Ep. 115: The Mineral You're Probably Ignoring (And Why It's Wrecking Your Digestion)

Most people think about magnesium for constipation and digestion. 

What if the problem isn't that you're deficient in magnesium? What if the minerals you already have can't actually do their jobs?

That's what copper does. And it is one of the most overlooked minerals in functional nutrition.

In this episode, Dr. Heather covers the copper-zinc-iron-thyroid connection and why it matters so much when it comes to constipation, low ferritin, slow motility, and fatigue that doesn't budge.

What you'll hear in this episode:

• Why minerals don't work in isolation and what happens when copper is low
• The seesaw relationship between zinc and copper, and why long-term zinc supplementation without copper can backfire
• How copper supports stomach acid, digestive energy, and gut motility
• Why iron supplementation doesn't always work (and what the actual missing piece might be)
• Ceruloplasmin: the copper-dependent protein that acts like a traffic controller for iron
• How copper and zinc both connect to thyroid physiology, and how that links back to constipation
• The zinc-copper-iron-thyroid-constipation chain, explained step by step
• Copper-rich and zinc-rich foods, and why oysters are in a category of their own
• What we look for on HTMA and why we read minerals as a pattern, not in isolation

Resources and links mentioned:

• Minerals & HTMA Practitioner training on June 18
• HTMA testing 

For practitioners: On June 18, Dr. Heather is teaching practitioners how to identify mineral patterns using HTMA and other functional assessments, including how copper and zinc impact ferritin, why some clients don't improve with iron, and how minerals affect thyroid and gut function. Details in the link above.

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Transcript

Dr. Heather Finley 0:03

Welcome to the Love Your Gut Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Heather Finley, registered dietitian and gut health specialist. I understand the frustration of dealing with GI issues because I've been there and I spent over two decades searching for answers for my own gut issues of constipation, bloating, and stomach pain. I've dedicated my life to understanding and solving my own gut issues. And now I'm here to guide you. On this podcast, I'll help you identify the true root causes of your discomfort. So you can finally ditch your symptoms for good. My goal is to empower you with the knowledge and tools you need so that you can love your gut and it will love you right back. So if you're ready to learn a lot, gain a deeper understanding of your gut and find lasting relief. You are in the right place. Welcome to the love your gut podcast.

