If your gut has gotten more unpredictable as you’ve gotten older—and you’ve been told it’s just in your head or that you should simply cut out more foods—this article is for you.
Because the truth is, the causes of digestive issues after 40 or 50 are often hidden. They’re misunderstood by friends and family, dismissed by the medical system, and buried under years of confusion and trial-and-error.
In this article, we’re not just talking about food triggers. We’re going deeper. You’ll learn how stress, hormone shifts, and even well-meaning advice can leave people stuck with worsening IBS symptoms that no diet alone can fix.
Here is a video we made, otherwise there is a written version underneath.
The Reality of Aging and Your Gut
Just like pigment cells stop producing color in your hair (which is why they turn grey or white), the cells, nerves, and muscles in your gut age too.
They don’t regenerate or function quite like they used to. We see increases in sensitivity, decreased resilience — and that’s something none of us can change.
However, what we can change are the other hidden factors that most people don’t realize are just as important: chronic stress, unprocessed emotions, hormonal shifts that throw off your entire system, and even how the medical system talks to you or labels you.
Summary: Natural aging affects gut function through cellular changes, but the hidden factors like stress, emotions, hormones, and medical treatment often have a greater impact on digestive health after 50.
The Problem with “Diagnosis of Exclusion”
IBS is what doctors call a “diagnosis of exclusion” — meaning they’ve ruled out everything else they can think of, but still don’t know what’s actually wrong.
When someone comes to their doctor with digestive issues and gets diagnosed with IBS, it used to be a syndrome of “we don’t know what’s wrong with you, so go away.”
Many people won’t follow up after receiving this dismissive diagnosis. The gap in care becomes particularly problematic for older patients, who are often not taken seriously when they’ve adapted to living with symptoms for years.
Summary: IBS diagnoses often become dead ends where patients receive no real help, with older adults particularly vulnerable to being dismissed by the medical system.
Medical Hexing and How Labels Become Identity
Medical hexing occurs when you go to a medical provider for information about what’s happening to you, and they disregard you while giving you a scary label. Then you begin to identify with that label, and your psyche identifies with it too.
The problem is that you don’t separate yourself from the condition.
It’s not “I have a body that suffers from IBS” — it becomes “I am an IBS patient.” This creates a psychological cascade that can actually exacerbate symptoms, especially when the original concern was disregarded.
The Historical Context of Gut Disorders
Interestingly, IBS, IBD, and celiac disease were all lumped under one category around the turn of the 20th century.
Dr. Sidney Valentine Haas famously treated and cured many people with what was essentially a low-FODMAP, specific carbohydrate diet that included green banana flour as the only starchy food allowed.
He was hugely celebrated until the 1920s-30s when gluten was identified, and then we started getting differentiation of GI illnesses. Before that, everything was considered celiac disease. Then conditions started becoming separated into Crohn’s, ulcerative colitis, IBS, and diverticulitis — though all are still thought to be initiated by dysbiosis.
Summary: Medical labels can become part of a patient’s identity, creating psychological barriers to healing, while historically successful treatments have been overlooked in favor of reductionist approaches.
The Hidden Role of Hormones
For women especially, hormonal shifts that come with aging act like a wrecking ball on gut health.
There’s a definite correlation between female hormones and GI changes, happening during menstruation, pregnancy, hysterectomy, and menopause.
Estrogen has relationships with insulin and GI motility. When you have really big hormonal shifts, it’s like someone dumping a huge rock in your calm, serene pool — you deal with the aftereffects until it settles down as hormones regulate.
The Menopause Connection
Globally, IBS prevalence in elderly populations is estimated at 10-20%, with women having four times more cases than men in the elderly population. This really starts at menopause, so women aged 40-50 and above significantly outrank men with the condition.
This happens in men too, but they don’t pay attention to their fluctuations because they don’t have monthly cycles as obvious markers, so they chalk symptoms up to something else.
Summary: Hormonal changes, particularly around menopause, significantly impact gut function, with women over 40 experiencing IBS at four times the rate of men due to estrogen’s effects on digestion and motility.
If you’re just getting started, download our free Low FODMAP food list to get clarity on common gut triggers
Tap the blue button below to download our “Eat This, Not That” list as well as additional resources for bloating (it’s free!)
The Stress-Gut Connection in Older Adults
When discussing stress hormones, we enter the realm of mindset and our integrated nervous system. We have reptilian brains, primate brains, and human-only prefrontal cortex functions — but it’s all integrated throughout our spinal cord, hands, legs, and gut (one of the biggest sensory organs).
