What Your Gut Has to Do With Bone Loss Most Women Miss This

If you're worried about bone loss and you're taking calcium, vitamin D, maybe magnesium, and you're doing everything you've been told to do, but you're still constipated, bloated, or your digestion just feels off, this may be the missing piece that no one has explained. Hey, I'm Erin Harner, Integrative Registered Dietitian Nutritionist and Gut Health Coach, and I work with women who are struggling with constipation, IBS, bloating, and SIBO. And lately, I've been hearing from more and more women who have also been told they have osteoporosis or osteopenia, bone loss. And they say they're doing everything right, but something still isn't adding up. If you want help understanding your gut pattern, I do have a gut clarity quiz and a free training, and I've linked those below. They're a great place to start. Now let's talk about what your gut has to do with bone loss. You may be taking the supplements, getting your 1200 milligrams of calcium, vitamin D, maybe magnesium, and you're trying to eat well. Maybe you've even cleaned up your diet or cut out food so that you can feel better. And then you get the scan and it says osteopenia or osteoporosis. And you think like, how is that possible? I'm doing everything right. And underneath that, there's usually something deeper. There's confusion and frustration and fear, sometimes anger, because this isn't just about numbers on a scan. This is about your future, your strength, your independence, your ability to stay active, to keep up with your grandkids, to travel, to feel strong in your body and not fragile. And when things aren't improving, it can start to feel like your body just isn't responding. So let's talk about what almost no one is connecting for you. Your gut is not separate from your bones. It's the gateway to what your bones actually need. I want to talk through four different problems that I see super often so that you don't make these same mistakes and face these same challenges. The first challenge I see is absorption. You can eat the right foods. You can have the most amazing diet. You can take the right supplements. But if your digestion isn't working well, your body isn't actually using and taking in what you're eating. And this is also where constipation becomes really important because constipation isn't just inconvenient. It's a signal that something in your body is not working the way it's supposed to. It's your body's way of telling you that things are just not moving through the way they should, that your gut is sluggish, that your gut's not functioning efficiently. And when things go in and then they sit too long, absorption becomes way less efficient. Inflammation can increase and the gut environment starts to shift in a way that makes it harder to actually take in and use those nutrients like calcium and magnesium, those things that we really want to properly absorb. So you can do everything right on paper. You can be eating the most amazing diet. You can get all your calcium from food. You can take fistfuls of supplements every day. And if you're not absorbing it, that's problem number one. And you're still not building strong bones. The second thing I see pretty often, it's just a sluggish system and chronic constipation. I see this so often with women who are diagnosed with osteoporosis and osteopenia. Constipation tells us that the whole system is really just slowed down. When the system is sluggish, it's not just digestion that's affected. Your metabolism slows down. Your signaling shifts. Your ability to regulate and process nutrients totally changes. And that matters so much for bone health because bone is constantly being broken down and rebuilt. And that process depends on a system that's functioning well and taking in the nutrients it needs is the building blocks to thrive. The third problem I see pretty often is microbiome imbalances and inflammation. Your gut bacteria, all those bugs in there, play a critical role in how minerals are absorbed and used in the body. They influence how your body regulates bone turnover. And when the gut is out of balance, especially when diversity is low, inflammation becomes high and that directly impacts your bones. This isn't about what you eat necessarily. It's about what your body can do with it. And then there's the fourth problem or challenge I see pretty often, which is when things can go really wrong. And that's when we start over-restricting. A lot of women start restricting more foods trying to fix their gut. They start with less dairy, less gluten. They take out fibers. They remove all sorts of things from the diet, hoping that it's going to help their gut feel better. This leads to less variety, more rules, more stress. And over time, your gut can become more sensitive, more reactive, and less resilient. You can't build strong bones on a shrinking diet. We need the opposite. We need more variety, more diversity, more nutrition, and better absorption. So I want to offer a little reframe here that can be really helpful. Instead of asking, what should I take for my bones or fistfuls of supplements? I like to ask a different question. We need to start asking, is my gut actually able to do what it needs to support my bones? Because this is not just a calcium problem. This is a system problem. Let's talk through some things that really help. First, we focus on supporting the body as a system. Everything is connected. We focus on improving motility, so things move through in a reasonable time frame. We focus on supporting digestion, so nutrients can be adequately absorbed into our body and our body can use them. We focus on restoring rhythm and consistency in our schedule, in our circadian rhythm, and the rhythm of our gut and our digestion. They all need to go together. We focus on rebuilding diversity in the gut because a diverse microbiome does lots of different jobs, including baking things like vitamin K2 in your gut so you can use it to point the calcium to the bones where it belongs, not in your arteries. We focus on reducing unnecessary restriction and expanding the diet. Greater variety in our diet leads to greater diversity in our microbiome, which leads to greater health and better outcomes. Because your gut needs movement, it needs variety. It needs stability and consistency and some time. You've got to give it some time. Bone health is not just about what you take. It's about what your body can actually use. If you're dealing with constipation and bone loss, those are not separate issues. That's called the gut-bone axis. Those two, the gut and the bone, are intricately intertwined. We can't have good gut health and therefore bone health. If the diet we're taking in and supplements we're taking don't properly get digested and absorbed into our body, that is thing number one. When you support your gut, you support everything downstream, including bone density and bone strength. If you want to understand what pattern your gut is in and what direction makes sense to go next, take my gut clarity quiz below. And if you want to go deeper, I've linked my free training called Bloated and Backed Up, where I walk you through the three biggest mistakes I see women make and what to do instead. Because the truth here is, you don't need to do more. You need your body to work better. You need to better absorb the nutrients you're taking in. And that's something we can actually support. I'll see you in the next one.