0:55

All right, so let me paint you a picture. Someone comes into Gut Together. They have already tried magnesium, they've done probiotics, they've taken digestive enzymes. Maybe they've even been on iron supplements because their ferritin came back low or iron came back low. But they're still constipated, they're still exhausted, they're still bloated after almost every meal, wondering what they're missing. Here's what I wanna start with today, because I think it reframes this whole conversation. What if the problem isn't that you're deficient in more things? What if the problem is that the minerals you do have can't actually do their jobs? That is what I wanna talk about today, and I wanna have a very specific conversation about some minerals that I think get overlooked, that really have a lot to do with your digestion and hormones and energy, and that is copper and zinc. It is one of the most under-discussed minerals in the functional nutrition space. Copper is so important because it impacts stomach acid production, iron transport, thyroid function, energy production, especially at the cellular level, even your nervous system, and yes, of course, your ability to poop. Most people have not heard a thing about it, or if they have, they are taking copper supplements like a oyster zinc or something along those lines. But that might not be the solution either. So today, that's where I wanna go. I wanna talk about copper, zinc, the relationship between them, and then why this mineral balance matters a lot more than you might realize when we're talking about constipation, iron issues, thyroid symptoms, fatigue. So let's just jump right into this I wanna start with something that comes up almost every week in our clients. People know about magnesium for constipation. That's a hot topic. Everybody's talking about it. We know about iron for fatigue, and that's where most people's mineral knowledge ends, um, unless they're getting targeted ads for, like, Element or other just hydration mineral products. But this all makes sense because those are the ones that we see the most on the Internet. But what I want you to understand is minerals don't work alone. They work in teams. It's like a football team. Iron and magnesium might be the quarterback that you know the most about. They get all the press, all the attention, all the glory. But there is an offensive line making every single play possible, and you never hear about them. Copper, potassium, sodium, zinc, these are the players that are keeping the whole system functioning. And when copper is low, iron gets stuck, energy drops, thyroid function slows, digestion slows, constipation gets work. So I wanna unpack why that actually happens. But the big reframe that I want you to carry with you through this episode is this: when something isn't working, the answer isn't always more of the obvious thing. Sometimes it's the mineral that nobody thought to ask about So before we get into what copper actually does, I wanna talk about zinc, because I don't want you going on your phone and ordering a copper supplement before you get to the end of this episode. Because you cannot talk about copper without understanding its relationship to zinc. Now, these two minerals have what I'd call a seesaw relationship, and it matters a lot, especially in clinical practice when we're talking about constipation, digestion, thyroid, even hair graying. This is a big one. So let's start with why zinc is important, because, like I said, I don't want you to walk away buying a random supplement, and I also don't want you to walk away from this episode thinking that zinc is a villain either, 'cause it's not. Zinc is so essential for stomach acid production. It's involved in digestive enzyme function. It supports the mucosal lining of the gut. So those of you that have leaky gut or intestinal permeability, this is your first line of defense, and it plays a role in immune function and tissue repair. The NIH actually notes that zinc helps maintain mucosal integrity, which is part of why you see it studied in the context of diarrhea and gut resilience. So z- zinc is generally important, right? But the way that it gets interesting, and where functional nutrition has to be really nuanced, is taking too much. So if somebody has been taking 30, 40, 50, whatever milligrams of zinc for months, especially without copper alongside of it, it can start to push copper down. So the NIH has established that 50 milligrams per day or more of zinc for even a few weeks can inhibit copper absorption. One thing that I often note in the trainings that I run is, what happened a couple years ago? During COVID, what was everybody doing? We were all mega-dosing zinc, right? Unknowingly, impacting our copper. Now, I have this theory, just that since then, we've seen a lot more copper issues. That's just a theory in my head, but something that we've seen in clinical practice as well. So the upper tolerable limit for adults is 40 milligrams per day, and part of the reason that this limit exists is specifically because of what excess zinc does to copper status. So when copper drops, we're not just talking about mineral imbalance on paper. We're talking about the downstream effects of how it affects iron transport, ferritin pathways, thyroid function, energy production, constipation. So the mechanism behind this is something called metallothionein. And what this means, so this is a protein involved in zinc homeostasis and metal binding. So when zinc is chronically high, it strongly influences metallothionein activity in the gut and even in the pancreas, which is part of how excess zinc intake interferes with copper status. So it's not just a simple deficiency, it's a competition at the absorption level. And the clinical reality is the pattern that we see really regularly, especially on clients that run HTMA testing with us. Someone starts taking zinc for immune support or even gut lining. They're taking zinc carnosine or something for their gut lining. Maybe a practitioner recommended it. Maybe they found it in a supplement stock online, but they have no idea what their copper is. Nobody thought to even check that. Over time, the very supplement that they started to support digestion becomes part of the reason that their mineral pattern becomes more imbalanced. So there's several case reports in medical literature That you can go down a deep rabbit hole if you want to, but basically that show that excess zinc intake can lead to copper deficiency, anemia, even low white blood cell counts, called neutropenia, and even neurological symptoms in more severe cases. So this is not just theoretical. There's actual research to support this. So the message isn't stop taking zinc. The message is more zinc is not automatically better, especially if it starts pushing copper down. So zinc and copper have this seesaw. When one is chronically high, the other tends to drop. And when copper drops, that's when we start seeing issues with iron and thyroid and energy, and even gut motility, which is so essential for constipation prevention. So let's talk about what copper actually