THE VITAL TAKE | GUT HEALTH

Why Gut Health Affects Everything From Energy to Hormones

Exhausted, bloated, headaches, hormonally off… My labs were normal. My body didn’t feel like it was.

I thought I was doing everything right. Multivitamins, walking, decreased my stress… but nothing was budging. It wasn’t till my mom said to me, “you need to start with your gut.”

Well of course, my nursing brain was there but wasn’t working fully. I know how the body works, physiology — I taught it to my patients, nurses, and friends who asked. Why was I not thinking of it myself, and why didn’t I just look at the basics? It’s hard when you are in the weeds, right? But there’s a reason gut health keeps coming up in nearly every chronic complaint I investigate. How we feed ourselves, feeds our cells.

Why Your Gut Controls Your Energy

Your gut is the mechanism for you to absorb your nutrients, thus creating fuel. When that is not functioning properly — slow motility, dysbiosis, infection, inflammation — it will not be able to process the fuel you are giving it to create energy.

It’s very simple. Where the complexity comes in is when there is dysfunction. Chaos ensues. So when there is dysfunction, we do not absorb the necessary B vitamins, iron, protein, magnesium — and the list goes on and on. When we don’t absorb these vital nutrients, we are directly feeding fatigue.

You can’t run the machine if you can’t get the fuel to the engine (cells).

The Hidden Link Between Your Gut and Your Hormones

The gut-hormone connection is highly connected. When we metabolize our estrogen, we need to detox it. One of the best detox systems we have is our gut. We move many things through our gut to excrete via poop. So when our intestinal lining is leaky, inflammation is present, motility is poor, and dysbiosis is present, we are not going to excrete what we need.

The estrobolome is the group of bacteria responsible for detoxing or reabsorbing estrogen after the liver has packaged it up. These bacteria produce an enzyme called beta-glucuronidase. This enzyme unpackages estrogen to be reabsorbed into the bloodstream. When dysbiosis and inflammation are present, this enzyme becomes overactive, increasing the absorption of estrogen into the bloodstream. This may lead to estrogen dominance or an imbalance in our hormones.

Why Inflammation Always Starts in the Gut

70% of the immune system is built in the gut lining. So it only makes sense that there is a huge role in inflammation. Now, inflammation is a necessary part of our immune system. Without it, we wouldn’t be able to fight off infections.

The problem comes in when the cycle of inflammation doesn’t stop or regulate itself. When we have inflammation in the gut lining due to food irritants, chronically high cortisol levels, toxins, or infections, our gut lining becomes permeable and leaks these byproducts into our blood stream. This further propagates inflammation, disrupts the HPA axis, and disrupts downstream hormone signaling pathways — creating more inflammation and dysfunction at the cellular level.

Your Gut Is Talking to Your Brain — Are You Listening?

Our gut is considered the second brain. Those little good bacteria that we house in our gut help make neurotransmitters and stimulate hormone production that is necessary for our brain to function.

The complexity of the gut-brain axis has multiple levels. We feel how we eat… blood sugar levels, for instance, dictate how our brain functions. Too low of blood sugar causes our brain to not function at full level. Our mood, brain fog, and anxiety can all be traced back to how our gut is functioning. The vagus nerve is the highway from our brain to our gut. Regulating our vagal nerve stimulation is essential to gut motility, hormone regulation, signaling, and so much more that we don’t even realize.

All these connections tell us one thing. Our gut is simply the mission control to the rest of the body. It is bringing in the data and instructing the rest of the body to do its job. When we don’t have good mission control, the instructions aren’t clear.

Why I Look at the Gut First

I didn’t learn this from a textbook chapter on the microbiome. I learned it watching it happen in real time, at the bedside, for over 14 years in critical care.

We had a phrase in the ICU: use it or lose it, when it came to the gut. If a patient wasn’t eating, we weren’t just worried about calories — we were watching entire systems start to shut down, because the gut wasn’t there to signal the rest of the body to keep working. And the medications keeping them alive — antibiotics, vasoactive drugs, the toxins from the illness itself — were hitting the gut lining directly. Necessary to treat the acute crisis. But there was rarely a bridge built afterward to repair what that crisis did to the gut.

I watched patients get discharged “fixed” on paper, while the actual damage — the inflammation, the dysbiosis, the disruption — kept quietly driving dysfunction long after they left the hospital. Most providers never circle back to that. I do.

This is exactly why I rely on tools like the GI-MAP in practice. It’s not guesswork — it shows me what stealth infections are lingering, what kind of dysbiosis is present, and what the inflammatory markers in your gut are actually doing. That data is what turns “something’s off” into an actual plan.

Where to Start

This isn’t about being perfect, and it isn’t about “healing your life” — it’s about knowing what is driving the symptoms and understanding the root cause. Once we get that, we can build habits that create the best life you can. Looking at the gut can directly affect your hormones, inflammation, and brain. They are all connected.

If you want to see how this shows up specifically for you, that’s exactly what The 5 Systems That Control Your Energy will walk you through.

Grab it here: The 5 Systems That Control Your Energy

Kimber

Kimberly Williamson, MSN, RN, BC-FMP