When you live with chronic low-grade stress, it leads to chronic nervous system dysregulation.
Whether you realize you’re in fight-or-flight or not, if you’re someone who runs around all day without time for yourself, you’re probably not in the “rest and digest” state — you’re likely in fight-or-flight, which turns off the GI tract.
The Freeze Response and Poor Decision Making
There’s also the “freeze or faint” response where everything tightens up and doesn’t function properly. Intelligence, creativity, libido, immunity, and GI blood flow all decrease. You don’t make good decisions, so food-seeking behaviors change, and you tend to seek foods that burden the GI tract more.
You’re in a stressed state, and then you consume high-fat, high-sugar foods in quantities that humans have never experienced except for the last 100 years. The body, already stressed and not working properly, gets burdened with massive quantities of calories, sugar, and fat, and shuts down further.
Summary: Chronic stress keeps the body in fight-or-flight mode, shutting down digestion and leading to poor food choices that further burden an already compromised digestive system.
When Life Circumstances Keep You Stuck
Many older adults feel stuck in their digestive issues and life situations because it’s what they’ve known for so long. This is especially true for those in their 70s and 80s who aren’t happy in their living situations or with partners of 20, 30, 40, or 50+ years, but feel stuck to make changes at this stage of life.
These situations appear safe on the surface, even though they’re not safe for the person or their gut health. Someone choosing to leave a partner, move states, or end a career that’s still supporting them at age 60-65+ represents a big leap into the unknown.
The Gut Instinct Connection
The biggest changes often occur in people who step into the unknown and take that brave leap, seeing global improvements in how they feel. However, it’s easy to get stuck in your own nervous system patterns because they’re familiar, rather than pushing against them to create change.
Summary: Many older adults remain in unhealthy life situations that appear safe but actually harm their gut health, with the biggest improvements seen in those brave enough to make significant life changes.
The Importance of Flexibility as We Age
As your community gets smaller with age, you’re losing lifelines and support systems. There’s wisdom in the concept that with aging, you need to learn to be more flexible because many things are out of your control. Like a willow tree, you don’t want to get stiff and break in the wind.
However, in our society, there’s often not much to lean on. If your spouse is the only other person you have, even if the relationship doesn’t work well, you might think, “I’ll just endure this while I can.”
Societal, cultural, and familial constructs keep people in these situations, but it’s also genuinely scary to change.
The Mind-Body Connection in Healing
When studying the etiology of IBS (and conditions like obesity), there are physical manifestations and psychological processes that can either keep you stuck or help achieve remission. It’s always both things working together.
Our society tends to approach health as purely physical — “just go to the doctor and fix it” — so people might not recognize the relationship between life circumstances and physical symptoms until a therapist suggests that maybe a job change, divorce, or cutting ties with toxic family members might be necessary.
Everything in healthcare (with the exception of acute infections and motor vehicle accidents) requires addressing both physical causes and psychological states.
Summary: Aging well requires emotional and psychological flexibility, recognizing that gut health issues typically involve both physical and psychological components that must be addressed together.
Moving Beyond Food-Only Solutions
The point of focusing on these hidden factors is that for many people, especially over age 50, symptoms aren’t caused solely by food. You have to go deeper.
Effective treatment involves working on the nervous system, rebuilding confidence around food, and stopping the cycle of fear and confusion that’s been controlling symptoms for years.
This comprehensive approach addresses why traditional dietary restrictions often fall short and why lasting gut health requires looking at the whole person — their stress levels, life circumstances, hormonal changes, and psychological relationship with their condition.
Summary: True gut health after 50 requires addressing multiple hidden factors including nervous system dysfunction, hormonal changes, chronic stress, life circumstances, and the psychological impact of medical labeling, not just dietary modifications alone.
What Should Your Next Steps Be?
If you’ve been stuck in the cycle of medical dismissal, endless food restrictions, and watching your symptoms worsen with age, it’s important to know that you can finally get lasting relief.
With the right support, you’ll start to notice how your gut doesn’t control your daily schedule, how you can eat meals without fear of immediate consequences, and how you stop living in survival mode while your digestion finally works with you instead of against you.
If this feels like the missing piece you’ve been searching for — if you suspect that hormonal changes, nervous system dysregulation, chronic stress, or even your life circumstances could be playing a bigger role than anyone has acknowledged — we’re here to help you figure it out.
To learn more, I invite you to apply for a nutrition assessment call with us. We’ll help you make sense of what’s really happening beneath the surface and map out the next steps to get you feeling better — not just temporarily managing symptoms, but addressing the root causes for lasting change.
