Dr. Lindsey Berkson’s fascinating interview on the Digestive Health Summit, hosted by Dr. Michael Murray, is all about the love hormone or oxytocin and the effects on digestion. The interview is called – How the Love Hormone is Critical for Gut Health.
Oyxtocin is not just a love hormone. It is also a helpful gut hormone. Dr. Berkson will clearly and easily explain the role of oxytocin in gut motility, sensation, tone of the muscular and nervous system layers, and even in the application for various gut issues from leaky gut to inflammatory bowel disease. You will also learn why nature intended oxytocin to be a care-taker of human health and how critical this hormone is in both genders throughout life. Historically oxytocin was regarded as a pregnancy and lactation hormone but you will now learn how it is even amazingly much more. She shares that the love hormone:
can be endocrine-disrupted by plastic, by Bisphenol A, by synthetic oxytocin given to a mother at birth i.e. Pitocin. I started using oxytocin in practice about 15 years ago as a hormonal Viagra and a rebooter, and I suddenly discovered that when I added it to the protocol of my inflammatory bowel disease patients, often people who were on Prednisone, methotrexate, on multiple meds, that could barely drag themselves out of bed, they were having many bowel movements a day, many of them were diarrhea-like and bloody; when I added oxytocin to them, usually within a few weeks we were able to get them off most of their meds and their health just came up incredibly.
There are oxytocin receptors all throughout the gut:
They’re in the esophagus. They’re in the stomach. They’re in the small intestine, the large intestine, they’re in the pancreas. They have a lot to do with the alpha and beta cells, with the release and maintenance of sugar. They’re in the liver; they have a lot to do with detoxification.
And oxytocin has also been shown to have an impact on constipation:
They have a double-blind, randomized trial in women with constipation and when they gave them oxytocin, they just delivered nasally because it first acts on the brain and then it has peripheral or distant actions. They had statistically significant normalization of bowel movements with oxytocin sprayed through the nose. How amazing is that?
Dr. Berkson then shares how intimacy and regular love-making improves gut health via oxytocin release:
I was so struck by how regular, satisfying intimacy was right up there with veggies and exercise [for longevity] and I was trying to figure out why, is it just the human contact? Well, one of the reasons was because both men and women become drenched in oxytocin and so nature takes care of your gut.
It’s a really fascinating interview with new information that is science-based. It is not to be missed!
You can register for the Digestive Health Summit here
Other interviews include:
- Joe Pizzorno, ND – The Toxin Solution: How to Clean Up the Gut to Ignite Vibrant Health
- Wardee Harmon – Improve Your Gut Health and Save Money by Making Your Own Fermented Foods at Home
- Razi Berry – Butterflies in Your Stomach: How Stess and Love Affect Digestive Health
- Trudy Scott – Anxiety, the Microbiome, Psychobiotics and GABA
- And more
Hope to see you on the summit!