Hannah Aylward (00:00.908)
Welcome to the Nutrient Dense podcast. I’m your host, Hannah Aylward, holistic health coach, functional gut health practitioner, and the founder of Han. So many people are continuously failed by conventional and alternative healthcare. We are here to do it differently. Alongside my team of functional registered dietitians, I’ve helped hundreds of women around the world overcome their chronic digestive issues when nothing else works.

I’ve learned a thing or two about what it really takes to transform your health from the inside out. And I’m here to share it all with you. Please keep in mind that this podcast is for educational purposes only and should never be used as medical advice. Now let’s dive in. Your transformation is waiting. Hello, my dears and welcome to the Nutrient Dense Podcast. I’m so excited to be here with you today because today we’re going to be diving into all things food sensitivities.

food intolerances and food allergies. So I’m going to be breaking down the biggest differences between all three of these things, because we do have some different responses from the body and kind of different causes when it comes to these three different food reactions. So I’ll be breaking those down and then also giving us some kind of next steps and tips and really getting to the bottom of this stuff. So you’re not dealing with it anymore because that’s what we want more than anything, right?

We want to not be afraid of food. We want to not feel like we’re reacting to everything that we do eat. So this is going to be kind of a quick and dirty little breakdown of food sensitivities, food intolerances and food allergies. And before we kind of jump into all the technical stuff, here’s what I hear most from our clients that are dealing with food sensitivities and intolerances. Cause most of you already know that you have an allergy that’s kind of in a different bucket, but I will break that down.

When it comes to sensitivities and intolerances, if you’re dealing with a lot of these, you may feel like you eat anything and you end up bloated, bloated, gassy, constipated, running to the bathroom. You’ve got stomach cramping, pain, whatever it might be. You’re kind of reacting to all of these different foods. You also may find yourself living off of like the five same safe foods because you’re terrified to eat any of the others.

Hannah Aylward (02:20.548)
So that’s pretty common. We see clients and when they come in to work with us, they may only be able to tolerate five different vegetables. The good news is by the time they’re done working with us, they can eat many, many more symptom free. And that’s really the goal for all of our clients is to be able to tolerate more foods with less symptoms and less pain and less fear and anxiety that accompanies it. I know that very well from my own gut issues when they’re done working with us, right on the other side.

So you may be living off a couple safe foods. You may feel like you eat a meal on one day and you feel fine. Maybe it’s like oatmeal and berries and chia seeds, whatever it is, doesn’t really matter. You eat that meal on a Monday morning, you feel fine. And then you eat that meal on Tuesday morning, the exact same meal, and you’re flared. So you’re bloated, you’re gassy, you’re in pain, you’ve got reflux, a lot of common IBS symptoms. So you’re eating the same food.

on both days, but the second day your body reacts to it. So some practitioners will advise you to utilize something like a food log. And we’ll use that here and there with our clients more so to kind of get a gauge of what they’re eating. If they’re responding to certain things, we’re looking for patterns. We’re looking to make sure that they’re eating enough. Honestly, about 90 % of the people that we work with come into us not eating enough, not fueling their bodies efficiently, thinking they’re eating healthy and making quite a few mistakes, but that’s no shame on you or anything like that.

That just means there’s a lot of room for improvement and opportunity for growth, which is amazing. That’s going to help get you feeling better. So that’s what we love. Anyway, some people will advise using a food log and you may have tried doing that. You’re tracking what you’re eating. You’re writing it all down. You’re trying to pick up on these patterns. What is ticking you off? What foods are making you feel sick? What foods are causing the bloating causing the chronic digestive issues, the headaches, whatever it might be. And you’re finding that they’re not really like going in a bucket. You can’t

put them into a certain category. So you’re trying to track your food and you’re taking the time and the effort, it’s so much effort to write it all down. And you’re like, this doesn’t even make any sense. I’m reacting to everything that I’m eating. All of those are some signs that you’re dealing with food sensitivities, food intolerances, and ultimately, which I’ll get to at the end, deeper gut issues that are causing the food reactions. So if you resonate with any of those things that I just said,

