Episode 381: Detox or Re-Tox? Why Beta Glucuronidase Can Block Hormone & Toxin Clearance
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If you’ve ever seen beta glucuronidase pop up on your stool test and wondered what it actually means, this episode breaks it all down. This powerful enzyme made by bacteria in your gut can UNDO your body’s detox work by “unboxing” toxins and hormones that were meant to be eliminated, leading to bloating, breast tenderness, and stubborn weight gain, even when your estrogen levels look normal.
Erin walks through the 3-phase detox process and how gut imbalances, constipation, or low-fiber diets can allow estrogen and other toxins to recirculate in your system.
You’ll learn both short-term strategies like calcium D-glucarate and long-term fixes to bring your beta glucuronidase back into balance.
In this episode:
How low fiber intake, sluggish motility, and alkaline pH drive beta glucuronidase levels higher and disrupt detox
How constipation and slow transit time can stall your detox efforts, allowing toxins and hormones to be reabsorbed
Erin’s strategies for addressing high beta glucuronidase, from calcium D-glucarate to long-term microbiome restoration
Why you can experience estrogen dominance symptoms like breast tenderness, bloating, and mood swings, even when your estrogen levels are low
The “gift-wrapped present” analogy that reveals how your body safely packages up hormones and toxins, and how beta glucuronidase rips the bow off
Resources mentioned:
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Glucuronidation combines these potentially toxic compounds with glucuronic acids to form a safer substance. So these conjugates, these new compounds are then suitable for safe elimination via the biliary tract. So that's bile. It gets pulled into the stool through bile and then ideally pooped out. So we are taking the toxins, pulling it through the body, and getting it completely out of the body. That's the dream. That's the ideal. That's how this is all supposed to work.
Welcome to The Funk’tional Nutrition Podcast, spelled with a K, because we do things a little differently around here. I'm your host, Erin Holt, and I've got 15 years of clinical experience as a functional nutritionist and mindset coach, creating a new model that I call Intuitive Functional Medicine™, where we combine root cause medicine with the innate intelligence of your body. This is where science meets self trust. Your body already knows how to heal, and this show is going to show you how. If you're looking for new ways of thinking about your health, be sure to follow and share with a friend, because you never know whose life you might change.
Hello, my friends. Today we are talking about beta glucuronidase. We're going to get right into it. This whole show is dedicated to this one enzyme. This is one of the markers on the GI MAP stool test. So if you've done a gut panel with us, you've seen it, and I loosely describe it as a marker of detoxification, which is not inaccurate, but it's also not the whole picture of exactly what is going on. So today I want to paint that whole picture. We'll talk about what it is and where it comes from, what it has to do with detox. If we see high beta glucuronidase on a stool test, what does that mean? And then what do we do about it? What can we do to lower it? So I was actually creating this as a resource for our clients because this is a marker that we frequently see elevated. But I also wanted to share it here. For your information, maybe you've done a stool test in the past, and this is something that you've seen on your lab or if you're a practitioner working with clients, you can share this episode with them.
That way you don't have to use up like 20 minutes of an appointment explaining what this marker means. So beta glucuronidase is an enzyme in the colon made by bacteria, and that enzyme breaks the tight bond between glucuronic acid and toxins in the intestines. So obviously that's a mouthful, so let's unpack it here. We have to start off with a brief overview of detoxification. Another fancier name for detoxification is biotransformation. So this is the process of inactivating and then removing toxins from our body. So we're transforming one compound into another form so that we can effectively and safely clear it out of the body. That's what detoxification is.
There are different steps or phases of this process. And the first step is called phase one. And that is to take toxins, which are typically fat soluble, and convert them into water soluble compounds so that they can be excreted by the body in the urine or the feces. And because there are all sorts of different types of compounds that the body can come in contact with, there are different variants of phase 1 enzymes. Enzymes are the things that are doing this biotransformation. So different reactions are part of this phase one. Oxidation, reduction, hydrolysis, hydration and dehalogenation. And then comes phase two, which is conjugation.
