Hannah Aylward (00:05)
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 worked.

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.

Welcome. I’m excited to be here with you guys today. Today we’re going to be going through the most common gut imbalances that we see in practice. So we’ll be digging into things like candida overgrowth, SIBO or small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. We’re going to be chatting about IBS. We’re going be chatting about leaky gut and all of these different kind of gut imbalances and conditions that can be causing your chronic digestive

I’m really excited to dive into all of this with you guys today, because it can be very confusing. You probably see like a lot of stuff on the internet and then you just, it leaves you more confused, right? About what these conditions are, symptoms of them, if you have them, all of that kind of stuff. So we’re going to be kind of digging into all of it

So

live is really for you. If you’re someone that’s struggling with these chronic digestive issues.

Things like chronic bloating, regardless of what you eat, constipation, diarrhea, maybe you’ve been diagnosed with IBS. Well, we’re gonna dig into that too. That doesn’t really mean much, right? There’s a lot more that we can explore when it comes to IBS. Almost everyone that we work with has been diagnosed with IBS. So we’re gonna be digging into all of that and then how to kind of overcome these things, because that’s the most important, right? We wanna know if you have them, these different imbalances and conditions, and you guys, they’re way more common than you think. So…

You know, you may hear me say things like SIBO or Candida or parasitic infections, and you’re like, okay, well, I mean, I don’t have any of those. How would I have gotten any of those? Let me tell you. We see them every day in practice. So they’re way more common than you may think. So we’re going to dig into like symptoms, causes, how we find out if we have these things, and then what we do about them, essentially.

So we dig deeper and understand and look for

A lot of the time, these gut imbalances, these imbalances in the gut microbiome along with your gut function, because it’s not all about your gut microbiome.

Your gut microbiome is just the composition of microorganisms within your intestines, essentially. Most people, when they’re talking about the microbiome, they’re talking about the large intestine of the colon. We do still have bacteria in the small intestine and the stomach. And then we’ve got all these cool accessory digestive organs like the pancreas and the liver and that kind of stuff. But most people are kind of talking about the large intestine. So it’s not all about the microbiome though, because we have to…

make sure that we’re actually breaking down and digesting our food efficiently before it even makes its way into the microbiome. So that’s one of the many reasons why simply taking a probiotic, it’s not enough. All we’re doing is adding good bacteria. We’re not checking for bad bacteria. We’re not optimizing digestion. We’re not checking our liver function. We’re not doing anything else. So if you feel like you’ve tried that and it hasn’t really gotten you anywhere,

Just know there’s a lot more to the story. Don’t worry. There’s a million other things that we can do. That’s not a comprehensive plan. We want to also work on, yes, our gut microbiome, but also really our gut function. There’s a lot that goes into that different digestive output. We look at the gut brain axis. We look at vagal nerve tone. We look at the nervous system. We look at blood sugar regulation. All of that plays a role in whether you’re going to digest your food very well or you’re going to be super symptomatic.

we are going to look for imbalances in all of these things. And saying imbalance is just like a simple way for you to kind of conceptualize it, right? It’s a lot more nuanced than that, but basically something’s not working the way that it should. That’s why you’re feeling this way. So your symptoms are communicating with you. Listen to them. Don’t ignore them. Don’t like over-focus on them and let them cause a lot of anxiety, but don’t ignore them because if you have got a gut infection that’s causing a lot of these symptoms and then you let that go,

for years and years and years, it’s gonna turn into something bigger. And I don’t say things like that often, because I’m not into like scare tactics, but things will get worse, right? If there’s, think of like, if you keep driving your car, even though the tire is losing air, and you just keep driving it, and you keep driving it, you keep driving it, eventually, it’s gonna get really dangerous. So we wanna avoid that, right? We wanna take a look at this stuff when it is present. Okay, so we’re looking at underlying causes to things like IBS. So the first one that we see,

is going to be something like gut dysbiosis. Now, dysbiosis is just a very fancy way of saying that our gut bacteria are imbalanced, basically. And there’s different dysbiotic patterns that we look for too. So this is where testing really comes into play. We don’t want to take just a broad spectrum antimicrobial supplement if you actually have insufficiency dysbiosis, where you don’t have enough of your good gut bacteria. That can also cause a lot of bloating, a lot of belly distension.

