Nourish With Intent: Gut Motility

Good morning, Cadre. Happy Saturday. Coming at you from Arizona this morning. If you were here last week, you knew I was traveling. Not the smoothest of lives, but happy to be with you here this morning. If you were able to catch JC earlier, always wonderful. And we have another live coming up after mine today, but good morning. Welcome. Today is week two of my little mini gut series, and this is something that I wanted to do because I get a lot of questions about it, even when I'm just talking to my, like, general nutrition clients.

And there's a lot to learn and a lot, I think, to be demystified. And I love learning in the process as well, because I'm not specifically a GI dietitian. It's something that piques my interest and that I do a lot of continuing ed on. So today I thought I would talk to you guys about gut motility. Last week, we talked about kind of the basics of gut health, which are really quite a large span of things. Good morning. Speak. Wonder. Happy Saturday. So what is gut motility? Gut motility is the movement of food through our GI system.

It is the muscle contractions from when food goes in our body to when it comes out our esophagus. Small intestine, stomach. All of the things are muscles, and they all contract to help us get food through our system. I left this door open because I thought you would get a nice view, but now there's a plane. I'm so sorry. Movement between meals. So our gut motility movement in general is really important to our overall health and gut health. It's important for nutrient absorption. Most of our nutrition is absorbed in our small intestine.

Our digestion happens from mouth, stomach, small intestine, and it's helpful for getting fiber to the large intestine, which is where it is fermented by our bacteria. And then the rest of it all gets excreted out ambient. Outdoor sensor. Okay. Okay. Awesome. Love it. I don't think there will be much else today. Maybe, like, a rogue golfer, but that's it. Now, when it comes to gut motility, there is hyper motility, and then there's hypo motility. So we want the in between. We want the average. We want the normal.

When you have hyper motility, that means that things are moving through your system too quickly, and that could be from something like infection. So if you think, like, stomach bug, any sort of food poisoning, where your body's just trying to, like, get it out of your system, malabsorption as well. So thinking about things like Celiac disease, you have impaired absorption of nutrients, any sort of just cramping, spasms. If you're someone that suffers with more chronic diarrhea, that could be the case.

And hypermotility can cause gas buildup, bloating. Food might not be broken down completely, so you might have undigested food particles in your stool. Overall, not as pleasant symptoms. And then you have hypomotility. Rogue golfer, please do, please make the haiku and put it in the community page. I love it. Hypomotility is when things are moving too slowly and similarly to when things move too fast. It can cause pretty much the same symptoms, things like gas buildup, bloating and distension. And this happens because oftentimes in hypomotility, the gas is being produced where it shouldn't be.

Most. Most of our gas production happens in the large intestine as a result of our gut bacteria fermenting things. When we have food moving more slowly through the GI tract, you have it sitting longer in your small intestine, which we do still have bacteria there, just not as much as the large intestine. But those bacteria can then start to feed on the carbohydrates, the sugars, the fibers in the small intestine and produce gas where it shouldn't be. And it can kind of get trapped. So gas can happen, bloating can happen.

Both hyper and hypo motility. Have my notes over here. I'm just making sure I covered all of that. Yes, it can also be caused by. If you're someone with chronic constipation and you are not fully emptying your bowels when you go to the bathroom, that can cause a slowdown of the rest of your GI tract. So if that's something that you relate to, maybe the rest of this will be feel helpful. So gut motility, that's kind of the groundwork. We eat things our body has to get it through. That happens using muscle contractions.

Any sort of impaired digestion, either too fast or too slow, can cause symptoms such as gas bloating, constipation, diarrhea, distension, discomfort. Not even going to touch on the mental health implications or the gut brain connection today, because that's a whole different can of worms. But we will cover it at some point. So when it comes to motility, the other piece of this that's been getting a lot more hype lately is something called the migrating motor complex. And this is a term for a process that happens when you are in a fasting state.

So when you're sleeping when you're between meals. And this is essentially a four phase process that acts as like a broom. And it helps to contract those muscles in a very rhythmic, consistent motion for about two to four hours after you've eaten, once you're fasted. And phase one is like right after you eat. Phase two, you like start to have a couple contractions, but it's inconsistent. Phase three, you have about two to three contractions per minute in the stomach and 11 or 12 per minute in the small intestine.

Essentially it's just trying to get all of the leftover food particles, anything dead bacteria out of the small intestine through, through your system so you can excrete it. The length varies between person to person, so that two to four hours is an estimate, an average. And it can also vary day to day based on your body. I will say one of the biggest things that I see on the Internet about the migrating motor complex is that you need to like very strictly not eat at certain times. That is not true.

This explains a lot about why my elderly mom is having bowel problems potentially. If this is something that is new, it might be worth exploring. The migrating motor complex is regulated by a couple different things. One is a hormone called motilin, which is produced in the small intestine. And there's also research that shows the migrating motor complex has some sort of interplay with the vagus nerve, which is what can connects our brain to our digestive system. And I've talked about that as well.

I love talking about the vagus nerve. So any sort of condition that impacts hormone production, things like nerve damage as well, any sort of damage to the GI tract, all of those can interrupt this migrating motor complex. Those are things that are out of your control. So that might be worth looking into with some sort of GI specialist or your PCP if they know you really well and feel comfortable talking about those things. When it comes to things that are within your control, to answer your question, speak wonder.

