Hannah Aylward (00:05.88)
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.

I am so excited to be here with you today. Today we’re going to be discussing the root causes of chronic gut and digestive issues. So when I polled my community and asked you guys what topics you want to need to explore and dive in on and get some education on, this was the top voted topic. So digging into underlying root causes of chronic gut and digestive issues.

And this is imperative if we’re really wanting to minimize symptoms or really like eradicate symptoms, we have to understand what’s causing them, right? So we’re going to be digging into the different root causes that you could be dealing with and what we see most commonly in clients. And I’ll be talking and kind of digging into each one of these little topics. When we’re looking at different chronic digestive issues and symptoms ranging from like reflux to bloating, constipation, diarrhea, they can all have different underlying root causes.

For example, someone’s bloating can be caused by a gut bacterial overgrowth and another person’s bloating can be caused by low stomach acid. And this is why working with someone is so essential to really shorten your timeline of just like trying a bunch of random things that you’re reading online and work with someone to identify like what is your individual root cause. So we talk a lot about root causes here. I like to say that we take like a root cause approach to a root cause approach.

Hannah Aylward (02:08.494)
Instead of saying, oh, you’re bloated, let’s deal with the bloating. I want to dig deeper and ask, why are you bloated? What’s causing the bloating? Because that’s really important. And then dig deeper and go, well, how did we get there? Whatever is causing the bloating, what actually caused that? Because that is what really needs to be addressed in order to get you feeling better. there’s a lot of kind of functional practitioners out there that will put people on extensive gut protocols. We absolutely do that. Love a good gut protocol.

But it’s really important to not just take a bunch of supplements and actually dig a little deeper and go, well, how did I get to the point where I need all these supplements? What caused that? What caused the scut dysbiosis? What caused the fungal overgrowth? How did I get to the point where I needed the functional testing and all these supplements? And it’s not like a blame game or anything like that. It’s just a deeper understanding of what got you here so we can work to prevent it from coming back. So.

why do you want to take a root cause approach in the first place, right? And this language I think has kind of gotten like, what’s the one I’m looking for? Like diluted. I think a lot of people are saying that they’re a root cause approach and I’m kind of like, right? So it’s kind of gotten a little diluted, but this is what I mean when I say we want to take a root cause approach to healing, to your gut repairing journey is for, I like to this example, right? So.

If you step on a thumb tack, right, you’re walking, you step on a thumb tack, a push pin that you like put in your wall, and you can take an Advil and it’s going to help to minimize pain, right? You can ice it, you can take more Advil, right? Over time, the symptoms are being minimized, but over time things are going to get worse. So we’re going to get an infection. You’re going to need to take more Advil because your tolerance is going to go up.

And we’re not actually getting to the root of the issue, right? The root of the issue being we have to remove the thumbtack from your foot in order to get you in really feeling better. And when you remove the thumbtack from your foot and help to kind of expedite that healing process, then we’re not dealing with these symptoms anymore. These symptoms are gone, right? And we’re not dealing with medications to just minimize the symptoms or suppress the symptoms. We’re no longer dealing with managing symptoms. We’ve eradicated the symptoms.

Hannah Aylward (04:14.604)
right? Because we got to the deeper cause of the symptoms. especially with things like IBS and chronic bloating and, you know, constipation, diarrhea, we always want to dig deeper and understand what’s the cause of this because chances are you didn’t always have it. All right. You didn’t always deal with this chronic constipation or chronic bloating. You didn’t wake up feeling bloated, you know, five years ago, 10 years ago. We see people that have been struggling, you know, for like 15 plus years sometimes. And then sometimes it’s like one year.

But my point is, is we want to dig deeper because once we remove that, then your body can do what it knows how to do, which is repair itself and feel good. So I hope that makes sense to you guys. That’s a very easy kind of like analogy that I like to use. The point being, we’re not going to symptom suppress. We’re not going to just throw medication at it. We’re not going to throw anti-inflammatory drugs at it. We’re going to go, why do we need the anti-inflammatory drugs in the first place? Let’s remove that so your body can repair on its own and get you feeling a lot better. So that’s kind of.

how we avoid you just spinning your wheels, living life of managing symptoms. So I really got into this work because I struggled with my own chronic digestive issues for years with little to no help. I did a million elimination diet. I think I lived on an elimination diet for like probably five years. I didn’t eat gluten or dairy for about a decade. Like that’s not an exaggeration. And I felt a little better, but not fully better. Something was still really wrong. And I was eating healthy.

and I was exercising and I’m young and I’m like, what’s the deal? And then people are like, you’re just anxious or you’re just really stressed. And I’m like, no, do not tell me that. It’s gonna anger me even more, right? So I had to dig deeper and understand what was causing my digestive issues. And once I dug deeper into my gut health, it’s not an exaggeration to say my entire life changed, right? I was no longer living managing my symptoms, kind of battling my body, hoping for the best, praying that what I ate didn’t upset my stomach.

or cause me to cancel my plans or cause me to not be able to wear the outfit that I wanted to wear. Instead, I wasn’t dealing with them anymore, right? And then I was able to tolerate and enjoy more foods as well. So we don’t want you to have to live on a super restrictive diet to just like manage your life. A nice, healthy, resilient gut microbiome can tolerate most foods with little pain. Little exceptions here and there, right? You got an allergy, that’s a different conversation. You go out for like pizza and a couple beers, you’re a little bloated, that’s a different conversation.