Hannah Aylward (04:45.476)
This is the podcast for you because we’re going to get into all of it. And this is the majority of clients that we see. So we’ll see clients come into us having been on quite restrictive diets, maybe elimination diets for years, low FODMAP diets for years, AIP diets, GAPS diet, so many different restrictive diets. And there is a time and place for these different diets for sure. They can be used to help minimize symptoms.

but the key is to make sure that we’re using them while we’re working on the underlying root causes, which I’ll get to at the end of this. Now let’s get into some of the biggest differences between food allergy, food sensitivity, and food intolerances. So first off, we’ve got food allergies. If you have a food allergy, you probably know you have a food allergy. I hope you know you have a food allergy. The difference being that you’re gonna feel it.

pretty immediately, right? So if you have a peanut allergy, if you have a shellfish allergy, whatever it might be, if you, maybe sometimes you even get close to that food, but if you eat that food, you can go into anaphylactic shock, right? This can happen very quickly. This is an extreme response from the immune system. Your immune system is producing IgE antibodies that are kind of communicating all around your body. And then you’re going to get that pretty intense, pretty immediate response.

from the immune system that can lead to anaphylaxis, right? So food allergies are potentially fatal. They’re dangerous, they’re life threatening, they’re immediate and they’re very serious. So we’ve got an IgE response from the immune system. We’ve also got an immediate response from the immune system when we do get exposure. So those are in their own little bucket of like, hey, we do not mess around with these. You can’t be guessing with these ones.

Then we have food sensitivities and food intolerances, which are, can talk about in the same conversation, but they’re quite different because these are foods that you eat and you’ll feel it, but it’s not going, it’s not life threatening, right? It’s definitely going to decrease the quality of your life. It’s going to cause digestive issues. It can cause all sorts of like full body symptoms, but it’s not fatal. You don’t need an EpiPen. You’re not producing IgE antibodies.

Hannah Aylward (07:03.218)
When it comes to food sensitivities, your body can be producing IgG antibodies. That’s kind of what most functional practitioners believe to be true. However, we know that food sensitivity testing that is testing for IgG antibodies is pretty highly inaccurate. We have some trouble replicating the results when we do run these tests.

And IgG antibodies are actually kind of showing that your immune system has had exposure to this food. So a lot of more like holistic or functional practitioners will run food sensitivity testing, right? This is never a recommendation from me. This is not where we start. Honestly, I think in all of the years of practicing, we have run maybe one. honestly, I can’t even recall the time, the last time that we ran a food sensitivity test.

clients will come in to work with us and they will have these test results. But these IgG antibodies that the test is picking up, it’s usually a simple blood test, right? It’s like a finger prick. There’s some big companies out there selling these to lots and lots of people. I would never spend my money on that test because that IgG response is really just showing that your immune system has had exposure to this food. This is also why we will find that

you may have a lot of foods listed on this test result. So it may show. And what it usually shows is these foods that you’ve had exposure to recently and not in every single case, but this is also part of the problem, right? Because these test results highly differ. We can’t replicate the results very efficiently, very effectively, which is also a problem, right? But you may find that on that long list of foods that you’re sensitive to,

It’s these foods that you’ve like eaten recently. That’s because your immune systems had exposure to these foods. You’ve, you’ve eaten them, right? So we never want to look at food sensitivity testing as honestly, anything that’s going to guide our health or our gut health healing journey. We never run them. We never spend money on them. I never advise clients to get these. With that being said, you know, if your immune system is highly reacting to some of these foods, can pulling these foods out temporarily help?

