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.

Hello, hello, my dears, and welcome back to another episode of the Nutrient Dense Podcast. I am super excited to be here with you today because today we have Cecily Andrews on the podcast. She is one of the incredible practitioners on my team that helps so many of our clients. One of the things that I love about Cecily is her incredibly thorough functional approach. she is really good at looking at

all different kind of areas of the body and how all of these things are connected. And what I tell clients is she’s very, very good at digging deeper. What’s going on? Why, what are we missing? What have past people missed and how can we really help these clients get better? I’m going to pass it over to Cecily and let her introduce herself. And then today we’ll be jumping into really all things functional blood work. Cause I think that’s one of the things that Cecily does best. She does a lot of great things, but I think one of them is

all the functional blood work and the assessment. So Cecily, will you go ahead and introduce yourself?

Yes. Hello. My name’s Cecily. I’m a functional nutritionist on the HAN team. Super excited to be here talking about all things gut health and health in general. Yeah. So as Hannah mentioned, I love using functional testing. It’s just a great addition to working on all the foundations of health and of course nutrition, but it really just lets us

take everything a little deeper and have that data to really understand exactly what’s going on in the body. I always say test don’t guess. The more data, the better, just so we can pull patterns from all the information and just get a full picture of what’s going on.

Yes, I love it. And a little bit about your background, Cecily. So you’ve got a master’s in nutrition and then you’re also an NTP, right?

Yep. So I started, actually what started me in this journey was my own health struggles, which is

pretty typical, I feel like, for a lot of practitioners in our field. So I had gone to multiple doctors with no answers, ended up going to a naturopath, getting diagnosed with SIBO a few different times and just wasn’t really ever supported. I never really understood, you know, the root cause. We talk about that a lot. So I really felt like I needed to take matters into my own hands. I decided to go through the Nutritional Therapy Practitioner Program.

to start my education. And then after I finished that, I went into a graduate program in clinical nutrition. And then I did some functional training after that to learn about those lab tests. So yeah, it was really my own kind of health struggles. I’ve been through a lot of the things that we help a lot of our clients with myself. And over time, I just kind of pieced together like really what works and the tools that are best needed and the most effective. Yeah.

I love that. mean, we see so much bacterial overgrowth in clients. So you had tried like getting rid of it a few times and it wasn’t going away. Yeah. So I basically, you know, had just used like some basic herbs to try and get rid of, you know, kill the SIBO. and there was just so much more to it than that. You really have to support the body, support the immune system, understand the root cause of the bacteria overgrowth.

you know, work on improving stomach acid and work on volatility and make sure your detox thing. there’s just so many things that can feel so overwhelming that you really need to work with an expert in the field who understands the whole process. that’s amazing. And so important because SIBO has such a high relapse rate and we see people with SIBO or with symptoms of SIBO or maybe their doctors told them that they have SIBO before or whatever it might be. And it causes so many like huge chronic digestive issues, like such bad bloating and

Hannah Aylward (04:39.554)
could be constipation or diarrhea or both. And then like skin stuff, low energy, brain fog. mean, the list goes on and on with the SIBO. So I once had a functional doctor tell me that I had a little bit of SIBO as well, but it was, that was pretty much it. Didn’t go much farther than that, right? And it was your kind of like traditional, like, usually it’s like candy back then it’s like, use the candy back then and then we’ll see how you do. And it just wasn’t, it didn’t do what I needed essentially.

Exactly. Yeah, I was actually talking to someone yesterday who had said that’s what they were recommended multiple times over. That wasn’t working. Then they tried refax them in, know, the anti-virus remote. That helped short term, that’s typically the story. And then it comes back. And typically when it comes back, it comes back worse. So once again, just understanding the root cause and like having a protocol in place that really covers all of your bases so that you’re not just

supplementing, but that you’re also working and supporting the body where needed. Yeah. Love it. We could take this conversation in so many directions today and just talk about, I’m going to do a whole SIBO episode. We talked a lot about it when I had Marley and Eli on, but I’ll do a full like SIBO breakdown episode soon for you guys. But today we really want to talk about like functional blood work. So this is something that we’ve been running more and more of, I would say as time goes on, just I think

partially because we’re seeing more complex cases, people not maybe responding as well to the kind of like first run of the stool test, but also just so we can better understand like full system, full body health and start to put the pieces of the puzzle together a little bit. So my question for you, Cecily is what is the difference between the functional blood work that we like to run that you love and just your basic blood work that someone might get from their doctor? Yeah, definitely. Great question. So typically when people

Think of blood work ordered from their primary care doctor. They’re getting their CDC, their complete blood count run, their CMP, the metabolic panel, maybe a thyroid marker. So a full thyroid panel, essentially there’s multiple markers that we’re looking at, but that standard panel that most providers have run kind of just covers the basics. you know, doctors are trained to look for disease states.

Hannah Aylward (07:01.942)
And when we talk about functional blood work, we’re looking more at like patterns and not necessarily beginning disease states, but imbalances that could potentially progress into something worse in the future if it’s not addressed now. So that’s kind of like with all functional lab testing, it’s more preventative. But once again, we are looking for those imbalances and patterns. In our functional blood work panel that we ordered for our clients, we are ordering

It’s just a more robust panel, essentially. So we’re ordering a lot more markers. We are ordering a full thyroid panel that has like eight markers versus one in the standard panel. We’re ordering a full iron panel, which has also like eight markers versus just looking at ferritin or just looking at iron. Once again, because having all of those markers, it’s kind of like pieces of the puzzle. It’s just more information and data that we can draw certain patterns from.