Hannah Aylward (06:29.538)
The clients that we see are like, don’t eat processed sugar, don’t eat ultra processed food, don’t eat fast food, don’t eat gluten, don’t eat dairy, still chronically bloated. That’s who I’m really talking to. If you’re not there yet, we can still help you, of course. But if you are there, then you’re like nodding your head like, yes, this is me. Someone finally understands, please help me, right? So we don’t want to be managing these symptoms. A nice, strong and resilient, healthy gut microbiome can tolerate these foods. And that’s where we want to get you to. So.

Dealing with my underlying root causes changed my health and changed my life because it changed my energy and my confidence and the snacks I had to pack and my fear of eating out and all of that. And that’s really how I got here and why I do what I do today. Take a really deep underlying root cause approach. We look under the hood, see what’s actually causing your symptoms and also work to support your body’s underlying physiology on a full systems like approach through a full systems approach because every system in your body is interconnected and they’re influencing one another.

So we’re not just looking at your gut and digestive issues, we’re looking at supporting your adrenal function, your liver detoxification capabilities, your cortisol levels, right? Your thyroid health, all of these things influence one another. So when you’re really looking to fully get better and take a full system approach and a root cause approach, we’ve got to kind of take all of this into consideration. And that’s why our programs are extensive. If anyone that’s worked with us knows our programs are extensive because that’s really, we dig in deeper, right? It’s not just probiotic.

It’s not just like an enzyme or something like that. We’re going to give you a very extensive plan and we’re going to support your body like full system. Okay. So let’s get into these common causes of your product digestive issues. And the most common things that we see in clients and we’ve helped hundreds of clients around the world. At this point, we’ve read lots and lots and lots of labs and between everyone on my team, we’ve got like 15 plus years experience. We’ve seen quite a bit. Someone say.

So you pick up patterns, right? There’s one thing to kind of like read research and learn from that. And it’s another thing to like practice and see what works clinically. So we’ll share all of that with you. The one other thing I want to note is that it’s usually not one thing. And I know that that is going to sound frustrating. So it’s usually not one root cause.

Hannah Aylward (08:40.386)
Like when we’re looking at clients and we’re helping people, it’s not the one thing that got them to finally work with us, right? And after struggling for years and years, we’re probably finding like a myriad of underlying root causes. So I’m gonna go through these and you probably are dealing with like a few of these, right? That’s very normal because your body can withstand so much and it’s very smart and it’s like very self-healing. The issue is my kind of like…

hits a block in the road and then it’s like, okay, now the symptoms are like really frequent. It’s not once a week anymore. It’s happening a lot. So just, you know, before dining in, just know that people find my root causes, but you’re probably dealing with like a couple of these things. And that’s where it gets to the point where the symptoms really start becoming more frequent. Okay. So first, the biggest root cause that I see causing people’s chronic digestive issues and health issues overall, and you’re not going to want to hear it. You’re not going to like it. It’s chronic stress. Yeah. But I like to put stress in three different like,

buckets really. I think that hopefully I didn’t get an eye roll from you guys. Sometimes when people get me, it gives a little eye roll because it’s like, duh, we’re all stressed, right? But I like to kind of section them out into three buckets. So I like to talk about different causes of stress being physical stressors, mental stressors, mental and emotional stressors, and then environmental stressors. So that can kind of help you wrap your mind around these things and go, I probably have a couple of these different stressors, right? Because once again,

One stressful day is not going to wreck your gut health. It’s the accumulation of chronic stressors from many different areas. So first off being physical stressors. So physical stressors can include things like under eating, over exercising, not getting enough sleep, chronic blue light exposure, never getting enough sunlight exposure, mineral deficiencies and nutrient deficiencies, right? Because these are going to put stress on the body when your body doesn’t have what it needs to do its job. That’s going to cause stress.

Then we have things like gut infections and gut issues because a lot of people kind of talk about inflammation. Inflammation is the root cause of all disease, but what’s causing the inflammation is what I want to know, right? We want to take things a layer deeper and ask, well, why are we getting all of this inflammation? Where is it coming from? And a big source of inflammation and stress tends to be these gut infections and kind of like gut imbalances, things like dysbiosis, because on the other side of your gut lining is the majority of your immune system. So

Hannah Aylward (10:59.2)
If we are chronically activating the immune system via pathogens and increased intestinal permeability in the gut, we’re gonna get that chronic inflammation. We’ve got different physical stressors, like I talked about, and these are really common. So most of our clients that come in to us aren’t eating enough and they are eating a clean diet, but it’s pretty imbalanced. They’re not getting in enough with what they need. They may have taken out a lot of food due to fear of foods, due to what other practitioners have told them.