And by the way, both of these steps or these phases are happening in the liver. So liver cells in phase two add another substance, like an amino acid or a sulfur molecule to the toxin. And the purpose of this is to make it less harmful and safe for excretion, usually through urine or poop. So these new substances that are created can safely eliminated from the body. Now, phase two reactions are different than phase one. These are glutathione conjugation, sulfation, acetylation, methylation and glucuronidation. And that's why I'm going through all of these reactions, because glucuronidation is the big one we are going to talk about today. Glucuronidation combines these potentially toxic compounds with glucuronic acids to form a safer substance, these conjugates.
Conjugates is basically just a word for like two things combined together. Two things conjugated together. So these conjugates, these new compounds are then suitable for safe elimination via the biliary tract. So that's bile. It gets pulled into the stool through bile and then ideally pooped out. So we are taking the toxins, pulling it through the body and getting it completely out of the body. That's the dream, that's the ideal, that's how this is all supposed to work. And this glucuronidation pathway is responsible for the detoxification of not just exogenous compounds.
So these are things that we come in contact with outside of our bodies, like drugs and carcinogens, but also endogenous compounds. So these are things that are created inside the body like hormones, estrogen, androgen, serotonin, bilirubin, dopamine, for example, those have to be processed and cleared out of the body as well. So if you've listened to the podcast at all, especially my hormone episodes, you'll often hear me talk about beta glucuronidase in relation to estrogen and in relation to hormones. And this is exactly why that glucuronidation pathway is very important for estrogens. Glucuronic acids bind to estrogen so that it can be eliminated. That is the complex or the conjugate that it forms estrogen plus glucuronic acid. So beta glucuronidase is an enzyme produced by gut bacteria that can uncouple that it deconjugates that. It splits those things in two.
It cleaves the estrogen away from the glucuronic acids. It breaks that tight bond between glucuronic acid and whatever toxin or hormone that it's attached to in the intestine. So basically, everything that happens in phase two, everything that the liver just did in phase two, beta glucuronidase essentially undoes that in the gut, and that is not a good thing. We want these toxins bound up, we want them conjugated. Binding of toxins in the gut is protective because it blocks their absorption, their re entry into the body, and it helps us excrete them out. I love how Dr. Carrie Jones always says we have to take toxins all the way to the toilet. It's not about just clearing them out of the liver and into the gut.
We have to take them from the gut into the toilet. Beta glucuronidase unbinds these toxins, which makes it possible for them to be reabsorbed back into the body instead of excreted.
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So when we're talking about estrogen, I always like to use Dr. Carrie Jones analogy because it's so good. Think about wrapping up a birthday present where you're putting the present in a box and putting a bow on top, you know, putting the lid on the box, tying it up with a bow. That's basically what the body is doing with toxins and with estrogen through this detoxification. It's putting estrogen or putting toxins in a box and then it's putting a lid in the bow on top. That's glucuronidation, okay? That's the process of glucuronidation. Beta glucuronidase, that enzyme basically unties the bow and opens the lid so it allows the estrogen or whatever toxin is in there to be reabsorbed. When it's not bound up with those glucuronic acids.
It's basically like a free agent, you know, it's just floating around and it can get right back into systemic circulation. It can be reabsorbed. And that is what can lead to symptoms. When we're talking about estrogen, that's what can lead to symptoms of estrogen dominance or excess estrogen symptoms, even if you don't have too much estrogen, even if your body's not producing too much estrogen. I talked about on a recent podcast episode that my beta glucuronidase was elevated and it was giving me a lot of high estrogen symptoms, even though my estrogen was low. So high estrogen symptoms can look like irregular or heavy periods, breast tenderness and pain, bloating, weight gain, hair loss, hot flashes, night sweats, joint pain. So this can really impact us quite a lot. This enzyme, if it's elevated, can impact us quite a lot.