inflammation, all of that kind of stuff, weakened intestinal barrier. we have to, this is where, like I said, the testing really shines, right? Dysbiosis really just means an imbalance of our gut bacteria. We can have too many of our not good gut bacteria. We can have not enough of our good gut bacteria. We can have a nice mix. We can have overgrowth of opportunistic bacteria. We can have an overgrowth of histamine producing bacteria as well, causing a lot of like histamine intolerance system.

symptoms, histamine overload symptoms. Basically for you to understand it, there’s an imbalance in your gut bacteria that is causing the bloating. It’s causing the constipation. It’s causing diarrhea. It’s causing the IBS and it can also cause things like acne, eczema and things like that. basically once again, we just have an imbalance of our bacteria. Now we need to dig deeper to understand what imbalance of bacteria is present, but dysbiosis is present.

in almost every irritable bowel disease case, along with almost every IBS case. Causes of dysbiosis are going to be things like poor diet, excessive alcohol use, changes in medication, use of antibiotics, high levels of stress and anxiety that then weaken the immune system and the intestinal barrier, inadequate digestive output, meaning you’re not breaking down your food very well. So you’re not producing enough stomach acid, you’re not producing enough

bile, you’re not producing enough pancreatic enzymes. These are what help us actually break down and digest our food efficiently. If we are not digesting our food efficiently, things are going to start to overgrow in the GI tract. So that’s why we have to take a look at our digestive function on top of just our gut microbiome, right? A lot of stuff is happening before it even hits the gut microbiome. So your gut is essentially like one long tube. You can think of it as one long hose that goes down and it twists and it turns.

If we aren’t producing adequate digestive output, things are going to slow down in there and there’s going to be mal-digested food chunks in the GI tract hanging out longer than we want them to. That’s going to breed an overgrowth of bacteria. What do we get from that? SIBO. We get small intestinal bacterial overgrowth and or we get large intestinal bacterial overgrowth or more of that like dysbiosis picture. So we have to make sure that we’re breaking down our food efficiently. So when we aren’t producing adequate

digestive output, we will end up with these gut imbalances, including things like SIBO. So symptoms of gut dysbiosis, frequent gas and bloating, cramping, chronic bad breath. So if you’re like, I brush my teeth all the time, I take care of my oral care and my breath just stinks. Your oral microbiome is connected to your gut microbiome. These are influencing one another.

So we’ll also see imbalances in the oral microbiome contributing to dysbiosis as well, because all this bacteria, you’re swallowing and it’s going down into your gut. But if you have chronic bad breath, that’s another sign. Loose stool, diarrhea, constipation, bowel movement urgency, mucus in your stool once per week, brain fog, anxiety, depression. I would add to this acne, eczema, psoriasis.

Your skin’s really a reflection of what’s going on inside. There’s very commonly gut issues present in these chronic skin conditions. So we do work with that and with clients with skin issues as well. So those are some of the main symptoms of gut dysbiosis. Basically, once again, you’ve got an imbalance in your gut bacteria. We need to test. You need to work with someone to assess what’s going on and then work through a protocol. Now, our protocols with our clients are going to be anywhere from four to six months. It’s not a super simple fix.