does in the digestive system, because most people have not thought about this. Digestion is not just mechanical. Your body has to produce stomach acid. It has to activate digestive enzymes. It has to move food through your system with coordinated muscle contractions, and all of that requires energy. Copper is involved in that energy production at the cellular level. So copper is going to support the function of mitochondria, where your cells actually generate energy. And the stomach lining, just like every other tissue in your body, depends on that cellular energy to do its job well. So there are also copper-dependent enzymes that may drive the digestive process. When your copper is low, you're not just dealing with one small gap. You're potentially slowing down digestion from the very beginning. So what does this actually look like in a real person? This looks like bloating. This looks like feeling full quickly, like food is just sitting in your stomach like a brick, like having a poor appetite, slow digestion, especially in the upper GI tract. And when food isn't being properly broken down at the top, we know that everything downstream gets harder, and the small intestine has to deal with now partially undigested food. And the microbiome then gets exposed to things that it wasn't meant to process. So motility will slow down, gas builds up, constipation sets in. I always say that digestion is an assembly line. Every station depends on the one before it, and copper is involved in keeping the energy at the early stations running. This is part of why I get really frustrated when the conversation around constipation stays so surface level, more fiber, more water, more magnesium. And sometimes those things help. But if the root issue is mineral-driven, you can drink all the water you want, and it's still not going to move the needle the way that you want it to. So this is the part that I really want you to stay with me on because I think that this is one of the most clinically useful things that you can do and understand, whether you're a clinician or not, about iron and ferritin and fatigue, because most people think low ferritin or low iron means that you need more iron, and sometimes that's true. But iron metabolism is not a simple equation, and I have many other episodes that you can go listen to on that. That's not what we're getting into today. You have to absorb iron. You have to transport it, you have to store it, and actually use it, and copper is involved in several of those steps. So the analogy that we use often with our clients is copper is the Uber driver. Iron is the passenger. You can have hundreds of passengers waiting, but if there are no Uber drivers, no one's getting anywhere. And that specific mechanism is a protein called ceruloplasmin, and ceruloplasmin is a copper-carrying protein that acts basically as a way to help regulate this iron metabolism, so it's gonna work alongside other copper-dependent proteins. When copper is low, ceruloplasmin and other transport protein activity can drop. That's gonna impair iron movement. If you've been on any of my iron webinars, you know this. And iron is not getting where it needs to go. So what this looks like in labs is you might see low ferritin with normal iron. You might see ferritin that doesn't budge no matter how much iron someone is taking. And in some cases, you can see high ferritin with symptoms. That has its own story. You might see low ceruloplasmin, low serum copper, and alongside this, more importantly, from a symptom perspective, you're gonna see low energy, hair loss, thyroid symptoms, constipation, just to tie this all back together. We've seen clients whose ferritin started moving after we only addressed minerals, copper being one of them. Not more iron, copper. And if you listened to the episode I did on Jessica a couple weeks ago, that was a big piece is getting all the cofactors to help with iron So this is why you cannot look at anything in isolation. When I'm looking at any ferritin picture, I'm asking, "What is copper doing? What is zinc doing? What's the full mineral picture?" Because you can supplement and make no progress if there's no Uber drivers. And that's also why I think it's important just to note that if you're just waiting, like, oh, take this and wait, it might be more mineral related. And while this episode is more about digestion than it is iron, it all goes together because we need copper for so many things. And so your constipation, and your low iron, and your hair loss, and your low energy, and your thyroid issues could all be tied with one, or likely more than one, but this one thing could be underneath all of those things. So let's just connect the dots because I think when you see the full chain, the constipation picture will make a lot more sense There's lots of research that shows that trace minerals like zinc, copper, iron are all connected to the thyroid. They're all connected to hormone meta- metabolism, thyroid function, and these minerals don't operate in separate lanes. They overlap, like I've shared. So the chain that we wanna understand clinically when it relates to zinc and copper is when copper is low or when that zinc-to-copper ratio is off, iron transport and utilization start to struggle. So with compromised iron transport, your cells are getting less oxygen delivered efficiently, and reduced cellular oxygen and energy availability will affect your thyroid physiology. So the thyroid can function like a thermostat for your metabolism, or it does function as a thermostat. When that thermostat gets dialed down, everything slows down, including digestion, including gut motility, and slower motility is gonna mean slower stomach emptying, slower small bowel transit, slower colon transit, and the result then is constipation, bloating, feeling full, reflux, gas, et cetera. So what we wanna note about this chain is constipation is at the end, but the origin is much further upstream. It's minerals, mineral balance. So when someone comes to me and they're like, "I'm constipated," we're not just starting with a probiotic. We're looking at what does their iron look like? What does their thyroid function look like? Are they over-supplementing zinc? And we've caught that many times. And ultimately, the best way to look at this is through HTMA patterns because we can see so much about iron and the thyroid and metabolism and burnout and adrenals and overall mineral balance just from this one simple test. Constipation is the symptom, but the story really starts a lot further back. And we know now that constipation is not just a magnesium problem in 99% of cases. It's a mineral pattern problem. And the reason this matters is if you only just megadose magnesium, you're gonna get temporary relief at best. But if we work upstream and we're addressing these underlying patterns, that's when people genuinely start to feel different So let's stay on the thyroid piece for a minute because this is really important when it comes to gut motility, or we often will see people that say, "I've had thyroid labs done. They said everything looks fine." Even