I remember we had one client and she was told not to eat more than 45 grams of carbohydrates per day by a functional medicine doctor, which is not good, not enough. Women tend to under eat protein as well and just not eating enough overall. And that’s a big stressor on the body. It can contribute to blood sugar and speculation. It can contribute to higher cortisol levels, chronic stress, not so great, right? So these are some of the physical stressors that we’re looking at that can contribute over time to these chronic digestive issues.

Then we’ve got more so mental and emotional stressors. So this is what like you probably think of when you think of stress, right? You’re like, I’m stressed. I have so much work to do. My to-do list is never ending. I’m running late. I’m always running late. Things like that, right? Those are going to be more mental and emotional stressors. It could be financial stress. It could be losing a loved one. It could be an abusive relationship. It kind of goes far and wide, but that’s the stress that you feel or kind of can wrap your head around probably.

more quickly when you think of stress, right? You’re like, of course I’m stressed. It’s never ending. That over time can contribute to gut and digestive issues and hormonal issues and really everything. Why does that happen? Because when we’re in that chronically stressed out state, our body is going to enter that sympathetic dominance state, our nervous system is going to be in that sympathetic dominance state. This is the opposite of the rest and digest or parasympathetic nervous system response.

We have to be in the parasympathetic nervous system response in order for the body to actually repair and to properly digest our food. So once again, it’s not one stressful event that’s gonna ruin your gut health. It’s the accumulation of stress over time, over years and years and years that is over time going to contribute to these gut and digestive issues and hormonal imbalances too and really like everything, tanker, adrenal, thyroid, bullets goes on.

Hannah Aylward (13:20.076)
Because like I said, we’ve got to be in that parasympathetic to actually properly digest our food. And when we are in that sympathetic dominant state, that stress state, that fight or flight state, digestion is an afterthought. Blood flow goes away from our GI organs. Our gut motility gets altered. Our stomach acid production decreases. Our gut immunity goes down. The rate at which our gut lining regenerates is compromised as well. And this is really setting the stage for bacterial imbalances.

fungal imbalances and eventually increase in testicle permeability or more commonly known as the gut. So I always say to my clients, stress does not stay stress. So I like to emphasize this because there’s no doubt we have to at your nervous system and we have to look at stress when we’re talking about the gut and, your health overall, right? Energy levels, thyroid health, everything. However, stress physiologically impacts the body, right? So over time,

Stress is not going to just stay mental and emotional stress. It’s going to cause nutrient deficient feed. It’s going to cause, like I said, increased intestinal permeability, low gut immune function, gut dysbiosis. So these are more like physical issues that we have to address in order to get in ceiling fully better. Regulating the nervous system, absolutely necessary. And also dealing with what the dysregulation of the nervous system has caused in your body physically, necessary as well. So we like to take kind of a…

multi-pronged approach again, to getting people feeling really better, right? It’s not one or the other. Once again, I like to emphasize this because a lot of the people that we see have gone into their medical doctors and been told you’re distressed. It’s just your anxiety that’s causing your digestive issues. Just to help your stress or here’s like an SSRI or whatever it might be. Your gut is going to influence your anxiety and stress levels and your stress levels are going to influence your gut health as well. It’s five directional and it goes both ways.

However, if you are dealing with these chronic digestive issues day in and day out, I would bet some good money that it’s not just your stress. Stress is absolutely like can contribute to a flare up, can cause some of this stuff over time. But at this point, it’s not your stress anymore because stress doesn’t stay stress. So you want to work with someone, whether it’s us or someone else that’s really going to help you full system. Dig deeper, look at the nervous system and also look at repairing some of these more like physical imbalances that are contributing to the chronic digestive issues.

Hannah Aylward (15:45.186)
The other thing that I like, like other kind of section of stress that I like to discuss is environmental stressors. And we’re pretty much inundated with these day to day. And I don’t say that to freak anyone out or scare anyone or make you feel like there’s no hope for your healing. That’s not the case. It’s just something to be aware of, right? When I’m discussing environmental stressors, we’re looking at things like mycotoxin or mold exposure. Tons of us are exposed to this. It will wear on the body over time.

I’m talking about toxins in our water, if we’re not properly filtering our water. I’m talking about poor air quality and plastic exposure and endocrine disruptors, being exposed to endocrine disruptors through things like candles and fragrances and things like that. These are more so environmental stressors. These are adding to your toxin load and they’re adding to your stress load. So when you’re looking at your stress timeline or you’re like the picture of your health, I like to…

invite people to kind of like widen the lens and take a look at your life through a bigger lens and ask yourself, how many of these have I had exposure to over the last few years? And it’s not, once again, it’s not a blame or shame or guilt game. Like never, that’s not gonna get us anywhere. It can just be helpful to widen the lens and go, no wonder I’m dealing with these issues now. I had exposure to moles.