Hannah Aylward (09:19.708)
to minimize inflammation a little bit. Sure. If you know right now you’re listening to this podcast and you’re like, I know I react to this food and this food and this food, gluten, dairy, these things do not work well with me. I feel sick when I eat them. Then don’t eat them. That is not harmful. That can help. mean, all of this is kind of communication from your body. You will be better off if you eliminate these foods. The key though,

is to eliminate them temporarily because we don’t want to take these foods out forever. Now, if you’ve got celiac disease, that’s kind of a different conversation. We have to remove that food for good cases like hypothyroidism, Hashimoto’s, those cases can really benefit from removing gluten. But I’m talking about, you’ve just like read a lot of stuff online. You’ve, you’ve read a lot of functional medicine, doctors, blogs. you’ve seen maybe another holistic practitioner and they’re like, take out gluten and dairy. And you’re like,

Okay, I guess I will. And then you kind of feel the same, right? That’s, that’s one person. Another person may feel like I really, I eat gluten and dairy and whatever I do, I get super sick. It hurts my stomach. I get a headache, whatever that is. Go ahead and remove that food for now with the key being once again, that we want to dig deeper and understand why you are reacting to these foods in the first place. So food sensitivities, the other big kind of differentiator here,

is that they can cause more like systemic symptoms. So when we’re looking at food sensitivities, we can feel the effects of that food for up to 72 hours after consuming that food. So it’s kind of, it’s not so immediate, right? When we’re looking at allergies, we’re getting that immediate response. When we’re looking at food sensitivities, we can feel kind of icky up until 72 hours. We may feel at 72 hours after consuming the food itself. So that’s a big difference.

You can feel kind of okay initially and start to feel it a couple hours later. The other big kind of differentiator here is that it can cause more of those like full body symptoms. So it could be you getting a headache. could be you getting big brain fog. It could be you breaking out, right? So those are kind of some signs. It’s not just digestive symptoms for a lot of you. It might include digestive symptoms and some other kind of like full body symptoms. That’s pretty common.

Hannah Aylward (11:37.734)
For me, when I was dealing with a lot, a lot, a lot of gut issues, I could not tolerate dairy at all. I had pulled dairy and gluten from my diet. I probably went a whole decade not eating gluten and dairy. That’s not an exaggeration thinking it was like healing my gut. It wasn’t. I had to dig a lot deeper. However, did it help me feel a little bit better in the interim before I even understood what else I needed to do? It did. It did not heal my digestive issues. It didn’t get rid of all my digestive issues. It didn’t fully heal my gut.

There was a lot of other work to be done, but it did help a little bit, right? It took me from like a, I’m struggling 80 % of the time to I’m struggling 60 % of the time, which was helpful because if you know, if you’re dealing with chronic digestive issues, you’ll take any relief you can get almost because it starts to like so heavily weigh on the quality of your life. If you feel sick, like I said, eating these foods, we can take them out. When I was eating dairy, when my gut was really struggling, I would get a headache.

And that was pretty immediate. It was not an allergy, but pretty immediately I would get a headache. It could break out my skin. When I was eating gluten, I would get big brain fog if I had like some bigger exposure to gluten. So I could have a piece here and there. I could kind of tolerate that. But if I ate too much of it, if I ate like a larger serving of it, I would have really bad brain fog. I would feel very sluggish after eating it for like, you know, a whole day after eating it, it would kind of ruin my next day.

I would also have some digestive discomfort after eating it. So that’s kind of more of those like full body systemic symptoms. It can even cause joint pain. So food sensitivities are like really all over the map. You’re looking for symptoms of just kind of feeling off up to 72 hours after eating the food. So it can be very difficult to track, which is why, you know, doing something like an elimination diet can help bring some clarity because you’re just going to take it all out and then you want to slowly, slowly reintroduce these foods.

However, elimination diets alone will not heal your gut. And you know, that’s kind of our whole philosophy here. There’s a lot of other work to be done there, but I won’t get too off topic. It’s going to be a challenge to keep me on topic this whole time. So we’ve got food sensitivities, more systemic response, not so immediate of a response. We’ve got potentially IgG antibodies. A lot of people believe it’s IgG antibodies, but really IgG antibodies are just showing us that our immune system has been exposed to the food. So

Hannah Aylward (14:03.255)
either way, food sensitivities are not the actual cause of your digestive issues. They’re more like the result of your digestive issues. And I’ll get into that more. Then we have food intolerances and food intolerances are going to be more specific to your digestive tract. So that’s kind of going to look like you eat the food and then you’ve got stomach pain. You’ve got bloating, you’ve got indigestion, you’ve got constipation, diarrhea,

you you look six months pregnant with belly bloat afterwards. These are more signs of intolerances that are more so like you’re going to feel the change in your digestive function. So less of like a headache response or a breakout or a joint pain response and more so a digestive system response. And this is because food intolerances are usually due to mal-digestion. Your body cannot break these foods down efficiently.