One of the things that you could try is being intentional around meal spacing. So as I said, this happens for a length of about two to four hours and you get one to two cycles of this sweeping in that time. Now this is also happening at night when you're sleeping. You get a lot of cycles of this, but during the day between meals, because we eat more frequently, you're gonna belt one to two. So when you think about meal spacing within that, okay, if this is happening every two to four hours, the general recommendation is three hours between meals.

So that your body has a chance to sweep things through. Now, it's also very important for me to note here that if you are not eating enough, which might come into play with your mom speak Wonder, because she's 94 and not eating much, if you're not eating enough food, enough calories in general, your GI system is going to suffer. Because everything that I'm talking about, all of the functioning of your GI tract requires a lot of energy. So if you're not getting enough calories to support stomach acid production, digestive enzyme production, those muscle contractions that are taking energy, that's going to have a really big impact on GI health as well, the regularity.

So I think not to get too specific, but trying to help her eat enough would probably be step one. You can use calorie dense foods when she is eating with people who are honestly over 80. Typically, what I find is that kind of goes against what we're talking about today. But eating more frequently just to help kind of keep appetite up, make sure they're not forgetting foods or food in general. But that could be a strategy as well, especially since our elderly folks tend to not eat very much when they do eat.

So having more frequent meals can help with that. That's always going to be step one. If at step one you're not seeing any improvement, then you can get into these more nitpicky strategies like how do we time for migrating motor complex. But I would say start, start there. Yeah, hopefully that was helpful. That's what I would say with timing this migrating motor complex. So spacing out meals is one thing that includes any sort of, like, caloric beverage. If you're someone who has a coffee, you have breakfast and then you like, sip on your latte for the next three or four hours, you're not going to have any of that migrating motor complex happening because you're not fasting because that latte has calories in it.

So something like a caloric beverage or dessert after dinner, the closer you have that to your meal, the more likely you are to have enough of that time between ending that meal and your next meal for this migrating motor complex to get a cycle in. Yeah. Oh, I already read that. Okay, so those are my tips for things that are within your control. Again, eating enough is always first. And the thing that gets misconstrued that I see especially as it comes to how the migrating motor complex can contribute to things like sibo, right.

Small intestinal bacterial overgrowth or just IBS in general. If you're not sweeping things through. You have more time of that food sitting in your small intestine if there's pathogenic bacteria. So, so that's what we see in small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. That is what's going to get fed by the food sitting for longer. Well, bacteria will, but it can really capitalize on that and overgrow and then cause more symptoms which can kind of put you in a loop. That in and of itself can also inhibit this migrating motor complex.

So you're kind of stuck in a cycle there. But I see a lot of people online saying, oh, just fast, like fast for days or more fasting, more restriction. That is not what I'm saying at all. That's probably not going to be helpful. It's going to be more helpful to make sure you're eating enough food. Maybe try playing around with meals, timing meal spacing. And it's also not the end of the world. There's not like a goal of perfection. This is something that it's not going to likely make all of your symptoms disappear.

If it does, great. But the people I've worked with that I've talked with this before, that has not been the case. It has improved symptoms and there's also a lot of other ways to improve symptoms. Restricting fasting, I wouldn't recommend starting there. More is not always better. The other thing to think about if you have hypomotility, so slowed down digestion and impaired migrating motor complex is thinking about prokinetic medications and supplements and those would be from your doctor. But there's also some foods that can help get things moving and two of the big ones are ginger and kiwi.

So incorporating those things into your diet, if this is something that you struggle with, might be helpful. Ginger is also really helpful for nausea. So in the realm of ibs, I recommend that one a lot. Ginger chews are great if you're someone that doesn't like just like eating gingery foods. So take away if you're having symptoms that are associated with IBS or sibo, constipation, bloating, gas deaths, diarrhea, this could be a strategy. It could be another piece to the puzzle in thinking about how to improve your digestive symptoms to a place where you feel more comfortable and more able to get through your day.

Speak wonder me also, I keep them in my nightstand just for the. I don't like. It's usually just when I'm sick, but I want to make sure that I have them at all times. Traveling is a good idea. I try to get my husband to use them when we fly because he gets motion sick. So that's all I have for you today. Hopefully it was a little bit interesting. I think this is a good piece to set up kind of the foundations of. We're still building up. Right. So last week we talked about, here's all the little really easy things.

If you don't have a lot of GI distress or even if you do, these things can play a role. Now we're getting a little more into, like, the science, which I love. I'm a nerd for it. And this, I think, really sets up kind of a base for the stuff that we'll continue to talk about. As I mentioned, gut brain connection, the vagus nerve connection between your GI system and your brain can be impacted by this. It can be impacted by other GI conditions in different ways. We can talk about serotonin production in the gut and how that affects our.

Our brain. Weekend wannabe rogue golfer on the fairway Double book. I love it. Oh, I was the rope golfer on the fairway the other day. I have only ever played golf twice, and this week was the second time. And I could have done much worse, but we were not. We were not hitting the ball very straight. Looking a little rogue out there. So. Okay, thank you all for joining me. I know it's just a couple of you. Hopefully you learned something. Thought it was interesting. If there's any other specific requests for GI topics, I will continue.

I don't know for as long as I. Probably a while. I could talk a lot about gi, unless anyone has other specific requests. So we'll. We'll start here. I'll see you all next week. Like I said, there's another live later today. I don't remember the time because now I'm on a different time zone than I usually am. But thanks for being here. I'll see you again next week. Oh, thank you, Speak Wonder. I appreciate that. All right. I hope some of this you can take to your mom as well and help her feel better.

See you next week.