I’ve been drinking poor quality water. I’ve had really high stress levels over the last few years. I lost my job. I lost a loved one. I hate my job. My to do list never ends. I’m raising kids and I’m run ragged and I’m stressed out. I’m pulled in every direction. And then I’ve been under eating and over exercising. When we look at all of these things, it’s kind of like, okay, yeah, makes sense that we are here where we’re at. Right? So I think it can be helpful because it can just feel empowering. Mindful as to empower you.

on this journey so you feel like, okay, I can kind of understand how I got here. So that makes sense that I can get out of here too, right? So that’s what I like to kind of put under stress. So a lot of people talk about stress, decrease your stress, decrease your stress. I’m like, we know, right? We know, we’re trying. So when we are looking at kind of solving this issue, we want to look at our lives and look at, take these different buckets of stressors and look at how can we help kind of fill the holes

Hannah Aylward (18:05.548)
in somebody’s bucket because every single person that’s watching this is gonna have different things that are like creating the stress in their lives, right? Biggest thing for me is probably not sleeping enough and running a business. These things are pretty stressful, but that may not be the case for you, right? Your thing might be under eating and over exercising, or it might be you’re living in mold or it might be something else. So it’s important to like, this is why we wanna dig into your unique taste.

and also why the solution and the strategy is not the same for everyone. So if you feel like you have tried all of the things or you bought these leaky gut kits online or you bought probiotics or you bought digestive enzymes and you’re just like, none of this is working. And I’ve tried an elimination diet and none of this is working. You probably just haven’t taken the right strategy yet and that’s okay. We’re here to help you if you’re ready to dive in. We’d love to. Okay, so number one biggest cause of chronic gut and digestive issues.

stress, many different buckets of stress. Second thing that I have on my list here is the chronic dieting, over-exercising, under-eating, and restrictive dieting. So I wanted to harp on that a little bit more because we see this pretty commonly in a lot of women’s history. So if you’re someone that’s like yo-yo dieted, if you’ve ever struggled with an eating disorder, if you’ve ever had a period of time where you’re like really under-eating or you’re really over-exercising, meaning you’re doing lots of HIIT classes a week, this was a

big part of my story. I used to take HIIT classes like five times a week. I had no idea that it was negatively affecting my health. If you do a lot of like intense cardio, long distance cardio training or anything like that, and you’re not properly refueling and you’re not properly sleeping and you’re not properly repairing, that is going to cause degradation of the gut lining over time. There’s also some interesting research that shows that those that have a history of an eating disorder.

95 % of them develop a functional gastrointestinal disorder. Meaning, the more that you have restricted food in the past, if you’ve ever had a period of big restriction, you’re at higher risk for something like IBS, something like a functional gastrointestinal disorder. We’ve seen a lot of people like that. Pretty common developed SIBO, pretty common developed with stomach acid, and then we’ll see the bloating get really, really bad. And it can be really hard to get out of that because you’re working on your relationship with food, but nothing feels good when you eat it. And it’s kind of a little bit of a…

Hannah Aylward (20:27.29)
hamster wheel, but we’re here to help you with that. Why does this contribute to gut issues? It puts a ton of stress on your body. So when I really started to dig into health and how it actually works, not just like reading things in magazines, I was kind of shocked because a lot of what I had been taught or what I had learned was the opposite of what would really help me. instead of, you know, things that we were taught were like, count out your almonds and

make sure to not eat more than 1200 calories and, you know, go low carb or go low fat or whatever it is. And when I really dug into how, what the body needs to properly kind of work and do its job, we were doing it a lot of disservice by doing things like that. So it puts your body under lots and lots of stress, creates the environment for like nutrient deficiencies and over time that stress is going to contribute to gut issues. Then we have things like low FODMAP and these more restrictive kind of like

gut targeted diets as well. So I like to talk about low FODNAP because I’m not a fan. I don’t think it’s an actual like real strategy to overcoming your digestive issues. Low FODNAP, the low FODNAP diet is really just a diet that’s low in fermentable carbohydrates. So fermentable carbohydrates are actually great for your gut bacteria. They feed your gut bacteria. We have an issue with breaking down these fermentable carbohydrates when we have a bacterial overgrowth.

or an inability to break down carbohydrates efficiently. So very commonly, we’re looking at like a dysbiosis or a SIBO picture. My point in all of that is that the low-flodmethylate is not going to, quote unquote, cure anything. It should only be used to minimize symptoms temporarily while we find you a more, a better solution to dealing with the underlying cause of the gut issues being more so like a bacterial issue or a maldigestion issue.

or a gut intestinal permeability issue. So low FODMAP has been shown to decrease bacterial diversity over time. It’s very easy to end up with nutrient deficiencies because it’s so very restrictive. And it’s not, I will say out of the hundreds and hundreds of plants that we’ve helped all over the world, we’ve probably used it like a handful of times.

