What causes belly bloat?

Do you experience bloating? That frustrating big belly bloat that causes so much discomfort? This is something I get asked about all the time because so many people experience it.

Let’s begin by looking at gut health. Gut health starts with the liver producing enough bile. And the job of bile, along with hydrochloric acid, produced by the stomach’s gastric glands, is to help you digest your food.

If the liver weakens or becomes sluggish it produces lower quality and quantity of bile, which means that breaking down food becomes a problem. And with less bile being produced, HCL has to step in and work harder, eventually weakening this source of digestive juice too. So given nine out often people experience sluggish liver, you can begin to see why bloating is such a common issue.

But why are we all experiencing sluggish livers, you might ask. How can it be? It can be very easily given all the troublemakers our livers have to contend with, including heavy metals, pesticides, herbicides, detergents, cleaning and beauty products, high fat/high protein diets, pathogens and poor food choices, especially those that feeds the pathogens, including gluten, dairy and eggs.

Another factor here is too much adrenaline. Excess adrenaline from drinking too much coffee, eating high fats (fats produce adrenaline), emotional turmoil or just a busy life saturates the liver at a rate the liver cannot cope with and weakens bile and hydrochloric acid, double whammy.

So part of the bloating is the gut trying to cope with poorly digested food, which ends up sitting in the intestinal tract and rotting. This gut rot leads to the production of ammonia gas (confused for leaky gut) resulting in bloating, cramping, discomfort and distension.

And another part of the bloating is the excess of troublemakers that the liver is too overburdened to cope with. These troublemakers leach into the bile and back into the intestinal tract, where they coat the lining of the small and large intestine, hampering good bacteria and feeding pathogens. This can then lead to conditions such as SIBO, which is ultimately just an overgrowth of strep bacteria that flourishes in pockets of the intestinal tract and creates gas that pushes the intestinal linings outward and contributes to bloating.

So there you have it, a whistle stop tour of the belly bloat! The take home message here is that good gut health starts and ends with your liver. So, if there were one aspect of your health that you could focus on that would help with all the others, it would be your liver. And just remember, knowledge is power. It’s not about being living in fear but it is about knowing what causes what and taking responsibility accordingly!