if your TSH and T4 are technically in range, suboptimal thyroid physiology can still affect your gut function, and I see this a lot. Someone that has thyroid labs, they're technically fine or normal, but they have fatigue, cold hands, cold feet, hair loss, brain fog, constipation, and they've been told that their thyroid is fine. What we wanna understand here is that mineral status will influence how well your body can actually use thyroid hormones, not just how much is circulating. So if copper and iron are dysregulated, the cellular environment for thyroid hormone utilization is gonna be compromised even with labs that look okay So how does this relate to your gut and your constipation? Well, when slower thyroid function is present, that can look like stomach emptying slowed down, uh, just slow gastric emptying. The small bowel is not gonna move food through at the right rate. A colon is going to be slower, and that's a recipe for constipation, and bloating, and fullness that's gonna linger hours after a meal, or just gas that doesn't resolve. The connection between thyroid and constipation is often framed as a thyroid condition issue, but we often wanna ask a different question. What is influencing this? And oftentimes it goes back to minerals. So let's talk food, because before we ever talk about supplementation, we wanna be thinking about what someone is actually eating. Copper-rich foods are things like beef liver, probably not the first food on your list, oysters, mussels, clams, crabs. Cashews are another good source. Sesame seeds, tahini, um, if you like tahini. Dark chocolate, shiitake mushrooms as well. So maybe these are not foods that you normally eat. I know personally I'm not a big fan of oysters, mussels, clams, or crabs, but I do love cashews, sesame seeds, and dark chocolate, and mushrooms. So the thing that I think is worth naming is that many women, especially the ones I work with, have quietly moved away from these foods because they just don't like them or don't include them in their diet. Red meat maybe feels like something that you shouldn't be eating too much of, or organ meats don't taste good, or shellfish is not your favorite. And if you've been avoiding these foods, your copper intake may be lower than you realize. You have to be intentional about this. So maybe just pick one food from that list and try to incorporate it a couple times a week. I mean, I'm giving you permission to eat more dark chocolate, so take it. Dark chocolate and cashews, there's your afternoon snack. Enjoy. Let's talk also about zinc. So zinc-rich foods include oysters, which are... That's why you'll see supplements that are oyster zinc, because they have the zinc and the copper. That's, they're such a mineral powerhouse. Beef, lamb, pumpkin seeds are another great one, eggs, yogurt, cheese. So the, the goal is not to just, like, only eat copper, only eat zinc. We want balance, right? You need both, and this is where testing can be really helpful. Um, when we see clients who have been avoiding animal proteins for years, eating mostly plant-based foods, they may need to think about both minerals differently, especially since plant sources of zinc can also contain things that help reduce their bioavailability. Or someone who has been heavily supplementing zinc without copper needs a totally different conversation. Someone who eats shellfish regularly might actually have high copper. So this is where we want personalization, not just random advice. And this is where HTMA becomes such a useful tool, because it gives us a window into the longer term mineral patterns that a blood draw alone wouldn't show. What we often see in clients who present with constipation or low ferritin or thyroid symptoms and fatigue is elevated zinc, low copper, high zinc-to-copper ratio. Not always, but this is often a pattern that we will see. So what I wanna emphasize is that minerals don't exist in isolation, um, and copper being low is significant. Zinc being high is significant. Um, we wanna understand the full context. We also wanna look at other minerals like sodium, potassium, magnesium. What does the overall stress pattern on HTMA suggest about the adrenals, the nervous system? All of that matters. So there's value in looking at the blood markers like serum copper, ceruloplasmin, and also the clinical picture, and then pairing that with HTMA testing to get a deeper insight into that mineral symphony or the, the football team, whatever analogy you wanna use there, because they don't exist in isolation, and they're a part of a bigger pattern. But I hope you're understanding how important copper is and how important that zinc-to-copper ratio is, especially even from a digestive perspective So I wanna speak to the practitioners listening for a minute. Everything that I've talked about today, the zinc-copper balance, how it affects iron transport, ferritin, thyroid physiology, gut motility, reading these patterns on HTMA, this is the kind of clinical thinking that I'm going to be teaching in my upcoming practitioner training on June 19th. If you are a dietician or a health practitioner, maybe you work with GI cases, you've had clients where iron supplementation isn't working, constipation persists, thyroid labs are normal, but the symptoms are not, you definitely wanna be at this training, especially if you've been curious about HTMA, how it works, how it could add value to your practice, both for you and your clients. I will say that when we started addressing minerals in our clients, our client results shifted so much for the better. We were already getting good results with our clients, but adding in specific mineral support expedited the result process, where they were getting results quicker, faster, with less supplementation, because we had that specific data that we could use. So on this training, we're gonna cover HTMA testing, mineral patterns, how to interpret them for digestion, copper, zinc, ferritin, all the things. So I'd love for you to be there. The link is in the show notes, um, and would love for you to join. So thanks for tuning in. Whether you are a practitioner or not, if you've been dealing with any of the things that I'm talking about, constipation, low ferritin, thyroid symptoms, fatigue, maybe you feel like you're doing the right things, nothing's working, I hope this episode gave you a different lens to look through. So the question worth asking isn't always, "What am I deficient in?" Sometimes it's, "What's throwing off balance?" Copper doesn't get talked about enough. Zinc and copper balance doesn't get talked about enough. And the relationship between those minerals as it relates to iron and thyroid and gut motility, I never hear talked about, and I think it's a gap that we're often missing. So if you found this helpful, share it with someone who needs to hear it. If you wanna go deeper into your own mineral picture, check out HTMA testing. It can be so helpful. You can start with our free mineral guide. The link is in the show notes for that as well. And I will see you next week on the next episode of the Love Your Gut podcast.