Dr Amir Khan

And people will notice, actually, I've had a period poo.

There's blood in my poo from my period.

They'll know that as well.

And it can be quite scary, right?

But it's entirely normal.

Oestrogen is really interesting when it comes to gut health.

There is actually a group of microbes that live in your gut that help break down oestrogen and sense when more needs to be broken down and less needs to be broken down.

So they help control the amount of oestrogen in your body.

They are called estrobolome, that group of bacteria.

And of course, around the perimenopause and menopause, when estrogen levels are dropping, you want less of them to break estrogen down because you want to try and maintain as much estrogen as you can.

So they have this really interesting relationship.

These gut microbes have an interesting relationship with how much estrogen is floating around your body.

I think that's fascinating.

absolutely fascinating yeah and then oestrogen itself affects gut motility how how quickly your gut is digesting food and the less of it is the slower your gut digestion is so people find with menopause or perimenopause they well menopause in particular they can become constipated uh and with perimenopause they don't know whether they're coming or going because it just depends on what their oestrogen is doing on that day so it could go over

the place up and down so yeah before I started HRT I went through a period where I everything was all over the place yeah up and down left and right and I went to my doctor about it because I was really worried and since being on HRT everything's gone back to normal yeah people find that with HRT and so progesterone does play a part in it as well probably less so than oestrogen but yeah definitely you can find that your bowels slow down after the menopause yeah

So the best thing is to focus on getting a really healthy, diverse gut microbiome and eating the rainbow, as you said earlier, lots of different plants because you can have a...

I'm vegetarian, but I do find sometimes I just eat the same stuff all the time, the same plants.

I buy a pepper, a cucumber and some tomatoes and I make a salad and I have that same thing.

But it's the variety that is key to keeping that gut microbiome healthy.

Fluid.