And that is usually the result of inadequate enzyme production or low stomach acid or poor bio flow. So you’re going to feel like essentially you can’t break these foods down properly. So you’re getting that response in, your belly, you’re feeling it in your digestive tract. So when we’re looking at food intolerances, we’re kind of looking at what are you lacking to properly break down this food? For example, a lactose intolerance, right? When people have lactose intolerance, they can’t break down dairy.

efficiently so they don’t have enough of the good enzymes to help them break down the dairy. This is also why you can get like lactate pills. You can get these pills that are essentially just enzymes to help you digest these foods better. If you’re going to go for the ice cream, if you’re going to go for the cheese, whatever that can help for most of the clients that we see, it’s not enough. That’s not going to fix. It’s not going to fix anything, right? But that’s not enough to fully help them.

but it could help use some symptoms temporarily, really never a recommendation of ours, if I’m being honest, but that’s kind of how you can better understand it. So looking at intolerances, we don’t have what we need to actually break down the food efficiently. Now the clients that we see most commonly have a nice combination of both. It’s not, you know, clients will definitely come in with allergies, but as I said at the beginning, if you have an allergy, you pretty much know you have an allergy. That’s kind of been a different

Hannah Aylward (16:27.797)
bucket, different immune response, different level of severity, different bucket. When we’ve got intolerances and sensitivities, almost all of our clients have food sensitivities and intolerances. I don’t even talk about it that much with our clients because the work that we do is focused on digging deeper and understanding why they are having these food reactions in the first place.

So we can kind of lump like sensitivities and intolerances into this bucket of like food reactions. Long story short, I eat this food and I don’t feel well. It’s not going to kill me, but I feel sick and I got to stay home and I got to cancel my plans or I can’t button my pants or whatever it is. So as I mentioned, food intolerances are usually the result of kind of like mal-digestion. We can’t break these foods down efficiently. Food sensitivities,

can be the result of many things in the digestive tract. So we can have increased intestinal permeability or leaky gut playing a role here. We can have maldigestion playing a role here. We can have different gut imbalances, pathogens, infections playing a role here too. So when we’re looking at, and this is why, you know, I love having the conversation of breaking down the difference here, but we are not really focusing on this with our clients, right? As I mentioned, we’re focusing on digging deeper.

because it kind of doesn’t matter if it’s a sensitivity or if it’s intolerance or whatever the heck we’re looking to optimize your digestion and we’re looking to get you feeling better. And we’re going to look at the health of your gut microbiome and we’re going to look at how you can actually break down and digest your foods, how well you can do that. Cause both of those things have to be taken into consideration when we’re having this conversation. So identifying it as an intolerance or a sensitivity kind of doesn’t matter.

And in my eyes, we, what matters most is digging deeper to understand why it’s happening in the first place. So I hope that makes sense for you. So when we’re working with clients, they have a nice combination of different gut imbalances present that are causing them to react to these foods. Like I said, it can include increased intestinal permeability, gut imbalances, microbial imbalances, and then kind of a maldigestion picture. But here are some things I want you

Hannah Aylward (18:45.451)
to look out for when you are eating foods, it’s going to help kind of clue you in to why you may be reacting to these foods in the first place. A big part of your digestive system breakdown, a big part of why you can’t digest these foods efficiently is because we’re not producing adequate digestive output or enough digestive juices to actually break down your food. So if you’re eating foods that are higher in fat,

It can be healthy fats or unhealthy fat. could be avocado, olive oil, and it also could be like fried foods or canola oil. It doesn’t discriminate here. However, of course we want to stick to the healthier fats like the olive oil, the avocados, the olives, that kind of stuff. But if you’re eating these foods and you notice that they’re causing bloating, stomach distension, burping, gassiness, they’re causing

floating stools, pale stools, green stools, sometimes as well. This can be a sign that you’re not producing adequate bile to help break down these foods efficiently. Bile is one of our digestive juices that helps us break down fats and absorb fat soluble nutrients. So if we’re eating these fattier foods and we’re feeling sick after we eat them, then we know, okay, we may have a bile issue that’s present and that can kind of help clue you in.