Please don’t go Googling this and throwing random supplements into your body. You can do more harm than good. If you don’t know what you’re working with, you can do more harm than good. Just a bit more nuance than that, right? We can have biofilms that are not allowing us to actually get into the bacteria and kill them off. We can get a big die-off reaction if your detox pathways aren’t nice and strong enough, open enough. So you really want to work with someone through this. If you do too much too fast, if you blindly supplement,

you can feel really, really bad and you can do more harm than good, release toxins in the body without the ability to excrete them efficiently. You’ll make yourself sicker essentially. So you want to work with someone that knows what they’re doing with this. Okay. Then we have SIBO. So SIBO is small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. So this is pretty common. There is some research that shows that SIBO is the cause of like

I like eight, they say like 70 to 80 % of IBS cases. To be honest, that’s not what we see in practice. I don’t agree with that. I think that study like needs to be updated. SIBO breath testing can be a little finicky too. We can get some false positives, some false negatives. There’s a lot to it. So once again, you want to work with someone that sees a lot of this and knows kind of the ins and outs of all of it. But SIBOs, it’s very prevalent and tons of people have SIBO. We have like a lot of advanced training in SIBO on my team because we do see it often.

So essentially what SIBO is, is it’s when we get an overgrowth of bacteria in our small intestine, when usually our gut bacteria should be hanging out in our large intestine. So going back to what I said earlier, that gut microbiome, people throw that term around a lot. Do they know what it is? So the gut microbiome is that the microorganisms, the ecosystem of microorganisms in mostly our large intestine or our colon, that’s where the trillions of gut bacteria are hanging out that you like hear about.

That’s where you want your probiotics going. That’s where you want your fiber feeding your good gut bugs. This is happening in your large intestine area colon. Now we run into tons and tons of symptoms if we get an overgrowth of bacteria in the small intestine instead. And this doesn’t even have to be bad, like opportunistic, dysbiotic bacteria. This, can have an overgrowth of our good gut bacteria in the small intestine and it still makes us super symptomatic. So those with SIBO will feel full very quickly.

they’ll have a lot of like upper abdomen distension and bloating. The bloating with SIBO is horrible. It’s awful. I’ve had SIBO. It was awful. You’ll find yourself reacting to like lots of different fibers. So if you feel like you’re trying to these healthy foods and you feel horrible, they make you super gassy and super bloated. You know, that, can kind of clue us in. Usually people feel a little bit better on a low FODMAP diet when they do have SIBO, but not always. And that’s because SIBO usually isn’t just SIBO, which I’ll get into.

But if you are someone who was told to go on a low FODMAP diet and then you tried it and you’re like, I did feel a little better, but there’s no way I can do this forever. This is like unsustainable because it is and it can lead to more issues down the line. Then you might have SIBO. Essentially, when we’re eating these fibers, these FODMAPs are just fermentable carbohydrates. They’re good for us. They’re good for our gut bacteria. They help to feed our gut bacteria. We don’t want to take them all out.

Now, if we’re eating these FODMAPs, if we’re eating these fiber rich foods and these foods that are rich in fermentable carbohydrates and we’re getting very bloated or we’re getting constipated because a lot of bloating will then lead to constipation or diarrhea, we’re super symptomatic and reactive to these foods that can signal that we might have that bacterial overgrowth, right? But if we are responding to these fermentable carbohydrates, what’s typically happening, and everyone’s case is a little different, but what’s typically happening is we’ve got these

fermentable carbohydrates feeding our gut microbes, which is a good thing. However, when we have an overgrowth of these gut bacteria, we’re feeding an overgrowth. So that can cause a lot of gas and bloating in the abdomen. So it can feel confusing because you’re like, these foods are really good for me, but I eat them and I feel really bad. I was told to eat more fiber, but I cannot tolerate more fiber. That’s usually a bacterial overgrowth picture. It can also be a maldigestion picture, but it’s usually we’ve got some

bacterial overgrowth present, that’s then causing your reaction to these foods. So you’ll hear me say a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot. Don’t blame the food for what the food isn’t doing. The restrictive diets are not the answer. We’re so quick to like peel these foods out of the diet and fear them and never eat them again. That’s not gonna get us feeling better long term. And it’s going to decrease our quality of life because we’re gonna be scared to eat out. We’re gonna be scared to, you know.

eat certain foods that are healthy, that’s not what we want, right? The issue is not the food. The issue is not the apple or the garlic or the onion. That’s not the problem. The problem is that these fermentable carbohydrates are feeding these bacteria that are already overgrown, that are then eating them up, fermenting them, and then feeding these bacteria and these bacteria are giving off gas. And that’s what you feel in your stomach that feels very uncomfortable. You can even look like six months pregnant with belly bloat, right?

