Is Gluten Sensitivity Ruining Your Sex Life? A Video by Dr. Vikki Petersen

Transcript of the video

I wanted to talk to you today about a topic that is becoming more and more commonly seen in patients in my clinic.

If you’ve been around for a little while and you’re mature, you probably remember the first time on TV, maybe you remember seeing the first President Bush mentioning ED or erectile dysfunction. I know the first time I heard that said on TV, I was a bit shocked. Call me old-fashioned, but that was kind of new and different. That problem, ED, has certainly continued, and we hear more and more about it as far as medications dealing with it. That’s all over the television and all of our magazine advertisements, etc.

A new thing has come on the scene, maybe the female equivalent of that, which is we used to have KY jelly that was kind of popular for a long time, and this is sort of an enhanced product, if you will, to improve sensation for the intimate act. And it struck me the other day when I saw that commercial. I’m not sure if you’ve seen it, but there’s the equivalent of fireworks going off in the bedroom to express how this product works.

And I thought, “you know, we’ve gotten into an interesting time and it’s not normal to need enhancements in that area“. Being intimate with one’s partner is natural, and enjoying that is also natural in a healthy body.

So, what’s really going on here?

Gluten sensitivity creates deficiencies

There are a few different areas I could discuss. I’m actually going to write a blog that encompasses more of it, but I wanted to look at the gluten association with this ED problem. There have been many, many studies that have talked about how gluten affects hormonal balance, and it’s a direct effect on the adrenal glands and the reproductive glands. It is a secondary effect from the deficiencies created from gluten—B6 and zinc and certain other vitamins and minerals, tryptophan, which is an amino acid. Certain of these substances get depleted when someone is sensitive to gluten and therefore not absorbing nutrients the way they should from the damage and inflammation that occurs to the small intestine.

So, secondarily to those deficiencies, we see hormonal-based problems. They can be depression, they can be infertility, miscarriage, ED, loss of libido. So all of these things are included in that.

But as a society, I think we’ve sort of moved into this idea that maybe it’s normal and it’s just because we lead stressful lives… But we don’t [our clinical research] find that at the Root Cause Medical Clinic. So I wanted to communicate about this association with gluten.

Forgive me as I—you see my eyes go down a little bit because I’m going to talk about some studies.

Studies on the effects of gluten sensitivity

As I mentioned, tryptophan is an amino acid. It can be deficient when you are affected by gluten sensitivity. Showing in adolescence that they had depression, they got on a gluten-free diet, their tryptophan levels then normalized as a normal course of getting on the gluten-free diet, and their depression went away without any help of medication.

By the way, a quick note about antidepressant medications is that one of their side effects is decreased libido. So getting to the root cause of that depression, whether it’s gluten sensitivity or something else, also makes a lot of sense because that libido issue will come in as a side effect of those drugs.

There was a study in the Annals of Italian Medicine that talked about specifically in celiac disease that a gluten intolerance will target the reproductive organs. And to think that gluten only affects the gut is really an error in our understanding, and there have been many, many studies about this.

Gluten sensitivity and adrenals

The other thing that happens with gluten sensitivity is that it weakens your adrenal glands, which are your stress glands. When the adrenal glands, or stress glands, are weakened or under stress, they do an interesting thing because it’s the stress glands that kind of get you through the day, give you enough energy to get you through your days as well as they possibly can.

But they’re a bit burdened by, when under stress, having to do one job and not being able to do all of their jobs. Because one of the major jobs that they do is make sex hormones. They make the precursors to the sex hormones, estrogen and testosterone primarily, in men and women. What these adrenal glands will do is they’ll actually divert away from making these hormones, the sex hormones, to making adrenaline and things that just allow you to get through your day.

Adrenal fatigue is also secondary to gluten sensitivity. Now I’m not saying every single person that has a libido problem is gluten intolerant, but it’s common enough that it would certainly behoove you and anyone you know to get screened for a gluten intolerance based on all this research. Once again, I’m going to write a blog on it to get all the specifics.

There was one more study, it was from the Journal of Reproductive Health back in 2010, and it absolutely confirmed earlier studies of implications of gluten intolerance with reproductive health issues.

In conclusion

So with all of these commercials and information on the market, I just wanted to put some truth out there as far as getting to the root cause. You shouldn’t need the drug and you shouldn’t need the cream, you should just enjoy a body that’s functioning the way it was designed to function, and that is to enjoy itself when the intimate act is occurring. And it should be rather effortless; we shouldn’t need a lot of help for that when the body is healthy.

This might be a facet that you haven’t looked at before, and I encourage you to do so. It certainly could do no harm.

Additional resources

Dr. Vikki’s book on Gluten Sensitivity
The Nutrition Center at Root Cause Medical Clinic