Bile Acid Diarrhea – Natural Bile Diarrhea Treatment

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Welcome back to the podcast. I’m Dr. Houston Anderson, chiropractor, functional medicine practitioner and self proclaimed awesome natural healer some long story short, a lot of those things we make up ourselves but no, I do have a little bit of experience in this field. And today I want to go over something that I’m not even sure when I wrote this article, but it’s something called bile acid diarrhea . And and many people may have skipped over this episode if I if I don’t if I just put bile acid diarrhea in there, but I want to put loose stools here, which which correlates with IBS.

And really, when we talk about IBS, not all of it is labeled IBS diarrhea, or IBS, constipation. It’s not labeled either way. But bile acid diarrhea is actually a more common gut problem than Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis. And so we know that everyone’s heard of those two things. Okay, so, so with those stories, especially in the functional medicine world, those are things that we’re seeing all the time.

Okay, so if you’re someone that gets loose or watery stools, they could either be like a bright green or a dark green. Or maybe you’ve even seen some yellow in your stool. These are things that are associated with gallbladder problems, right? These are things that are associated with bile acid is actually made in the liver and goes to the gallbladder. And the increased frequency increase your urgency.

Now, like I said, this is my number one article on my entire website. And and it’s unique because I actually never get a phone call regarding bile acid diarrhea. So this sounds crazy. Why do a podcast on something that that no one ever calls you about? I get one, probably about one a month that actually people call me on this.

Whereas like the hormone, hormones, I get calls all the time and other digestive disorders, I get calls all the time. But the big thing of why people look for solution to bile acid diarrhea is because of incontinence. Okay, so there’s a lot of people that have bile acid diarrhea, and when it starts off as just a little IBS, you know, yeah, you might have some unformed stools, but not such a big deal, you may have a little bit of urgency, right, like, like, hey, I need to get to the bathroom. But eventually, it turns into this severe full incontinence where you can’t even drive anywhere, you can’t go on a plane you on barely can’t even hold a job, because in the timeframe that you need to get to the restroom is about 10 seconds or something like that, so that you can survive and not have an embarrassing event of incontinence. So this is an important topic.

And that’s why I want to do there. The other thing is, you know, I have actually had bilasa, diarrhea, myself suffered for many years, and recovered from it. At that time, there was no real solutions. No one told me about the solutions, and there just wasn’t enough information out there. So just to go over the common, the commonality here it is three to five times more common than Crohn’s and ulcerative colitis.

Okay, so if you know someone with ulcerative colitis, you probably know five people with bile acid diarrhea. And what I love about that is, anytime I go into a really big room or a crowded event, I always imagine Oh, about 50% of these people have like weird poop problems, right? And it’s actually fun to think about that. Because you’re not the only one, if you’re watching this, and you’re worried about your IBS, or irritable bowel or whether you had leaky gut or something like that. It’s very common in the general population to have a digestive problem.

So there’s a couple of different ways that that traditional medicine goes about this now realize that mostly, you can test for it. But mostly, we’re not testing for this. Every once in a while, we’ll do like an ejection fraction ratio test that may correlate with it, but it’s not specifically designed to it. Technically, a hospital stay is is the best way to diagnose these things. But definitely not necessary, right?

Because if you see a bunch of bile in the toilet or green liquid in the toilet, and you have loose stools, this is something you should consider. So green diarrhea, so to say, I know this is kind of a gross topic is is what you should be looking for. I don’t want to go over too many drugs with regards to what they typically do in traditional medicine, but cola styrene is a drug or a binder, a bile binder that they use and what it does, it decreases cholesterol. Which of course we know that decreasing cholesterol is not a good long term plan, but short term overall I see the cola Stormin does work pretty well except for the people that have Doesn’t so the people that it doesn’t usually end up just getting really bad cramping or severe constipation. So rather than loose stools, now they have like extreme pain, and constipation, which they don’t like that form of IBS, either or, or bowel problems anyway.