Another thing to look out for is if you are taking hot liver oil or fish oil and you feel like really burpee after it, or you feel nauseous after it, because these capsules, if you’re taking a capsule form, you could take a liquid form too, but these are essentially straight fat, right? They’re just oil. So if you have any issues with liver or gallbladder function, your liver is what produces bile. Your gallbladder is what pushes it out at meal time. If you’ve had your gallbladder removed,

Any of these cases, if this function is compromised, then we’ll find that you are more reactive to these foods. So this can kind of help clue you in when you’re doing your at home investigation and don’t take it too seriously. You know, working with someone is obviously best here to kind of help figure it out. But if you want to try to pick up on some patterns, we may want to look at things, not so much like is it dairy or gluten or sugar or soy, but look at, after I eat these foods higher in fat, I feel more sick.

Hannah Aylward (21:07.221)
that clues us into what we can help you with next. So it’s not always just these kind of like big food groups that they have you take out when it comes to an elimination diet. It could be, every time I eat guacamole, I get really sick. That’s because it’s super high in fat. I noticed the same thing when I have a bunch of cheese. I noticed the same thing when I have, I don’t know, a bunch of mayonnaise or when I have a bunch of olive oil or whatever it might be. So you can look for that pattern.

So once again, bile is what helps us break down fats and absorb fat soluble nutrients. I could do an entire podcast episode on bile, which maybe I’ll do in the future. it’s super duper important, but if we don’t have enough of it, if it’s not thin enough, if it’s our liver function is sluggish, our gallbladder function is sluggish. We’ll have issues with digesting these fats. Gallbladder issues are a huge underlying root cause of bloating that very, very commonly go missed. We see it.

all the time in our clients. And we have certain test markers that we’re kind of looking for to gain some insight into the liver and gallbladder function. However, we can also tell a lot from symptoms, which is what I’ve shared here with you today. The other thing that we can look at is stomach acid levels because our stomach acid is what’s going to help us break down protein. So if you are someone that feels like every time you eat protein, you feel sick.

or you feel really heavy, you feel like that food is like sitting in your stomach. It feels like there’s a brick in your stomach. That’s directly from what our clients will say. there’s a brick in my stomach. I feel super heavy after I eat, I get full very quickly, but also maybe you have like an aversion to me. You don’t really want to eat it aside from like, you know, ethical reasons and all of that, if that’s what you believe, but more so just like, I feel sick after I eat it, I’m burping, I feel heavy, I get constipated. That can be a stomach acid issue. So once again,

The answer never lies in just pulling these foods from your diet forever. We’re not going to repair your gut function by simply eliminating animal product or anything that’s high in protein. That’s not the answer. The answer is to identify, do you have low stomach acid and how do we help you rebuild that stomach acid production efficiently so you can better break down these foods that are high in protein with less symptoms and less discomfort. If you do feel

Hannah Aylward (23:28.309)
heavier after eating protein, then we want to look at stomach acid. Then we have enzyme production. And typically when we have low enzyme production, there’s many different enzymes, right? But if we’ve got lower enzyme production, we may have more trouble with things like carbohydrates and breaking down carbohydrates, including, like I said, you know, lactose intolerance. We don’t have the enzyme to break down this dairy that we are eating. Therefore it causes a lot of digestive issues.