Hannah Aylward (22:41.056)
when extremely necessary. So only to minimize symptoms while we’re doing the deeper work. We’re repairing the gut environment, we’re repairing the digestive function, we’re repairing the gut microbiome and things like that. we don’t wanna be on these really restrictive diets for very long because they’re going to damage our relationship with food. They’re going to make us scared to eat many things, including healthy things, which is also as equally as important after you’re bloating, your mental health.

And your relationship to food is equally as important to bloating and things like that. And it’s going to, like I said, contribute to bacterial, lowered bacterial diversity, can impact motility. Due to that, the list goes on and on. So you’ll also feel more stress when you’re trying to manage and follow a diet like that, which is having the opposite effect of what we want. So I think when people come to work with us, they’re…

more like surprised about how little restriction we add in because they’d usually try to a lot of these really restrictive things. We definitely have clients take out a few things here and there, but it’s not, it’s not the end goal is what I’m saying, right? We want to repair your gut function and repair gut microbiome so you can tolerate more foods, including things like font maps. So we’ve got like loads and loads of clients that have been able to tolerate more foods after they work with us. If any of y’all are on this live, drop your nuggets in the comments, but people that have been able to eat.

tomatoes for years without reflux or eating tomatoes. People that haven’t been able to eat an onion are putting a full onion in soup, garlic, dairy, the list goes on and on. I see it every single day. So it’s always a possibility for you as well. Okay, so we’ve got stress. Then we’ve got the chronic under-eating, over-exercising, restricted dieting.

Then we’ve got blood sugar dysregulation. So this can kind of be tied into the stress and the food picture as well. But a lot of people are kind of existing on this blood sugar roller coaster. And this is very inflammatory for the body. So when our blood sugar levels go up very high, they’ll crash very low. And when they crash very low, your body’s going to pump out cortisol to raise your blood glucose levels because your body is very smart and it’s always trying to work for you and with you. So when that blood sugar crashes, your body’s going to push out cortisol.

Hannah Aylward (24:45.934)
Then you’re going to be running on stress hormones and you’re going to be running on cortisol. And what does cortisol do to the gut? It pokes holes in our, in our gut lining. It wears away at the mucosal layer of the gut lining as well. And it down regulates digestion. It’s when we are living life on these ups and downs, blood sugar dysregulation, it’s going to contribute to motility issues. can damage nerve function and it’s going to be essentially a cause of stress on the body that’s going to damage digestive function. So.

If any of you guys have had the experience of what I see commonly in people is that they feel like food makes them feel worse. When you’ve got these gut issues in your eating, you feel a lot worse. So you’ll skip meals or you’ll go longer without eating. And then by the time you eat, it almost makes your bloating worse. You finally eat after like six hours, then you’re immediately bloated. That’s because you’re eating and your body is under a stressed state. You’re setting yourself up for digestive.

like failure, not failure, your body’s still gonna digest your food, but poor digestion overall, right? So we wanna minimize these blood sugar ups and downs. can be a big cause of inflammation. It’s gonna cause you to run on stress hormones, which we don’t want, because it’s not gonna feel good over time. We’d be exhausted, and it’s going to disrupt your gut function. So we wanna make sure that we’re balancing and helping to regulate your blood sugar levels by basically eating the right foods at the right time. So we wanna make sure the biggest thing

that’s gonna help to regulate your blood sugar level is protein. Eating adequate protein at meals is absolutely essential. You wanna aim for like 20 to 30 grams per meal. And then trying to avoid things that I call like naked carbs. So carbohydrates, we need them. They’re not bad. They’re great. They also taste great, right? We can absolutely keep them in the diet. We just wanna make sure that we’re not eating them alone. Try to avoid eating things like just crackers. Pair your crackers with avocado or hummus or a hard-boiled egg or…

dip crackers in tuna salad or something like that. So you’re pairing them with the protein or you’re pairing them with the fat. That’s going to help to minimize the blood sugar ups and downs. If that makes sense. There’s a lot more that we can go into with that, but that could be a whole other like live just alone blood sugar regulation, but that’s kind of the idea, right? So the blood sugar ups and downs, not supportive of gut health overall, digestion overall. And it can be once again, tricky. Cause if you feel like you’re reacting to all these foods, you don’t really want to eat. can’t feel like you can’t eat a lot or enough.

Hannah Aylward (27:09.324)
And then you’re living on this blood sugar roller coaster, which is just, it’s a, it’s the hamster wheel. We’ve, we’ve got to really break that and working with someone that knows what they’re doing. you can help you through that is going to be really, really helpful. Skipping meals also not great. Interim sassing also not great for this because once again, we go too long without eating stress levels go up, cortisol goes up, digestive function goes down. Okay.

