An impaired digestive tract can lower your overall life expectancy

While we’ve always known that aging affects our digestive tract, only recently have we begun to learn that our digestive tract can affect the aging process in-return.

Research has revealed that countries with the highest life expectancies (for ex. Japan) have populations with better gastrointestinal functions. A large part of this is because of something known as “reserve capacity”, which is how much your digestive function can decline without any negative effects to your health.

People with an optimally working digestive system have ample reserve capacities to take on age-related declines. However, the gut of fecal impaction sufferers stays in such a persistently unhealthy state that they use up their reserve capacity early on. This adds to the eventual decline of their colon function and has a marked effect on your expected lifespan.

Having an unhealthy gut prematurely ages you

Recent evidence suggests that your gut microbiome is a very accurate “aging clock” that can be a reliable predictor of your true physiological age.

Research even shows that people who have unchanging microbiomes tend to die earlier than people that have dynamic a bacterial composition in their gut.

Unfortunately, the gut of fecal impaction sufferers not only has an unhealthy bacterial balance, their bowels also tend to maintain low-diversity microbiomes. This reduction in bacterial species diversity makes your existing gut microbiota less resistant to fluctuations caused by environmental factors.

This takes away your ability to readily adapt to health challenges and accelerates your body’s overall aging process in the long run.

You are more likely to suffer from emotional and mental health issues

Our brain uses a very intricate communication system to interact with our gut. However, we’re now discovering that this communication goes the other way around as well where our digestive tract influences how our brain functions.

This bi-directional communication system is known as the gut-brain axis and it has a massive impact on how you feel and how you act.

This connection between our gut and brain is so strong that psychiatric drugs have shown to effectively treat bowel disorders and now we’re even finding out that many mental health disorders can in-turn be treated by improving your gut health.

This has huge implications if you are a fecal impaction sufferer because the poor condition of your gut can significantly increase your chances of developing anxiety, depression and chronic stress. In fact, research even shows that simply suffering from constipation can also lower the quality of your everyday life by affecting your mood, behavior and even your relationships.

In other words, how you’re feeling right this moment and how you behave with others is presently being influenced by the current state of your ailing digestive tract.

Your thinking abilities are likely to decline

There are two thin layers of over 100 million nerve cells that line our entire digestive tract. Scientists call this the Enteric Nervous System (ENS), in other words the nervous system of the intestines. This nervous system acts as our second brain and has a significant influence over our Central Nervous System (CNS).

The bacteria in our digestive tract uses this influence to control our cognitive abilities to a great extent.

Since the slow fecal transit during fecal impaction and constipation results in poor gut microbiomes, your enteric nervous system’s signaling to your brain starts affecting your memory, attention and learning abilities.

You may not even notice this happening but it can have a very real impact on your everyday life.

Even worse, new evidence shows that an impaired gut can compound age-related neurological issues and increase your risk of developing Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease. This often results in much poorer outcomes as can be seen with the high mortality rates in fecal impaction patients with dementia.

You will experience greater muscle loss as you get older

One of the most disabling aspects of aging is the progressive loss of muscle which starts from the time we turn 30. This is known as sarcopenia and we’ve recently learned that our gut plays a major role in its pathology.

We’ve discovered the reason why most people get frail with old age may have to do with ongoing, low-grade inflammation. Researchers have found that changes in our gut bacteria may be the driving factor behind this process.

Fecal impaction sufferers are especially prone to this issue because your digestive tract stays in a constant state of inflammation and the prolonged presence of stools in your gut encourages the growth of inflammation-promoting unhealthy bacteria.

You will also experience greater bone loss as you age

Our bodies are only able to increase bone density until the age of 25, after which we gradually lose bone mass with each passing year. This bone loss speeds up significantly when we cross 50 and it is the second leading cause of unintentional injury deaths worldwide…

This goes to show how bone loss related issues are not only very common but also deadly. It also highlights how important it is for us to maintain our bone density as time goes by.

Clinical studies have now revealed that microbes in our gut play a vital role in supporting our bone strength by inhibiting osteoclasts (cells that degrade bone) and promoting the proliferation of osteoblasts (cells that form bone).

An impaired gut however, often lacks the rich microbiota necessary to encourage bone mass retention. As a matter of fact, the inflammation that is commonly seen in the gut of constipation and fecal impaction sufferers has not just shown to negatively affect bone metabolism, it is also frequently associated with osteoporosis.

You will have chronically poor energy levels

From the time you wake up to the time you go back to sleep, how much energy you have can determine how productive you are, how excitedly you engage with your day and even your overall satisfaction with your life.

While our diet is a significant factor in contributing to our overall energy balance, our gut is assigned the crucial task of absorbing nutrients from our food and distributing it to our body to be turned into cellular fuel.

One critical process by which our intestines affect our energy levels is by using our gut bacteria to ferment dietary fibers and producing something called SCFAs (short-chain fatty acids) which are known to be extremely important in controlling our energy metabolism.

Studies have shown that gut dysbiosis (poor bacteria composition) is not only a hallmark of slow moving stools, it also saps you of your energy levels by lowering the SCFA levels in your digestive tract. This is why people that suffer from chronic constipation report feeling tired all the time and often struggle to power through their day.

It affects how you look and how others perceive you

Both our gut and our skin have microbiomes that communicate with each other through something known as the gut-skin axis.

This communication system allows the health of our gut to determine how our skin appears and how it ages in such a distinct way that others are able to quickly infer our overall health based on these visual cues.

In fact, people’s perception of us can even go beyond how our skin looks and also be guided by how our skin smells. Evidence shows that people with healthier digestive microbiota and are rated higher on an attractiveness scale because their immune system function is projected through their body odor.

It is remarkable how sensitive we are to such subtle signals and how our gut can change how others interact with us. Unfortunately, this also means people with impaired digestive tracts likely project unhealthy health cues to others and this can come to play a significant role in your social, work and love life.

You are likely to have poor quality of sleep

How well you sleep at night doesn’t just determine how well you function the next day, it has shown to determine your risk of developing many chronic diseases such as heart disease, diabetes, obesity, stroke and cancer.

New research has now revealed that not only does our gut microbiome influence the quality of sleep we get, poor quality of sleep can in-turn degrade your digestive tract’s bacterial composition. This can lead to a vicious cycle where your gut becomes progressively unhealthier and your sleep gets progressively worse.

Indeed, studies have shown that the worse your constipation, the worse your sleep disturbances. This has major consequences for fecal impaction sufferers because your digestive tract is in such an extreme state of disrepair that your chances of developing a secondary chronic condition becomes very high.

You are likely to have poor immune function and impaired healing

Our capacity to fight diseases and our ability to maintain our youth to a large extent is determined by our immune function and how well we heal from injuries. Clinical evidence suggests that both these things are affected by the health of our gut.

Research indicates that gut dysbiosis can cause immune dysregulation and affect our overall healing, not just in our digestive tract but other parts of your body as well.

Once your immune system’s function goes off balance, it can lead to further gut impairment, trapping you in a downward spiral of worsening immune system and digestive function.

Since 70% of our immune system resides in our gut, by the time you develop chronic constipation or fecal impaction, your immunity is so affected that it starts to age your body faster and you become vulnerable to infections, autoimmune diseases and even cancer.