Some of the signs that you have issues with, you know, poor enzyme secretion would be like undigested food in your stool. It could be stomach cramping. It could be bloating after eating. It could also be, you know, feeling heavy after eating. Constipation will play a role sometimes there as well. But you are essentially not producing enough enzymes to break this food down efficiently. So all of these, you know, a lot of these symptoms you could consider

as a part of that kind of like food intolerance bucket. But we can see now that they have these deeper underlying root causes. And even those causes can sometimes have deeper underlying root causes too, that we won’t get into here today to keep this short and effective. but there’s always something deeper to dig into there. That’s the biggest thing that I want you to take away from this episode is that you don’t just pull these foods forever. We have to look at why is the body

reacting to these foods so intensely and what’s kind of causing this pain, what’s causing this inability to break down these foods well enough. And what are those deeper causes, contributing to, you know, my digestive issues, taking out the food is not going to heal really any of that. It’s kind of like not putting another log on the fire, which can be helpful, but it’s not actually dealing with the cause or the reason why the fire’s lit.

I don’t know. I’m making up that analogy as I go, but I think you get the gist of it, right? So there’s always something, something deeper going on. Another kind of like example of this, you could put this into the sensitivity bucket. You could put this into the intolerance bucket. Like I mentioned, it kind of doesn’t matter honestly, but people that have something called small intestinal bacterial overgrowth or SIBO, they are going to be really reactive pretty frequently, right? Like pretty commonly.

Hannah Aylward (25:53.163)
These people are really reactive to FODMAPs and FODMAPs are just fermentable carbohydrates that are in some of the foods that we eat and they’re in a lot of healthy foods and these carbohydrates are not bad for our health. They’re actually great for supporting gut proliferation. They’re helping to feed our good gut microbes, but we run into issues when we already have an overgrowth of these gut microbes.

So it’s very common if you have a lot of digestive issues, if you’ve seen your gastroenterologist or if you’ve worked with, you know, a dietitian or a nutritionist, people are very quick to pull the FODMAPs because there has been some research there and it does help with symptoms. So if you are dealing with heavy bacterial overgrowth, especially if it’s in the small intestine, you’ll probably feel a lot better when you do follow a low FODMAP diet. Now, once again,

This is not the solution to overcoming the chronic bloating, the GI issues, the constipation, the diarrhea, pulling the FODMAPs is not actually going to quote unquote, heal your gut, right? It’s not actually repairing anything. It’s just putting a little less fire on the flame, whatever. I’m really bad with these apologies you guys, so bear with me. It’s just minimizing symptoms temporarily. And if you’ve ever tried a low FODMAP diet,

You know, it’s incredibly difficult to follow. It’s super difficult to do and to stick with. And it’s not something I ever want people on long-term. I’ve also seen like hundreds of our clients be able to eat these foods without pain, without bloating and gas, without constipation and diarrhea after working with us. So in my opinion, there’s never a time when we have to like take these foods out forever. That’s not the solution when it comes to these and it can differ per client.

This is where testing and working with someone is so, so important because it’s not always like super black and white. Like if you are reacting to FODMAPS, then you have SIBO and that’s it clear the SIBO and then it’s gone. That can give us more insight. It’s a, that’s like a common pattern, but that’s not the exact case for everyone. SIBO is also never just SIBO because something causes the SIBO. Something’s causing the overgrowth in the small intestine when the majority of those bacteria should be moving along to our large intestine. So.

Hannah Aylward (28:13.277)
It’s not like it’s kind of not even SIBO’s fault. It’s like what caused the SIBO. But in a lot of people with SIBO, they’ll have that kind of intolerance or sensitivity to these FODMAPs. But once again, it’s not really about the FODMAPs. It’s like, why are we reacting to the FODMAPs? And in this case, normally it’s because we’ve got an overgrowth of bacteria that is essentially like we are eating these fermentable carbohydrates. We already have so many of these bacteria present. We’ve got too many.