Been there. It was so fun. So it’s awful. I mean, I used to skip meals because I just wanted to be able to button my jeans. A lot of the clients that we work with are like, towards the end of the day, I came in, button my pants anymore. That’s bloating, right? And there’s underlying root causes to that that we can assess and overcome. So the most important thing to understand with SIBO is that SIBO is never just SIBO. So the goal is not simply to eradicate all of these bacteria and be done with it. This is why

you know, the common fix or common treatment for SIBO is an antibiotic. Your doctor may give you an antibiotic. A, Rifaximin has about a 40 % success rate. B, we’re not addressing the reason why we have the SIBO in the first place. So we have to ask what caused the bacteria to overgrow in the small intestine when it should be going into the large intestine because we want a lot of abundant bacteria in the large intestine, right?

So what’s causing it to get kind of like stuck in the small intestine? So SIBO at its core is a motility issue. We’ve got a breakdown in our gut motility. Things aren’t moving through the GI tract at the rate at which we want them to. Once again, think of your GI tract as like a long hose. It’s all the way down, it twists and it turns, and then it comes out the other end, right? If we’ve got any breakdown in the chain, things aren’t gonna move through at the rate we want them to.

And then we’re going to end up with issues, overgrowth, things like that. So when SIBO is present, we’ve worked with tons, dozens and dozens, mean hundreds, hundreds and hundreds of clients that have had SIBO. We always want to dig deeper. What caused the SIBO? How did they get there? So some of the common causes of SIBO are going to be low digestive output. You’re not digesting your food efficiently.

bile issues. Bile is antimicrobial in nature. When we are not producing enough bile, we’ll have issues keeping that small intestine relatively sterile. It’s not entirely sterile, but we want to keep bacteria from overgrowing in there. When you’ve got low stomach acid, that can cause SIBO. A lot of times when people have a history of an eating disorder, they have SIBO. I see that pattern very commonly in clients. Antibiotic use, consistent antibiotic use can cause SIBO because

we wipe out all of our bacteria. We wipe out our good bacteria and our bad bacteria, and then we’ll get that overgrowth in the small intestine when we have SIBO, right? So chronic antibiotic use can cause it as well. Then we have something like mold exposure, very commonly can cause things like SIBO. So it can feel like you’re like trying to get rid of it and it’s not going away, trying to get rid of it it’s not going away. That’s pretty common. And then we can also have like physical issues. like adhesions, obstructions. So if you’ve been

If you’ve had any surgery, abdominal surgery, and scar tissue has built up, then that can be kind of like a kink in a hose that’s not letting things flow through your GI tract efficiently. That can also cause SIBO. So there’s a couple different underlying root causes of it. There’s also different kinds of SIBO. You can have hydrogen dominant, you can have methane dominant, you can have hydrogen sulfide SIBO. We work with all of these, really.

Like I mentioned, low digestive output, medications. So I mentioned antibiotics, but also things like proton pump inhibitors. So Pepsid, what’s the other one? Nexium, omeprazole, all of those can cause SIBO because they’re neutralizing your stomach acid. So you’re not, you need stomach acid to break down your food. These medications I think are, they need to be given away. They need to get out of here. A lot of doctors will just slap them on cases. Of course, they’re very helpful when you’re like,

actively developing an ulcer and we need to stop it. can be that emergency intervention can be great. Other than that, they cause a lot of damage, nutrient deficiencies, increase your risk for SIBO, etc. And then things like levothyroxine. that like very common thyroid medication increases your risk for SIBO as well, because of its impact on motility. I mentioned adhesion. So like C-sections, gallbladder removals, tummy tucks, colon resections, those kinds of things. I just want to make sure I’m hitting everything for you guys.