So where is it coming from? Why do we have it? We have many different species of bacteria in our gut that actually make beta glucuronidase. They produce this enzyme. Bacteroides, Bifidobacterium, Citrobacter, Clostridium, Lactobacillus, Staphylococcus. These are some of the bacteria that are actually making this enzyme. So when we see high beta glucuronidase on a stool test, what does that mean? Number one, that is implying that we've got some dysbiotic bacteria overgrowing dysbiosis or imbalance either in the colon or the small intestine, like Sibo. So something is out of balance because these bacteria that produce this enzyme are either overgrown or they're overproducing it. And we can also look to the environment of the gut. The environment of the gut has gotta be conducive to the growth of these microbes that produce it.
So what does that look like? A neutral or alkaline ph? Remember that the PH of the colon is slightly acidic due to the production of short chain fatty acids. Short chain fatty acids are acidic. Right. The colon's environment is a little bit acidic, and that's by design, and that's how it should be if it's going to be healthy. So if we have low short chain fatty acid production, we're going to have lower acidity, and that is going to make for more hospitable environment for some of these dysbiotic bacteria. Another thing that can do this is low fiber intake. We unpacked fiber and why it's so important on a recent episode. So I won't get too much into that here, but we can definitely see low fiber being a contributing factor to that.
It also can imply when this beta glucuronidase is elevated on a stool test, it can imply that there's some interference with phase two detoxification involving glucuronidation. So that shouldn't be a shock because we just broke all of that down. So you're probably understanding why. But basically, when this is high, it can signify problems with detoxification. It can definitely signify problems with estrogen clearance. Like we just talked about, we know that higher levels of beta glucuronidase are correlated with higher circulating estrogens in lower fecal excretion of estrogens. So when this guy is high, we're not pooping out as much estrogen as we should be, and it's going back into systemic circulation. It can also signal that we are potentially being overexposed to toxins or drugs because medications and toxins could potentially be reactivated.
So just as we're not pooping out the estrogen, we may not be pooping out our toxins and other things that should be clearing out of the body. And we're giving an opportunity to be recirculated. So that's why I say loosely that beta glucuronidase on a stool test can be a marker of detoxification for exactly that. Now, what I haven't mentioned yet is phase three detox. So phase one and phase two happening in the liver. Phase three is really about what's happening after that. So it involves bile and it involves the gut and it involves the microbiome. This is true elimination.
Those water soluble, nontoxic compounds that are packaged up in phase two need to be eliminated from the body, not reabsorbed. Okay, so hopefully what you're hearing is that we need to have good, healthy gut bacteria if we want to appropriately and effectively clear toxins out of the body. It's not just all about beta glucuronidase. Remember that it's the bacteria in our guts that is producing this enzyme. And with this conversation, we also have to talk about constipation in slow motility, sluggish motility when stool transit time is slowed, meaning you're not moving and clearing poop out of your body as quickly as you should. Estrogens and other compounds, those glucuronidated compounds, those complexes, sit in the colon longer than they should. And so this provides more opportunity for beta glucuronidase to deconjugate the estrogen or deconjugate the toxins. Remember, cleave them apart rip them apart.
And when they are ripped apart, they're allowed to be reabsorbed back into circulation instead of being eliminated. So constipation can really amplify the recirculation of hormones and other toxins back into the body. So this is why we take constipation really seriously in our practice. We just did a whole episode last week talking about how we help our clients with it. So you can go back and listen to that one. But a slower colonic transit time, meaning poop is sitting in your colon longer, leads to higher beta glucuronidase activity. So when we're seeing high beta glucuronidase on a stool test and we know that somebody has constipation in slow motility, this is something that we're taking extra extra seriously to really work to move their bowels.
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Okay, so what are some strategies? If we see elevated beta glucuronidase on a stool test, we want to break this up into short term and long term because there are some short term band aid approaches that can be effective, but it's not going to work long term. Calcium d glucorate is the first place that we go that is a beta glucuronidase inhibitor inhibitor. So it inhibits that enzyme, beta glucuronidase. A typical dose is anywhere between 1500 to 3000 milligrams a day. So that's kind of a lot. So you really want to look at the labels of whatever you're taking.