And then they’re eating up these fermentable carbohydrates. And then these bacteria are eating them up and they’re producing gases. And that’s the discomfort that you’re feeling. That’s the bloating. That’s the stomach distension. That’s the, you know, looking six months pregnant after eating or at the end of the day. Typically in those with SIBO, we see the bloating like maybe a little higher up in the abdomen, but not always. And once again, as I said, it’s honestly never.

just SIBO, there’s always something else there too. So it’s totally possible to have overgrowth in the small intestine and the large intestine and have an infection and have a parasite and have maldigestion. mean, we see it all. You can have all of that at once. So focusing on just eradicating the SIBO also really isn’t the answer because there could be a lot of other stuff going on. There probably is. That’s how you got the SIBO in the first place. And if we don’t clear that up, then we won’t.

we won’t get that full symptom resolution that we are looking for. So that’s just kind of an example of, what a quote unquote food sensitivity could be or could look like and an underlying cause of that food reaction. It’s kind of better just call them like food reactions. When I’m talking to clients, I’m like this food just, it’s, you’re reacting to this food actively. It doesn’t sit well with you. You get sick when you eat it. We know that there’s something else that we need to identify. We need to dig deeper and identify putting it into,

the buckets, kind of doesn’t matter so much because when we work with clients, we want to run functional stool testing to assess their gut microbiome to dig deeper, see what’s going on there. That’s essentially causing these reactions to the food that we are having. So when we have something like a fungal overgrowth or we have a candida overgrowth, candida is a natural normal part of a gut microbiome of all of our gut microbiomes.

Hannah Aylward (30:32.175)
the issue that we run into is when it does overgrow. So when it overgrows, we can get super duper symptomatic. those with Candida overgrowth or fungal overgrowth tend to react more to fruits and fermented foods and yeasty foods. like wine and sauerkraut, kimchi, all these gut healthy foods. And that’s why it can feel so confusing and things like sugar, higher in sugar, including fruit.

And of course other, you know, things higher in sugar, like cakes and cookies and all that jazz. However, the answer is never to just pull those foods forever and think that you’re going to clear your Candida when you just like take out berries or apples and watermelon. I never want anyone to feel afraid to eat these whole healthy foods. The issue is not the food itself. Like don’t blame the raspberries for what the raspberries like aren’t doing a healthy

gut microbiome, a healthy and resilient gut microbiome can tolerate most foods with little symptoms or pain. A little bit of bloating here and there, sure. A little bit of gas here and there, sure. It’s normal and natural to pass gas a couple of times a day. That’s not really the client that I’m talking to or the client that we see.

You know, if you’re bloating is over the top, if it’s causing you to cancel your plans, if you have to unbutton your pants, if it’s causing you tears, if it’s caused you food, fear, and anxiety, if it’s impacting your day-to-day life, we need to dig deeper and see what’s going on. For the person that’s like, I get a little bloated after a couple of slices of pizza. That’s not really who I’m talking to. Everyone should work on their gut health. No doubt. It’s could not be more important. however, you know, most of our clients are in some pretty consistent discomfort and pain.

So going back to the fungal overgrowth, we can find that we are more reactive to those sugary foods, foods higher in carbohydrates, foods higher in vinegars, fermented foods, yeasty foods, that kind of stuff. But once again, we don’t want to just pull out those foods forever. It’s not going to get rid of it. What we want to do is eradicate the fungal overgrowth, the candida overgrowth. Just so you guys know, fungus, yeast, candida, they’re kind of interchangeable.

Hannah Aylward (32:44.826)
for the purposes of this episode here. So we want to eradicate that overgrowth and then we’ll find that you can tolerate these foods more efficiently. Again, you can eat these fruits without pain. can have a cookie and you won’t be flared up with like eczema and acne and chronic bloating and diarrhea.

it always comes down to digging deeper and understanding what’s at the root of these food reactions. So once again, that’s like the biggest thing that I want you to take away from this episode is we want to dig deeper. And that’s what we do with our clients and digging deeper essentially looks like running some testing. want to run functional stool testing to see what’s going on in your gut microbiome.

What undergrowth overgrowth do you have any infections that are present? How’s your gut immune function doing? How is your ability to digest your foods looking like? That’s the stuff we want to address. And also why the deeper wise to all of that too, to help you be able to tolerate more of these foods and essentially like kiss these food sensitivities goodbye. And I, I have personally been able to do that over the years. I can eat

dozens and dozens of foods that I would never even touch before. I don’t think I touched a French fry for about 10 years. I was really missing out. I don’t think I touched a piece of cheese for 10 years. I would never eat cheese. Now I’m like eating feta cheese all the time. I love some raw cheddar. It’s so good. I never really got it when people were like, cheese is so good. I’m like, eh, I can live without it because I had to live without it. So I had really just, you know, didn’t mind it too much.