So there’s a couple common beliefs, though. So they’re really there’s two beliefs. And they’re kind of both, I don’t want to say they’re both correct, but they they’re both correct. And they’re both wrong at the same time. So one common belief in traditional medicine is that they call it bile acid malabsorption.

And bile acid malabsorption just means that the bile goes into the digestive tract and doesn’t get absorbed and then comes out hole right, and that’s why we see the green in the toilet. The other idea is that your body just produces simply way too much bile, which is just not really that common, it would be similar or akin to someone just magically producing too much saliva. Now some people make more saliva, some people make less, but you don’t see that many people just watering at the mouth because their body decided to just to make ridiculous amounts of saliva. The same goes for the liver slash gallbladder system. And, and I will tell you like because this is one of my pet peeves.

But if any if I throw this podcast in the bile is made in the gallbladder. It is not made in the gallbladder, it is made in the liver and stored in the gallbladder and concentrated in the gallbladder. But because they’re one in the same to me half the time, I often, in my own mind, even mix up the concepts or not the concepts mix up how I how I present it to people, I almost always say in my office, that the gallbladder and the liver are pretty much the same organ, they have different functions that you do things differently. But you really can’t have one without the other. Which is why it’s really silly when we actually remove our gallbladder now, there are solutions for people that have removed their gallbladder.

And just because you’ve had your gallbladder removed doesn’t mean you have to have bile acid diarrhea. In fact, I would say it’s less common at bile acid diarrhea after you have your gallbladder removed. The story is the liver makes that bile and it’s going to make bile adequate to whatever detoxification you need to do. So that’s the big thing to know about natural treatments for bile acid diarrhea, or really when you’re looking at loose stools. Anytime you’re looking at loose stools or constipation, the first place I’m going to go is to bile production.

And bile production is critical because bowels are going to go stimulate a bowel movement, or lack of bile is not going to allow you to have a bowel movement. So if you’re one of those IBS constipation people, there’s, there’s probably a problem with your bile production. So bile have kind of acts as the toilet flush. So you have the whole toilet bowl of water, we’ll just say it’s empty and clean and pretty right now. And when you hit the flush, everything goes the gallbladder kind of acts as that when it ejects, kind of throws out all of the bile out of the gallbladder contracts, all that kind of goes and sends this reaction that makes you have a flushing reaction, that flushing reaction you see in the form of either loose stools or constipation.

So if your gallbladder contracts, and only lets go of a bile, as they call it sluggish bile, the sluggish bile that’s kind of thick, and it’s not it’s not very, it’s very, I always like to think it’s like more like jello, which it is, than it is like water. And so if you if you let out a bunch of jello into your intestines, you can see how that’s not as as liquid and how it wouldn’t flow as fast. versus if you let out a bunch of water, you would notice obviously, that’s going to flow faster and come out faster. There’s there is a second phase two that the second phase is really how inflamed your intestines are, if your intestines are really inflamed, it’s going to be irritated by bile. This is where where it’s really confusing in a perfect digestive tract.

bile is actually the lubricant bile goes. And it’s salts actually create nutrients. Or or I guess you could say it actually heals the gut lining. When you’re just say average Li inflamed, you have an average amount of inflammation. Average Li is not a word.

I understand that but but it’s a you have an average amount of inflammation in your gut, in your intestines, the gallbladder goes and flushes a bunch of bile that bile goes it binds it connects it, it actually helps the intestines to be uninformed. And in a highly inflamed digestive tract. The salts in the bile then becomes somewhat of an irritant. Right? So I’ll use this example over and over in all my podcasts and with all my patients and say that like you know, if you have skin, if your hand has no cuts on it, then you put salt on your hand.