And then food poisoning. So food poisoning can also cause SIBO. After about a foodborne illness, then we can end up with SIBO because your motility can get damaged and your body starts to produce antibodies that then negatively impact your gut motility. Then you can end up with SIBO. So there’s many different causes of it. And then the classic stress, the chronic stress can also cause SIBO. Like I mentioned, those with a history of disordered eating,

97 % of them end up with a GI issue. So we don’t want tons and tons of restriction. That was part of my story. I heavily restricted my food after getting a lot of information online and becoming afraid of a lot of foods. I restricted my food and then I ended up in worse shape. It was bad news because my body was under so much stress. So these food restrictions and high, high stress can also contribute to SIBO.

So those are some of the main causes of SIBO. SIBO being that big gut imbalance that can cause a lot of symptoms like gas, bloating, looking nine months, six months pregnant with belly bloat, fatigue, eczema, rashes, rosacea, migraines, asthma, anxiety, depression, GERD, and more. So once again, when we’re looking at these conditions, when we’re looking at eczema, when we’re looking at bloating, when we’re looking at GERD, we want to dig deeper. Why is this here in the first place? When we’re looking at IBS?

what’s causing this IBS? What’s causing all these digestive issues? We dig deeper, we do symptom assessment, symptom analysis, we run labs, and that’s how we understand and identify these deeper root causes. And then once we address things at the root cause level, we can get you feeling a lot, a lot

Jessica asks, would fungus, athlete’s foot, fit in with the dysbiosis as well? That’s pretty commonly a fungal overgrowth. So you can have a fungal overgrowth on the foot, but you can also have a fungal overgrowth internally.

Candida overgrowth and things like that. We’ll see commonly with like chronic yeast infections, athlete’s foot, white coating on the tongue. Those are all some symptoms to look out for.

Now let’s talk about candida, because this one I feel like is just like thrown around the internet a lot. So let’s talk about candida. So candidases, often referred to as candida, is a yeast-like fungus. So I kind of throw around the terms candida, yeast, fungus. They’re all kind of interchangeable. Yes, you can have different types of fungus or yeast overgrowing, but very commonly it is candida.

We’ve only seen a few cases where it’s not like specifically candida and it can be other sorts of fungal overgrowth. And that’s kind of been in clients that have worked with like had very interesting jobs, like in a laboratory or like other ways of getting kind of exposed to this. Okay. So, candidases, like I said, often referred to as candida, it’s a yeast like fungus that is normally present in your gut. We all have some candida. So candida is naturally occurring in our gut microbiome. We run into issues when we

have an overgrown level of Candida. And this is once again, like it’s super common and it’s very commonly missed because there’s a lot of different causes to Candida. So we run into issues when it overgrows. Not all Candida is bad. If we have too much of it in the gut microbiome, we run into issues. So Candida can start to overgrow due to different things. This is important to know because we have to address these things in order to get better.

If a true root cause approach is digging deep enough to understand how did we get here? What caused this? How can we repair the candida? how, why did this happen? Why, what gave the candida an opportunity to overgrow? Cause you can take all the antifungals you want, but it might just come right back. So an imbalance in your immune system can cause candida overgrowth. Overuse of antibiotics.

It’s on the package. Your risk for candidases goes up after you take an antibiotic because we’re wiping out all of the good and bad gut bacteria. What is not being eradicated? Fungus. Fungus is opportunistic. It’s going to overgrow when it has the chance. If we wipe out all of our good gut bacteria, the fungus can overgrow. We’re setting the ecosystem and environment for the fungus to overgrow. So antibiotic use, especially right after we take an antibiotic, we want to be mindful.

Chronic high sugar diet can also cause candida overgrowth. Chronic stress over time as it weakens the immune system can also contribute to candida overgrowth. Mineral imbalances can contribute long-term use of oral contraceptives and mold exposure. So we see mold exposure causing fungal overgrowth, candida overgrowth pretty often. We also see long-term use of oral contraceptives like birth control causing candida overgrowth quite often. Those I’d say are like some of the biggest causes.