And now I’m like, my gosh, she’s so good. And Greek yogurt is so good. And it’s so, it’s such a great source of protein and it’s so easy. You don’t have to prep it. You can like enjoy it so simply in the morning. So it really works out on the other, on the other end. So I can eat these foods and I did not eat these foods for honestly a decade. I couldn’t eat an apple without looking six months pregnant after eating it. It quite frankly just sucked. mean, it was, it was awful. And I ended up kind of just like skipping meals.

Hannah Aylward (35:00.868)
because I didn’t want to deal with the inevitable pain and bloating and gas that was going to come from eating these foods. So glamorous, I know. But if you’re my people, then you’re like shaking your head like, yes, that’s me. So then you’re in the right place. And if you’re not, we can find you another podcast, but I would just end up skipping these meals because I was just like, I can’t, I don’t have time for this. I have too much going on and I don’t want the rest of my day to just go downhill from there. And then it’s kind of

your nervous system activates. And then you’re kind of playing this, like, what, what can I do to minimize the symptoms and how bad is it going to get? And am I going to have to, you know, step out of class or step out of this meeting because I’m in so much pain or because I have to run to the bathroom and it, it kind of comes, then it likes to kind of transforms into like crisis. How do we minimize the crisis that we’re experiencing? And if you know that feeling in your nervous system, then you know it right. It’s not a pleasant way to exist.

And now I’m able to, mean, travel. don’t really have to think about it too much. I don’t really have to prep that much. I mean, I used to travel with mad snacks, you guys, so many snacks. I still love some snacks and some, it’s always great to have healthy options. It’s not like I’m over here, you know, eating pizza and burgers and fries all day, every day. Definitely not. But with that being said, I can go eat at a restaurant without fear. I don’t have to scan the menu for the one thing that I can eat that I have to modify.

Not anymore. My life is way easier. That is really truly what I want for all of you, all of the clients that we work with because on the other side of that is freedom. That’s when your whole life opens up. That’s when you don’t spend your days constantly thinking about your digestive issues, how bad they’re going to get, what you can do to minimize them. If you can have space that night, what plans you have to cancel. I mean, you can feel that energy. You don’t have to live that way.

once we dig deeper and address some of these underlying issues that you are experiencing. So it’s the good, good work. And we’ve had, I mean, I could name off so many clients that we’ve had start to be able to eat onions, garlic.

Hannah Aylward (37:06.07)
apples, dairy. Dairy is like one of the biggest things we see people be able to tolerate again. Strawberries, mangoes, I mean all sorts of weird foods that they couldn’t eat before doing the deeper gut work. And when we look at the labs, when we look at the deeper root causes for these clients, we’ve got usually a nice combination of different microbial imbalances and some mal-digestion patterns that are causing the reactions to these foods. When we eradicate those,

It’s that’s kind of a simple way of putting it, but so you can understand, we kind of come on in and we use natural agents to eradicate these things and optimize digestion. We see them be able to tolerate these foods a heck of a lot better with no pain, with no bloating, with no food fear. And that’s what I call the juice. That’s the juice of it all. That’s what we want for you. So I hope that you leave this conversation with hope, with a better understanding of your body.

and also deeply knowing that you should not have to live on a heavily restricted diet for the rest of your life. You should not have to take out dozens and dozens of foods just to be able to make it through the day. And you should not have to live in this constant state of fear when it does come to the foods that you’re eating. And if you are reacting to loads of different foods and it’s hard to pick up the patterning,

And it’s hard to feel normal when it comes to your relationship with food. And you are living in this chronically bloated, chronically kind of like IBS symptom state, bloating indigestion, reflux, constipation, diarrhea, lots of food reactions that there’s a lot more to the story. All we need to do is dig deeper to get you some answers. Thanks for joining me for this episode of the Nutrient Dense Podcast. If you found this episode valuable, don’t forget to subscribe.

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