It’s no big deal. As soon as you have a cut on your hand, you put salt on it, it starts to hurt all the time, right? So if you have red inflamed tissue inside your intestinal tract, then anytime you have bile that passes through, it’s going to be an irritant. Anytime you have an irritant your body’s gonna have the flushing reaction, which you end up with bile acid diarrhea, and I’m pretty sure This might be the most most comprehensive, actually functioning podcast about bile acid diarrhea, because I will tell you that there’s not that much information out there of how it really works. A lot of that is because it’s a misunderstanding of the whole problem.

It’s a It’s a misunderstanding. It’s a, it’s a conventional approach and the conventional approach, just to go off of what yesterday or my last podcast, which I recorded yesterday, what it says is, it says that the conventional medicine often believes not always but often believes that the organ is just broken, right? Well, your liver makes too much bile, you’re just in a bad spot, there’s nothing good about it, you can’t fix this problem, take cola styrene for the rest of your life, or another bile acid binder, or cholesterol lower, and, or something that takes cholesterol and, and conjugates, or makes it thicker. That’s that’s what they recommend, because they’re assuming that that problem can’t be fixed. And natural medicine, what I’m saying is, there’s a reason your body works that way your body is is not nearly as dumb as we think it is.

And we never get it nearly as much credit as we should. And, and this information is not going anywhere fast. And what I would say is what I mean is in traditional conventional medicine, they’re gonna believe that that gall bladders, just not working quite right. They also believe that you can remove it right? Even if I go to functional medicine.

And once again, I will always go back to the fact that this is functional anatomy natural medicine podcast. The reason why I did it that way is because natural isn’t necessarily always the functional medicine approach, right? functional medicine has a certain, I would say almost theory or approach, whereas natural and holistic medicine is a little bit different. So that the natural story that’s different than functional, functional medicine to be like, Oh, look, you have a bile acid problem, we might add some bile acids to it, we might go a little bit deeper into systems and lifestyle. That’s all that’s all good.

But from from a holistic perspective, we’re gonna say that, that that gallbladder doesn’t just have low bile, it’s functioning perfectly. And so it’s actually functioning to save your body because your body’s much smarter than you think. Okay, so one of the main things you got to know what the Bible does? So most common, and I can’t go through everything in the Bible, does it be a fun and I plan to write another article on exactly the benefits of bile acids, and everyone thinks they just absorbed fats, right. That’s one of the things that they do.

But it’s not comprehensive and understanding what it does. So detoxification so so the gallbladder is very, very important for detoxification of mycotoxins mycotoxins would be mold fungus things in the house like that. But it can also be internal mycotoxins things that were created by your own body, you have a little bit of Candida infection, you have a history of a yeast infection as a female, you have fungal overgrowth that you know of, you have rashes on your skin, you have toenail fungus, any of those things. You have regular bloating, you’re the person that comes in, you’re like, Oh, I feel like I have a volleyball in my stomach at the end of the day. That’s all fungal related.

And all of those toxins that those funguses create the fungi creates, you’re going to run into the fact that you have to detoxify them. The detoxification primarily happens through the binding in the bile. And so that’s an important thing to know. It also does it for environmental toxins of any sort. But But it’s important to know that it specifically will work with fungus, we’ll find that people that have chronic yeast infections, or fungal infections often have bile problems, right?

So it gets thick and sluggish. bad fats, okay, fried food, canola oil, vegetable oils. All of these are aggravators of bile acid diarrhea. The reason why is because they’re toxic, so your body has to go and actually bind to them. So you use a lot of bile, you use a lot of bile, when these things come in, creates a dramatic reaction, your liver has to make a ton more bile or upregulate.

And then you find that anyone that has either low bile acid, which is a common thing, and bilasa diarrhea is that you actually have low bile acid. And you eat a deep fried chicken wing or deep fried Mexican food, you don’t we’re in Arizona, a lot of Mexican restaurants around here. And all of a sudden, you know, 10 minutes later, you’ve got to be in the bathroom and your stomach doesn’t feel well. And let me just add that because this is really common. I, you don’t notice it till you get older as a kid.