Then we have nervous system dysregulation. So I’ve kind of touched on that during this already, but dysregulation in the nervous system is also going to contribute to gut issues over time. So I actually made a post recently, go check it out on my page after this, if you missed it, but it was all about trauma, nervous system, scores, and chronic digestive issues. So it is shown in research that those that have higher ACE scores, adverse childhood events scores, meaning you’ve lived through

more like painful things, more traumatic things in your life are at much higher risk of developing something like IBS. And that’s because of the nervous system’s impact on your digestive function. This was a big part of my story. Lots of wonderful childhood trauma involved that caused and kind of set my body up to develop these lovely chronic digestive issues that I’ve had for years. Because when your body is in that…

chronically stressed out state and your nervous system is being activated over and over and over again. You have a hard time settling. You have a hard time relaxing. You’re always worried. You’re always waiting for the rugs to pulled out from under you. You live in fear, right? Due to some of your childhood experiences, once again, not a blame game, not a shame game. It’s just to be aware of when you’re looking at your health picture and your health puzzle and you’re like, how did I get here? Right? Because that chronic activation is going to over time.

Deplete nutrients source, deplete minerals, damage gut, negatively influence that motility, increased cortisol, hold on the gut lining, down regulate gut and function, down regulate intestinal regeneration, cause the environment for leaky gut, gut dysbiosis, SIBO, and things like that. So it’s another example of stress, not staying stress. And this is where our nervous system plays such a huge, huge role in our digestion. Digestion is a nervous system regulated process. Digestion.

Hannah Aylward (29:26.666)
operate works north to south, which is why we want to take a north to south approach. Meaning it starts in the brain, right? It starts in the brain. We have to get our bodies in that more relaxed, calm, feeling safe state in order to properly digest our food. So that’s something that we absolutely want to work on. And we’ve got lots of tools and strategies to help clients with just kind of regulating their nervous system. But the biggest thing that you want to ask yourself is.

But I see coming up most often, it’s just like, are you always turned on? Are you always connected? Are you always checking email, checking Instagram, checking what Twitter is It’s not Twitter anymore. Checking TikTok, that’s what I was looking for. Checking your emails that are, say that whatever. Having a podcast on, you’ve got music on, you’ve got the TV on, you’ve got the laptop out, you’ve got, we’re like hyper, hyper, hyper connected right now. And it’s causing health issues in a lot of people. So you just want to unplug as much as you can.

That’s not gonna solve all of your issues, but it’s a really good start. And you just wanna ask yourself, like, do I feel safe in my body? Am I going through my day feeling kind of panicked and jumpy and nervous and worried, or can I access safety in my body? And that’s a big question. And that’s something I’ve worked with a therapist on for sure. It’s not an easy fix. It’s not like a very simple answer, but one of the ways you can just help is unplugging, right? Give yourself more time to sit with yourself.

to unfug, to not be constantly inundated with information and data that you didn’t even know that you want to see and take some breaths and take some time off of all of that. I always say one of my pieces of homework, my line is like, I want you to go stare at the wall. Go look at the wall. No music, no podcast, no TV, no laptop, no nothing. Just stare at the wall. Cause when was the last time you actually just sat in silence with no input?

Probably been a really long time, right? bed, maybe if you’re not on your phone. So that’s one thing that you can implement today, right? Do it tonight. Schedule it. Give yourself 10 minutes to turn completely off. And if you are kind of thinking about your own life now and you’re like, I actually never do that, that’s not like to be pay attention to. Okay. Then we have our toxin bucket. So I, I talk about toxins in

Hannah Aylward (31:43.554)
in the sense of we don’t want them to accumulate. Yeah. So when we’re talking about toxins, we’re basically inundated with toxin exposure all day, every day. I mean, there’s toxins in the paint on the walls, there’s toxins in the air that I’m breathing, there’s toxins in the water if I’m not filtering it, there’s potentially mold in the coffee that I’m drinking, there’s everywhere. It’s everywhere. And you can’t get no exposure to toxins. We’re kind of living in a toxin soup right now. The world is kind of a toxin soup.

I mean, there’s like toxins in your mattress, in your clothes, everything, in your skincare, in your cleaning products. It’s very easy to feel pretty overwhelmed by all of it. So what we want to do, we want to enhance our body’s detoxification capabilities and we want to just minimize exposure where we can. And that way we can kind of keep the body in a better balance. So when the body is inundated and overburdened with toxins, we’re going to start to get many different symptoms. So if the liver can’t keep up with detoxification,

which we see a lot, seeing tons of liver issues in clients right now. Like next level, almost every client is needing a lot of liver support and it’s not showing up on like basic blood work. We’re just seeing that they have a lot of symptoms that are contributing to their gut issues and their bloating. mean, liver, stagnation and liver dysfunction can be a huge cause of bloating you guys. It can also, it’s also a huge cause of like bad PMS, then a lot of period pain, hormonal imbalances and all that too. So.

We want to support our detoxification capabilities, support in opening up our drainage pathways, support the liver and being able to do its job. Yes, your liver is always detoxifying, but it was not normally inundated with all of the toxins that it is inundated with today. Yeah. So we want to work to support that. And we want to also decrease our toxin exposure. So as the bucket kind of emptying out, we’re not just pouring back in and pouring back in so it can kind of find an equilibrium. Yeah. So once again, it’s not about getting no exposure to toxins.