Once again, we see this a lot and you can’t get rid of it with a Candida diet. We have to come in and work on all this other stuff and bring in antifungal agents, support the immune system, support the adrenals, support detox in order to fully…

eradicate it. So common symptoms of Candida overgrowth would be fatigue, lots of fatigue, lots of brain fog we see in Candida clients, sugar cravings. Usually you’ll have really big sugar and carbohydrate cravings because sugar is what feeds Candida. We can even see depression, allergies. Very commonly people have like kind of allergies because Candida is a histamine liberator. Toenail fungus, bloating, gas, diarrhea.

Oral thrush, so you can have a white coating on the tongue, you can have a rash around the mouth. Constipation, very common. Recurring sinus infections, irregular menstruation, recurrent vaginal yeast infections, and GERD. So we’ll see, I see Candida causing reflux a lot. I see it causing yeast infections a lot, and I see it causing a lot of bloating and different reactions to foods kind of across the map.

not like your regular gluten and dairy, but more so like random foods. You’re like, I can’t eat strawberries. I can’t eat mangoes. These things really flare me up. I am running to the bathroom. That kind of vibe. Also, usually a lot of brain fog and a lot of bloating. People are super symptomatic when they have Candida overgrowth. And then we can end up with a lot of skin issues. like eczema, acne, very big. Candida is very, very prevalent in chronic acne cases. Along with another gut infection, we see those most commonly.

How long does it take to fully get rid of Candida? Great question. We’re looking at at least three months, but we have to do some prep work. So I would say, you know, anywhere from three to six months, but it depends on your

It’s not a four week thing. Neither is SIBO. A lot of naturopaths put people on a four week protocol for SIBO and then they end up working with us. It’s almost never enough. So it takes a second to get rid of all of this. But most people, would say, a good three months. My group program is four months and my one-on-one program is six months. And there’s a reason for that. It’s not a one week thing. takes some time. And you wouldn’t want to hit it hard enough where it could be a one week thing because you’d feel very bad.

The die off with Candida can be kind of intense. People can feel really like you can feel like you have the flu. You can feel really bloated. You can feel sick. It’s, you know, all of these bacteria house toxins. So if we come in and we eradicate these bacteria, we’re putting these toxins in the circulation and then we can feel a lot worse before we feel better. So you always want to work through this with someone. And a lot of clients will try to figure it out on their own before working with us. And then they’re like,

this isn’t working and I feel worse and then they end up working with us. So just like skip that step. Don’t do more harm. We don’t want more toxins to be in circulation in your body without your ability to get rid of them, right? Okay, so we talked about Candida. Let me see what questions we have about Candida specifically. What are the main foods to avoid with Candida? You probably want, first off, you’re not going to get rid of it avoiding sugar. So know that. However,

you might be more sensitive to hist, like foods higher in histamine. You probably won’t feel good after like fermented foods. So, sauerkraut, kimchi, kombucha, that kind of stuff. And definitely foods like, like really high in sugar. I would not fear fruit. I would not fear sweet potatoes or anything like that. But more so like alcohol is probably gonna make you feel terrible. Cookies, cakes, you know, that kind of stuff. Just sticks to a more whole food diet, really prioritize protein, healthy fats and

But yeah, mean, avoiding like sweet potatoes is like not going to get rid of it, you

Leaky gut is real, right? Healing leaky gut with one supplement like L-glutamine is not real. So leaky gut essentially is just increased intestinal permeability. Now your gut lining, your gut has a lining, your gut barrier, right? And your gut barrier is really a single cell layer thick. So your epithelial barrier is a single cell thick. It’s thinner than your fingernail.