You can hold your bowels for you know, days, I guess you know, I remember you know, we used to go Boy Scout camping. And you know, two three days later. Oh, yeah, I guess I should go to the bathroom when I get home. And you never really worried about it too much as an adult. If you’re that person that’s looking for the bathroom.

If you enter a restaurant and you’re like, hey, just want to make sure you guys have restrooms here. You know that you have a bowel problem. And most often, if you’re the person that eats a food and then has to run to the bathroom during during your dinner within the next hour. It’s a bile acid problem. It’s a gallbladder problem.

No, obviously if you just have general stomach upset and you don’t have to run to the bathroom, it may not be that but anytime you’re that guy that that goes in guy or girl but goes and eats that food at the restaurant, and and you’re like, I can’t finish my meal, I need to go to the bathroom before I finished my meal. That’s a problem. It’s often gallbladder related. Okay? So how often do these bile acids, okay?

Now say you don’t eat fried foods, so you don’t have fungal infections. But let’s just say that you’re possibly a female. Right? So estrogen is the number one reason why the gallbladder is going to have thick and sludgy bile. Even worse, the thickened sludgy bile the reason why that that bile acid is green is because of copper.

And copper plays an important role. But if you have bile acid diarrhea, one, you’re gonna be flushing a ton of copper, which you can’t replace it at the same rate, or you’ll be flushing a lot of salts. But overall, the more copper you have in your system, copper belongs in the gallbladder. If we let it out to many other places, we get fun things like psychosis and anxiety at night and things like that. So if those are some of your symptoms, you may know that you might have a gallbladder problem, right?

But estrogen can bind up this gallbladder and pretty much make it ineffective for everything else. So if you’re overweight, or have irregular blood sugar, you’re gonna have elevated estrogen with an elevated estrogen, you’re going to run into this problem of having gallbladder issues and those gallbladder issues, I would say the only one of the one of the symptoms that other than like bile acid diarrhea, that you’re gonna find it a pretty bad gallbladder. Problem is, if you’re belching after you eat a lot, it’s usually not the stomach that that’s the problem there. It’s usually the gallbladder that’s kind of regurgitating and creating just some some gas. It’s a space, I don’t even want to say it’s gas.

progesterone can cause the same problem. But usually I don’t see this problem from a natural progesterone production. I see it from exogamous hormone replacement therapy. So if you’re taking a progesterone cream or or anything like that, you may you may find that that’s important there. So how do we take some rolls off of this?

So I’ll take a second here. Before we go and save the gallbladder to just give a shout out to our sponsor, Angie naturals. The number one product I use for gallbladder dysfunction, for heavy and not have you been I’m sorry for estrogen detox, for supporting the pathways that support bile acid diarrhea, and that get us ridiculously good results is artichoke extract from AMG, we usually do three of their pills a day, and we see just really, really good results in a short period of time now. So with that being said, in the liver, you have a process called phase two liver detoxification, and it uses a product called glucuronic acid, it is actually the livers most abundant reaction. That is how I say up regulatable.

The liver uses a lot of sulfur, and that can be saved for another podcast because sulfation is actually the body’s most important process. And it’s one of the reasons why a lot of people react to sulfa drugs to it’s different than sulfur, but it’s actually the reason it’s both unrelated and related. What happens is this glucuronic acid pathway, which big word, this pathway becomes overburdened with all these things we talked about mycotoxins, hormones, it’s estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, all of the hormones, even cortisol that have to be detoxified. And these are all done through the same way. Now if you add a bunch of environmental toxins, pesticides, chemicals, glyphosate, things like that, these all have to be detoxified through the liver through glucuronidation.

