny then. Like this is the connection that can be missed if you are so focused on, you know, restoring balance to your hormones that you don't think to look at your digestive health. If you're only looking at hormone health and hormone balance in a silo, then you'll miss it. That's why this is so important to inspect what's going on with your gut health. And again, that's why when I'm onboarding new clients, I'm asking them about if they were sick as a kid, do they have, I mean, also recurring infections as an adult, because that is going to be really informative about okay, what sort of testing, you know, should we go ahead with a stool test with this gut panel to help get a lot of good clarity about what's going on in your digestive system? If you are thinking, oh shoot, wow, okay, this sounds like me. I have unpredictable periods and I've been taking a lot of antibiotics over these years, then I want you to know that I support women that are just like you in my practice every day. If you are ready to get to the bottom of it, go ahead, click the link in the show notes to book your introductory session, and we can create your personalized plan. If you are thinking, wow, this sounds like me, but you're not ready quite yet to take the leap and make that introductory call, then here are four suggestions that I want you to consider. Number one, supporting adequate stomach acid production is really important, as we touched on. And easy ways that you can do this would be by relaxing and resting while you eat. Maybe eating at the table, not on the go, not while you're driving, not in front of the TV. And similarly, don't multitask, right? So if you're just chill, you're focused, the activity for right now is eating your meal. You don't need to rush through it. That is going to be one lovely way to enjoy your tasty meal, but two, a better way to support your overall digestion and gut microbiome balance. Second, I want you to think about eliminating sugar in your diet. This can help because, again, you're avoiding giving this feast to, you know, if you have a yeast overgrowth or if you have another overgrowth that is a sugar-loving microbe. Is that a enormous, you know, tall order to say, oh yeah, yeah, hey, just go ahead and eliminate sugar, like just do it. But yes. Easier said than done for sure, but it starts with small steps. It starts with being open to changing what you're eating. So if that is the only takeaway that you get from today that you think, you know, I'm I I see why changing what I'm putting in my body limiting the amount of sugar that I'm consuming. I see why and how that can be helpful for me. So I think I'm open to making some changes like that. Beautiful. That is a great first step. But then move on to step two and three and actually make a plan to limit your exposure. My third recommendation for you is to put a good probiotic into rotation. Now, a probiotic is not going to it's not going to bring down levels that are high. However, it could be helpful in preventing, you know, certain levels of bacteria from becoming elevated. And so that's the overall function that you want to support. Get a different um bottle each time. You don't need to take the same exact type of probiotic every single time. You'll want to get exposure to different strains, different probiotics. So switch it up. That's my third recommendation for you. Fourth and final, and this is one, you know, if only we could time travel, or if you do find yourself in the future having to take an antibiotic for an infection, then remember to take something like Sacchomyces ballardi while you are taking that antibiotic. Saccharmyces ballardi is a yeast that can help to maintain a, you know, as healthy as possible balance of microbes in your gut while taking an antibiotic. So just something to keep in mind, even if in the future you're like, ah shoot, what did Bridget say? I don't remember, I don't remember what it's called, but you'll remember to look it up, and that's what I want for you. So that's my short rundown for the day. I hope this was helpful for you in making this connection between, okay, I've, you know, I've tried all of these things. I feel like I've done it all, but okay, now I can see how things that happened to my body that I took, medications that I took years and years ago, could be a part of the equation and something to investigate on this next step forward. In the next episode, I'm gonna be talking a little bit about three foods that could also be impacting your gut health, despite not being antibiotics. So come back and stick around for that conversation. A quick reminder: all of the information that I share with you here is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for medical advice or diagnosis. If you have any questions, I would love for you to connect with me on Instagram at I'm underscore hormonal. And that's all I've got for you today. I will see you on the next one. Thanks for listening.