I kind of think that’s impossible, but if you guys have practiced that, then let me know. But it’s more so about just doing your best, minimizing exposure and enhancing your body’s capabilities to detoxify. Right. So that can be really important. That can be a huge cause of these gut issues over time. And that’s one quian why these things are developing periodically. It’s not like one day you woke up with gut issues for most of that seer. That probably wasn’t the case. It was a slow accumulation over time. And then all of a sudden you’re like, this is really impacting my life and I can’t deal with it anymore. Yeah.

Hannah Aylward (34:01.068)
Okay. Then we have an unsupported diet over time. Most of us kind of know this, I think, right? A lot of the clients that we work with are pretty educated in this. They’ve done a lot of research. They work on themselves a ton. So we kind of know that an unsupported diet, the standard American diet over time is going to cause a lot of digestive distress and gut issues. So when we’re eating hyper palatable foods, ultra processed foods, lots of processed vegetable oils.

lots of sugar, lots of alcohol, all of these things are going to have a negative impact on our gut microbiome and contribute to gut dysbiosis, fogeot overgrowth, and things like that over time. That’s then going to be the cause of your bloating, your IBS symptoms, et cetera. So I won’t really harp on that too much. I think like most of us know that. We know that poor diet is going to mess with our gut, right? But we want to. Once again, it’s not, it’s not like pulling on big restricted diet.

It’s, want to make sure that you’re getting in enough of the good stuff that you need. So we want to make sure you’re getting in enough polyphenols and proteins and prebiotic rich foods. And we’re decreasing ultra processed foods overall. If you’re someone that feel you feel like you are going do all that and you’re still struggling with these gut and digestive issues, you’re not alone. That’s essentially every single person that comes to work with us. So we can help you. You’re not broken. Don’t worry. There’s just more of the story. So yeah. Okay. Then we have food poisoning.

So this is kind of an example of your gut is really not the same the next day, right? So some people that we work with, it’s probably a smaller percentage, more of it’s like chronic building up over time. But for some people, it’s gonna be like, I got food poisoning this one time and my digestion has never been the same ever since. Raise your hand if that’s you. Let me know in the comments. So food poisoning, foodborne illness can cause SIBO, which can then cause these chronic digestive issues like bloating, burping.

excessive gas, skin issues, brain fog and constipation, diarrhea, all of that kind of stuff, because it can damage our gut motility and then eventually cause the SIBO picture. That can absolutely like food poisoning and absolutely disrupt your gut microbiome in the sense of common SIBO. You could also have picked up an infection, something like H. pylori or parasitic infection that’s then going to cause all of these chronic digestive issues. It’s more so kind of like a, got this and I’m the same.

Hannah Aylward (36:19.062)
And if that’s you, then you know. And that is a big underlying cause for people as well. Then we have things like antibiotics, medications, and birth control. All of these things are going to damage your gut health over time. So antibiotics come in, they wipe out all of your gut bacteria, good and bad. They set the environment for fungal overgrowth to take place if we’re not careful. And many of us have been on multiple rounds of antibiotics as well. I mean, I was on so many rounds of antibiotics as a child and my

talks to my mom about it years ago, she was like, we had no idea. This was like bad for you. I just listened to the doctor, right? So I got, I probably took three rounds of antibiotics, like every cold season as a child, like consistently for years without having any idea that that could disrupt my gut microbiome and cause like my, you know, loading that wouldn’t go away and my skin issues and all of that stuff that was to come that I didn’t know. So we know antibiotics come in.

Of course, they can be life-saving when necessary. I’m not knocking them entirely. They are very helpful sometimes when we really, really need them. They just tend to be overprescribed, especially when we don’t even know if you need it, right? They kind of are like one of the first lines of defense here, taking an antibiotic and see if it works. We’ll see if it helps. It might not. We didn’t even maybe run any testing. No one else. So it comes in, wipes out all your gut bacteria, sets the environment for fungal overgrowth. Also just wipes out your good gut bugs. And we need these good gut bugs.

because our gut gut bacteria help to synthesize vitamins, help to convert thyroid hormone into active thyroid hormone, help to support gut motility, help to digest our food. I mean, we need these guys, right? We’ll see people with low levels of gut bacteria have things like irritable disease. We’ll see them have acne that will go away. We’ll see them have bloating that will go away. And when we work to repopulate the gut with gut bacteria strategically, we see these symptoms go away.