And so what artichoke does, is in that in that pathways, upregulates glucuronic acid and the upregulation of the glucuronic acid, I would say it’s kind of like giving you a second liver. It’s definitely an artichoke, no matter what you have digestive Lee is one of my top five cell phones in my office that isn’t commonly used. It is a mild, bitter, and I am a huge fan of bitter herbs in high dosages to kind of address that. So it’s important to know that this glucuronic acid pathway gets overburdened and needs support. You know what overburdens that also coffee, Caffeine Chocolate, these can overburden it, I really don’t have a huge problem with chocolate and most people aren’t toxic to caffeine.

I usually say under 50 milligrams a day. Though one of my colleagues recently says you know he doesn’t let any of his patients have any caffeine at all. Because no amount of caffeine is a safe amount of caffeine. That’s an interesting way to think of it I always think of alcohol is the same way. There’s really no safe amount of alcohol though if you choose to drink alcohol.

Your body’s going to recover in a period of time but it’s never a health food. If that makes sense. One of the other things that often happens with bile acid diarrhea is you often get a pancreatic comorbidity or in other words, you get pancreatitis or inflamed pancreas at the same time. This is when your stools start to turn a little bit lighter or even yellow. And if your stools are really yellow, you definitely know that you need to address your pancreas problem.

It’s not a perfect story, you just need to investigate that because that can be pretty severe, you’ll find that a lot of people, when they have ulcerative colitis also have bile acid diarrhea, it’s really hard to differentiate one from the other, because ulcerative colitis would cause a fast kind of flushing. Because once again, those bile acids would would irritate the colon. But at the same time, a bile acid problem can can create ulcerative colitis because it didn’t heal or nourish the lining adequately. So I think that that’s a double edged sword there that we have to be aware of. And a lot of people with ulcerative colitis are going to have bile acid diarrhea, and that’s how we’re going to run into them as doctors in the office.

But, but if you think like, oh, I’ve tried every bile acid product, or even, let’s say, say, say you’re one of the patients like, Hey, I tried your artichoke, and my bile acid diarrhea is exactly the same. Okay, that’s not going to be many people that say it’s exactly the same, because even in some of the toughest case, cases, we get pretty good results. But that being said, you’ve taken a product you’ve done whatever Dr. Anderson asks you to do. And you still don’t see a remedy.

It’s because your colons still inflamed, it’s because your intestines are still inflamed. And so it’s about decreasing that inflammation. Now decreasing inflammation in the intestines is, has lots of steps to it sometimes, and sometimes it doesn’t have that many steps. The only other thing I’ll say is, it’s important anytime you’re calming down, just because we’re on that inflammation in the intestines, it’s important that anytime you’re addressing inflammation in the intestines, that you’re addressing the infection, okay, you’re gonna hear me go back to the idea that they’re stealth infection in the body at all times. And that this is what’s creating a lot of the problems that we have.

Essentially, what happens is anytime your body’s unhealthy, or sub optimize your, your available or your body can possibly end up with a bile acid problem, right? So or in other words, I’m sorry, anytime that your body is tired, stressed or rundown, you can end up with a self infection. And that self infection that creates new problems, when we take care of first is the infection once you’ve optimized the infection, then you can often go and address some of the underlying things. So for example, in my article on my website that I’ll link to in the show notes, it says balanced blood sugar, avoid high fructose corn syrup. I do want to say just because I forgot to say that corn is the number one offender for the gallbladder.

So if you have bile acid diarrhea, you should absolutely stop eating corn altogether. And that’s just something that I have from clinical experience. I’ve actually not found that in the literature yet. But I will tell you that if you have gallbladder problems, if you have bile acid diarrhea, stop the corn syrup, stop the corn chips, I don’t care if it’s organic or not. Corn is an offender to the gallbladder.

So we will stop that until someone gets better. Now once you’re better, you may not have bile acid diarrhea for a lifetime. It doesn’t have to be a diagnosis or a permanent condition. But it’s something to be aware of. Self infection going back to self infection, you always want to address that I have some herbs that I recommend on my website.