Let’s conceptualize that. It’s pretty vulnerable, right? So we’ve got the epithelial layer, and then we’ve also got the mucosal layer of our gut lining. And the mucosal layer, we want nice and robust because it kind of helps maintain the integrity of the epithelial barrier. Now, in the case of leaky gut, the epithelial barrier ends up with these tight junctions that then become leaky. So I like to use my hands for this, or you can think of like…

a brick building, like where the bricks are all nice and tight and they’re like little like Tetris, like Legos. They’re all kind of plugged into one another. In the case of leaky gut or increased intestinal permeability, we get these leaky junctions. These tight junctions are now leaky due to other things, which is key here, that then allow undigested food proteins, toxins, undigested food particles to flow through that gut barrier.

and then trigger that immune system response. Cause on the other side of that gut barrier is the majority of our immune system. This is why the gut is like, is a part of 90 % of all chronic disease. So it’s incredible, right? Anything that’s going to cause that chronic immune system dysregulation is going to cause more systemic issues. So once we get a breakdown in that gut lining, these things are flowing through, they’re triggering that immune system response, and then we can have full systemic symptoms. So

With leaky gut, can have bloating, can have constipation, burping, gas, but we can also have migraines, headaches, joint pain. Leaky gut or increased intestinal permeability, that’s the more accepted term in the medical field, right? Call it whatever you want, I don’t care, as long as you understand it. These things, the leaky gut is basically part of every autoimmune condition because on the other side of that gut lining is your immune system.

We’re constantly triggering that immune system response, and then we’re getting lots and lots of symptoms. So this can also look like a lot of different food sensitivities. We never want to use food sensitivity testing. It’s a total waste of money. It’s a total waste of your money and your time. It’s highly inaccurate. And when you get an IgG food sensitivity test, it’s basically showing us that your immune system knows these foods. It’s interacted with these foods before. It’s not necessarily saying that you’re sensitive to these foods.

In all of my years of helping people with their chronic digestive issues, in the 15 years of experience that my team has, we don’t run food sensitivity testing and we see people with chronic GI issues every single day because we have to ask what is causing the reaction to the food. It’s not the food itself, know, especially when they’re like healthy foods. You get this long list of all these healthy foods that you eat all the time and then you’re like terrified to eat them. No, we have to ask what’s causing.

the reaction to the food, what’s causing that immune system’s response to the food? And there’s usually a weakened intestinal barrier or that leaky gut picture. So leaky gut is never just leaky gut. We have to dig deeper and understand what’s actually causing the leaky gut. What’s causing the breakdown of the intestinal barrier? Do we not have enough of our good gut bacteria to support a healthy and robust mucosal layer of our gut microbiome? In order to do this, we have to eat enough fiber. Fiber helps feed our gut bacteria and then our gut bacteria

help to produce these short chain fatty acids. Now certain short chain fatty acids like butyrate helps protect that intestinal barrier in the large intestine. There’s also other really supportive keystone strains of gut bacteria that help to keep that mucosal layer of the gut lining nice and strong. So things like acrimansia, mucinophila. I’ve got like tons of posts about it on my page so you can go scroll through and check if you want to learn more. But we have to look at the mucosal barrier.

We also have to look at anything else that’s breaking down the gut barrier. So if there’s a bacterial overgrowth that’s going to cause stress and strain on the gut barrier, if we’ve experienced chronic stress, if we’re living in a chronically stressed out state, cortisol weakens the intestinal barrier. So if we are, we can take all the supplements we want, but if we are operating and living in this high, high stress state, we’re weakening that intestinal barrier day in and day out.

Sometimes when people are really sensitive to gluten, that can weaken the intestinal barrier. But any gut infections, any microbial overgrowth, these things can weaken the intestinal barrier and then essentially cause the leaky gut. So I like to tell the story of someone that I know that’s close to me, but everyone’s on their own journey. even though I teach this and I do this as my profession, I don’t push my ways on anyone. So I let them come to me if they need help. So someone very close to me had…

All of these issues, right? Was working with a functional medicine doctor that then recommended just a, it was like a four product kit to detox and heal leaky gut, whatever. No testing, no testing. So I said, this was like a $500 kit. said, I wouldn’t do that. I would test first because you’re blindly throwing things at this. These products are all good products, but we don’t know what you’re actually dealing with yet. So you could give it a shot.