So antibiotics and we’ve got other medications, things like NSAIDs, know, anti-inflammatory drops. It says right there on the bottle, don’t take this too much or it’s going to damage your stomach, right? It’s to wear away your stomach lining. So something we want to take into consideration. If you’re someone that takes a lot of these things, like you get really bad period pain, you’re taking it. You get really bad headaches. You’re taking things like, I don’t know, Tylenol or ibuprofen or Motrin or anything like that too often. You know, we want to

Hannah Aylward (38:43.426)
We want to mitigate that. And we see that we’re able to do that with a lot of our clients. So we’ll have clients come in and they’ll take lots of, for example, like ibuprofen around periods and period time due to cramps and things like that. And then after a week helps support their gut and support their hormonal health, they don’t need that anymore. People come in to us with bad headaches as well. And we’ll see that after dealing with histidine producing gut bacteria or parasitic infections or whatever it might be, they don’t need that anymore. So pretty, pretty cool.

because then we can once again repair your gut and keep you feeling better too, which is what we want. Then we have birth control. So we know that birth control can cause a lot of issues and it will damage the microbiome. It’s been shown to increase inflammation in the gut lining. That’s like reported. And you always want to go back and talk to your doctor. If you have taken birth control and then you got an irritable bowel disease diagnosis shortly after that, definitely go talk to your doctor. Put the big burden on your liver.

essentially contributes to estrogen dominance, which is going to have more gut issues, more bloating, and it’s kind of a nightmare situation. So it can also, we see it causing a lot of like fumble overgrowth in clients too. I don’t have like a research paper to back that currently. It’s just like a pattern that we see in our clients a lot. So take it or leave it. But we know that birth control will damage the gut microbiome. It also depletes essential nutrients that we need for proper gut function and overall health. So

It is impacting the gut negatively through many different mechanisms of action, essentially. Okay, then we have H. pylori. So H. pylori is a bacterial infection. It’s very common. About 55 % of the population has it. We’ve co-evolved with this bacteria over time and it kind of influences and impacts people a little differently, which is why can be tricky, just like mold. Some people who live in mold may feel fine. Some people live in mold and they’re like,

chronically ill and it depends on your immune system and your genetic detoxification capabilities and all of that stuff. So it can feel a little confusing, but H. pylori, helicobacter pylori is the bacteria. We get infected with it. It comes in, it broke in the stomach lining. It damages the body’s ability to produce stomach acid. It causes a lot of irritation and inflammation in the stomach lining.

Hannah Aylward (40:55.862)
It’s a big root cause of things like acid reflux, gastritis, GERD, recurring SIBO that won’t go away. Always, whenever we’re looking at SIBO, we want to look deeper because SIBO is never just SIBO, right? SIBO is small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. It happens when we get an overgrowth of bacteria in the small intestine when our bacteria should be moving into the large intestine. We want to ask why is it overgrowing the small intestine and not moving along?

It’s not actually a bacteria issue. It’s a gut motility issue at its core. A siloary can be an underlying root cause to recurring SIBO. So we honestly don’t run a lot of like SIBO breath tests, because I want to get a more full picture on your digestion and your gut microbiome as a whole, because it’s never just SIBO. I don’t think we’ve ever seen it just be SIBO in anyone. Usually we’ve got a colon infection. We’ve got low stomach acid. We’ve got liver gallbladder issues, whatever it might be. Very different based on the individual.

but you always want to dig deeper. It was my point, error. So H. pylori will damage our body’s ability to produce stomach acid, which will then contribute to constipation, low energy, because you’re not absorbing the nutrients from your food efficiently. It can cause reflux, gastritis, GERD, and then down the chain because digestion works north to south. Without adequate stomach acid production, we will usually have poor pancreatic endpoints creation, and then we’ll also develop over time, gut dysbiosis.

because without being able to break down our food efficiently, we’re sending mal-digested chunks of food through the GI tract and it’s feeding bacteria. These bacteria are eating up these big food chunks and then bacteria are like give off gas and that gas is what causes bloating. So there’s usually a bacterial issue involved when people have chronic bloating, not always, but more often than not. And H. pylori can, it’s just gonna damage everything down the chain.

Yeah, so it has to be looked at and addressed when it’s present for most people. Some people can have it and have no issues. If you’re thinking about working with us and you have it, it’s probably causing issues because that’s why you’re here, right? So yeah, so those are some of the most common root causes to chronic GI issues, chronic digestive issues that we see. So just to kind of summarize, we always want to dig deeper. The conversation should never be, oh, you have constipation, just take this laxative.

Hannah Aylward (43:10.094)
We want to ask why you have this consultation in the first place, especially since you did not always have it, right? Most of you guys probably didn’t always have it if you have it. Oh, you have diarrhea? Let’s not just get you on a medication. Let’s dig deeper and ask, why are you having this diarrhea? Right? So we always want to dig deeper if we want to get you feeling better and really staying better. And I just think it works a lot better. It helps, helps like better quality of life a lot, a lot more effectively.

And then we have these big, the biggest common root causes being stress. Like I said, we’ve got physical, mental and emotional and environmental stressors. We’ve got chronic dieting, over-exercising, under-eating and restricted dieting. We’ve got blood sugar dysregulation, nervous system dysregulation, toxin bucket kind of overflow. We’ve got an unsupported diet over time. We’ve got food poisoning, kind of a more one-off situation, antibiotics, medication and things like birth control. And then we have something like an infection being an aftereffect.

or a parasitic infection. We honestly see a lot of parasitic infections too. They’re more common than you would think they are. So yeah, those are the things that are kind of deeper at these like root, deeper root causes to the chronic digestive issues that people are having that we help to get to the bottom of.

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!