I’m not worried about that so much right now. But increasing liver detoxification and supporting that bile. So once again, bile does detoxification. If you can support detoxification, you will support the bile. And by supporting that pathway, you end up eradicating this bile acid diarrhea.

It’s important once again, that you don’t want to do a ton of remedies that just stop you from having bowel movements. Obviously Imodium or something like that, over the counter is going to make you feel better and it doesn’t work for everyone. I would say the majority of the patients in my office are already have already tried colas, our mean Imodium, all kinds of Pepto bismol and stuff like that with very little results. As you have this bile acid diary over a period of time the most most frustrating part is that you end up with decreased nutrients with the decreased nutrients you’re no longer able to feel well rice you start to get fatigued you start to get run down, your capacity to heal continually decreases. So it’s important to address bilasa diarrhea from multiple angles.

And and also to realize that, you know, if you have loose stools frequently, there’s something to be done. There’s action to be taken there’s there’s more that you can do rather than just be like, oh well you know, I’ve always had a sensitive stomach. I kind of get tired of hearing that. Don’t get me wrong. There’s a lot of us that have always had sensitive stomachs.

But overall, we should be able to address these things. And it’s not the worst condition that there is. But But last caveat before I let everyone go, is, like I said, Everyone reads this article on my website and very few people take action. There’s a few people I will say that go and buy a bunch of artichoke, and they’re like, Oh, yeah, it worked. But the important thing here is that that you do some things I find a lot of people with bile acid diarrhea or eating actually a horrible diet.

I don’t mention diet a ton because in my office, almost everyone is already eating some type of clean diet, whether it’s vegan vegetarian, paleo, carnivore, keto, whatever your diet is that you’re following a fodmap Daya in SCD diet. And I will say like, if you’re really irritated and things are tougher, you definitely a fodmap or an SCD diet can help you out. If you don’t know what those are, that’s okay. The idea is to eat clean, right. So I find that a lot of people who suffer from bile acid diarrhea, it’s truly just a junk food diet that’s creating the the issue, we still have to fix it by doing the same process that I talked about this entire podcast.

But cleaning up the diet goes a long way when it comes to bile acid diarrhea, once you clean up the diet, then you should be okay to kind of reintroduce some sweets and things like that. But I would, I would go really hard on the diet first. And once your diets better then it’s time to go ahead and and look at supplementation or remedies and and so my recommendation is bile acid diarrhea can lead to chronic kind of unhealthy fatigue, things like that over time, it leads to chronic zinc depletion leads to chronic iron depletion, which are two of the hardest nutrients to get through that blood brain barrier. So if you’re struggling there, if you feel like you’re nutrient depleted, and you have loose stools, that’s expected, right, so you need to figure out the loose stools before you add more supplements. In fact, last note here I did have a guy on last night was suffering some from some of these symptoms here.

And and I looked at all the supplements and and you know he’s taken some great products, he’s taken some fish oil, some co q 10, some B vitamins. You know, a lot of a lot of good supplements maybe like 15, or 20, which is pretty typical for a patient when they walk in my office. And, and these are all good supplements. But I said if you’re having a bowel movement within 30 minutes after eating every time, there’s really no point in supplementing that way. Unless you can slow down your bowels because things like zinc and iron take hours to get past that digestive tract.

They are slow digesters, and they need to sit on the surface for a long period of time before it kind of absorbs your body just doesn’t absorb them easily. So it’s just important to know that if you have these problems, you need to focus on your bile acid diarrhea, you need to focus on your loose stools, that taking you know a little biotin for your hair is not the solution rather than fix your loose stools. Fix your IBS diarrhea, fix your bile acid diarrhea. And then at the end of the day, your nutrients will start to build up again. You’ll be able to absorb the food that you eat.

Hopefully you’re eating a healthy diet, and then things start to go the right way. If you have any bile acid questions, go ahead and shoot me a message and then hopefully we’ll see on the next episode. Thanks a lot.