It might kind of work, but I don’t think it’s going to be enough based on your symptoms. anyway, the kit was ordered. It was about four different supplements. And one of them was a supplement to support the gut barrier. So it includes things like glutamine and aloe and that kind of stuff, which is all great, right? However, then we finally ran testing when that was all moved through and didn’t work, which I knew. And then we found a ton of gut dysbiosis, tons of histamine producing bacteria causing a lot of the symptoms that were present.

tons of bacterial overgrowth. And then once he finally took those test results into the doctor, the doctor said, if I knew this was present, I wouldn’t have given you what I gave you. Okay, so total waste of $500. There’s an order of operations here. My point in sharing this story is we have to know what’s going on in your body. We’ve got to run functional lab testing. Stool testing can be highly, highly valuable. Blindly supplementing with this stuff, it’s not going to get you the results that you want. Trust me, I did it for like

probably seven years before I figured this out. I owned every supplement imaginable that you could have. The probiotics, the L-glutamine, the colostrum, the prebiotics, the vitamin D, the magnesium. I did it all and I was eating very healthy and nothing was working. And I was very confused. And it’s because I didn’t actually know what was going on in my body. I was just reading a lot of stuff online and I’m smart. And so I was trying a bunch of stuff. It was a total waste of my time and a total waste of money. So my point is with all of this, we have to understand

what is actually causing the weakening of the intestinal barrier, repair that, make sure that our gut bacteria look good, make sure there’s no infection, support our nervous system, support our gut proliferation, building of these good gut bacteria that then protect the intestinal barrier, supporting our gut immune function. All of these things have to come in play when we’re looking to heal or repair intestinal permeability or leaky gut.

But leaky gut is real and we definitely see it, right? We just want to dig deeper because a leaky gut protocol on its own is very lazy. It’s not, we’re not addressing everything that needs to be addressed. So some of these main gut imbalances that we see in clients that are causing the bloating, the gas, the constipation, the diarrhea, causing these people to have a lot of these symptoms, low energy, hormonal imbalances, super painful periods, all of that kind of stuff. There are underlying root causes to these things.

that are not just the food that you’re eating. Not all bloating is caused by the food that you’re eating. If I learned this earlier, I would have been a lot easier on myself because I was very convinced that if I took out every inflammatory toxic food, then my gut would just be healed. And it didn’t work. Over and over again, it didn’t work, but I didn’t know what else to do. So there’s a lot of other reasons that you can be experiencing bloating and constipation and reflux and food sensitivities.

that go kind of beyond just the food that you’re eating. Proper nutrition is essential. We all kind of know that. It’s of course important, but we always want to dig a bit deeper. So these main gut imbalances that we see causing a lot of these symptoms of IBS include things like gut dysbiosis or an imbalance of our gut bacteria. Once again, there’s different patterns for this. We can have histamine producing bacteria overgrown. We can have other dysbiotic bacteria overgrown. We can have not enough for a good gut bacteria.

We can have different infections, all of that. So this is where working with someone is really valuable there, because it’s not a one size fits all. Then we have candida overgrowth or that fungal overgrowth causes tons and tons of symptoms. Then we have SIBO, that overgrowth of bacteria in the small intestine when it should be happening in the large intestine. And then we have that leaky gut picture too. So I walked us through all of those things, underlying causes and common symptoms.

So if you’re someone that’s ready to dig deeper into this, you’re like, I’ve been struggling with this for a long time and I’m over it. That’s where I was. We’d love to help you. So if you want to, you can send me a message. We can hop on a call. I offer strategy calls to my community. Basically, you’ll talk with me. We can talk

your case, best next steps to get you feeling better, what it would look like to work with us, all of that kind of stuff. I’m happy to

Find someone that you drive with, find someone that you like.

Find someone that you feel like knows what they’re doing, has your best interest at heart, is going to dig deeper when things don’t go as planned because that’s usually what happens, and then get the support. We don’t want to blindly do this stuff. It’s really in your best interest to get help.

Thanks for joining me for this episode of the Nutrient Dense Podcast. If you found this episode valuable, don’t forget to subscribe, leave a review, share with a friend, and come back next week for a new episode. See you then!