P S. This is not medical advice, this is just education. I am not your practitioner. I'm not telling you what to do. Just keep that in mind. But again, short term approach to really reduce the toxic load. Especially if somebody is dealing with symptoms of high estrogens or we know that they have high estrogens and they're dealing with a lot of hormone stuff. This can really help to reduce some of those estrogens.
And this is going to keep the estrogen in the box, keep the lid on the box, keep the bow on the box, keep it packaged up so that we can poop it out. This is assuming that you are actually pooping. So if somebody has constipation and elevated beta glucuronidase, improving motility really should be one of the first treatment priorities and first treatment strategies. So we want to get things moving. So something to keep in mind when it comes to detox, we're always trying to work in reverse. So basically we have to open up phase three before we support phase two. We have to make sure phase two pathways are working before we crank up phase one. Otherwise we can create a bottleneck effect that can actually make some of the toxic load worse for somebody.
And I say this because there are some supportive foods in nutrients that can really support that phase two glucuronidation pathway. And if we suspect high toxic burn in, it might make sense to ramp up these foods to support glucuronidation. These would be foods from the brassica family. So cabbage, broccoli, brussels sprouts. Broccoli sprouts are really good. EGCG from green tea, fish oils and also limonene from the peel of oranges, lemons, limes and grapefruits can also activate glucuronidation. N acetylcysteine. So nac selenium and alpha lipoic acid are three nutrients that also support this.
But we want to make sure that phase three. So that would be your elimination. Are you pooping? How is the health of your gut? We want to make sure that that is working appropriately before we like ramp up phase two. Okay, so order of operations for high beta glucuronidase. First things first, get people pooping, especially if they're constipated. We can potentially bring in some liver supportive foods. And that calcium D glucarate, that is really more of a band aid approach because it's not going to lower beta glucuronidase levels, it's just going to inhibit the activity of that enzyme. So it can be really, really effective.
But we still need to do the microbiome restoration work because ultimately it's the bacteria that are producing this enzyme. So we want to lower those beta glucuronidase producers and just shift the microbiome to a more balanced and favorable ecosystem. So we do need to address any dysbiosis, whether that is in the colon overgrowths in the large intestine, or sibo overgrowths in the small intestine. That needs to be addressed. We also need to promote bacterial diversity with fibers, prebiotics, polyphenols, probiotics. Really eating a whole foods, wide variety diet. I talked about this in the fiber episode. There are actually specific prebiotics that are shown to decrease beta glucuronidase.
One of them is FOS. We talked about this in the fiber episode. 4 grams a day of FOS is shown to decrease beta glucuronidase. So if you can tolerate that type of fiber, that would be something to consider. Okay, so those are some effective strategies for elevated beta glucuronidase and hopefully have a better understanding of what that enzyme actually does. A really big takeaway that I hope you get from this episode is that we're never just working on hormones, we're never just working on gut health, we're never just working on liver health because they're all impacting each other all of the time. They're part of an interconnected system. And so we really need to be targeting all parts of that system.
And hopefully this episode gives you some insight into why that is. This is the exact work that we do in our one to one practice. So if you need someone to pull it all together for you, we're your guys. We've got you. You can fill out the application to work with us in the show notes. And if you're not 100% ready to commit, you can always start with you can dip your toe into these waters with a gut panel. So this is a stool test where we look at everything going on in your gu and let you know exactly what is going on. And yes, that includes looking at your beta glucuronidase levels.
All right, my friends, I will check you next week and we'll probably just be talking more about poop, you know, because that's kind of what we do here. See ya.
Thanks for joining me for this episode of the Funk’tional Nutrition Podcast. Please keep in mind this podcast is created for educational purposes only and should never be used as a replacement for medical diagnosis or treatment. If you got something from today's show, don't forget, subscribe, leave a review, share with a friend, and keep coming back for more. Take care of you.