And it gives us a much better idea of like sources of information. So it’s really just like a more robust version of, you know, a conventional blood work candle. Yeah, I love that. And it’s, I think it’s very important. And the other little piece to it is like the functional ranges, right? So we’re ordering more, we’re taking a more comprehensive look, and then we’ve got like these, difference in functional ranges. So can you just expand on that a little bit?

Yeah, so on the conventional, in conventional medicine, when you get your blood work back, there’s always a reference range and barfers will get flagged low or high based on those reference ranges. So in functional medicine, the ranges are basically just more narrow. So let’s say for TSH of 0.5 to 4.5 is the conventional medicine range.

In functional medicine, want TSH more around 1, like that’s really more ideal, but like 0.8 to like 1.7. So it’s just that, for example, it’s just a much more narrow range. Really, it’s more for like optimal health. The reference ranges in conventional medicine are based on the average population that is seen on an annual basis, which is more like a sick population. So yeah, we really call them more like

Hannah Aylward (09:22.292)
optimal ranges for like actually feeling good for optimal health. Yes. So important. I’m just nodding my head over here because yes, I mean, the average American has, I think I looked it up recently. I think it was like one to three underlying diseases or chronic diseases. And that’s where we’re pulling these reference ranges from.

It’s like a whole different viewpoint. And I think it’s really important because as you mentioned, I mean, these doctors are looking for, listen, everyone has their place and everyone has their area of expertise and they do things well, but they’re looking for, do you have this disease essentially? Not like, where are things a little off that could be contributing to these symptoms that you’re having. So we could get you feeling a lot, a lot better. So that’s kind of more what we’re doing. We’re not diagnosing anything. We’re not like treating any disease. more so looking at.

What’s off, right? You’ve got these symptoms, you’ve got low energy, you’ve got digestive issues. What’s off? Where can we optimize there and get you feeling a lot better? So yeah, I mean, when we work with clients, we always run functional stool testing. That’s going to give us a lot of insight into what’s actually causing the chronic digestive issues like the bloating and the food sensitivities and the constipation, diarrhea, potentially histamine overload symptoms, all of that.

So how does like, when we’re looking at blood work, how does the blood work really compliment the stool testing and what value does that add for us? Yeah. So basically having both tests is ideal. Like you said, starting with the stool test is great to kind of understand the picture of what’s going on in the gut. For example, if we’re seeing a lot of bacteria overgrowth or really low commensal good bacteria,

We still want to ask that question why, you I’m always digging deeper. Usually we could draw the inference that someone has low stomach acid if they have these bacteria overgrowths and kind of just digestive issues. So when we look at blood work, we can see certain vitamins and minerals that can basically indicate low stomach acid absorption issues. Once again, if someone having both of these test results side by side, if someone has

Hannah Aylward (11:31.982)
low vitamins and minerals, we can look back at the GI map and kind of understand, oh, there’s probably an absorption issue happening because of this low stomach acid picture typically falls in line with having a weak gut and just basically not assimilating and absorbing nutrients from their food. So once again, just having all of that information together and being able to like compare different markers and tests. But specifically what I really love about looking at the blood works

Next to this full test is looking at that whole iron panel I was talking about and looking at the full thyroid panel. So if someone has really low iron or really fine iron, both, either one can cause a lot of inflammation in the body. So looking at that, we can be like, this is another place that we can address. As we’re working on the gut, we can also look at

Why is there low iron? If there’s high iron, it can also feed pathogens and parasites and bacteria. If someone has recurring yeast infections, there is always a reason for that. Just killing the yeast isn’t reason enough. So looking at iron, for example, whether it’s low or high, it can give us some indication. And then like I said, that full thyroid can also have someone, even if they’re on thyroid medication, or if they’re thyroid.

hormones look normal, but they don’t feel normal. That kind of goes back to that absorption issue. And if you’re not absorbing things in the gut, the thyroid is going to struggle. Just for example, the liver is like to struggle. The body’s going to struggle if the gut is not absorbing these nutrients from the food that you’re eating. So once again, it’s just having the information side by side to really put those pieces of the puzzle together, just to understand more about what’s going on the body. Yeah.

It’s really fun to start to put all the pieces of someone’s case together. So let’s touch on the thyroid panel a little bit here, because I think a lot of, so many women struggle with thyroid issues. It’s so common. And a lot of the time you’ll go to your doctor and they’ll run like, yeah, basic blood work and they’ll check your thyroid and maybe it all actually looks fine and you’re still not feeling so good. So I would love for you to expand just on like how a full thyroid panel

Hannah Aylward (13:53.57)
that maybe we run or you could always ask your doctor for, it’s a little bit hit or miss whether you can get it or not, but it’s always worth a shot. But what’s the difference between a functional full blood thyroid panel that we are running versus what someone might get at their regular GP? So typically, like I said, doctors will, they tend to just run TSH, which is just one of eight important markers to look at when assessing thyroid health. So we will run

you know, free T3, free T4, TSH, reverse T3. And then looking at the antibodies is really important too. So the TPO and TG antibodies, once again, it’s just getting more information so that when you’re looking at each of the markers, you can kind of draw certain conclusions from like the overall picture, like each individual result, but then also the whole picture together. Just to see like

what needs the most support. So sometimes often like a TSH level can be normal, but it’s T3, T4, reverse T3, if any of those are off, it can kind of tell us where the issue is, like where the dysfunction lies so that you can kind of target it like rather than just rescribing thyroid medication, which most often will help people feel better. And sometimes it is needed short term.

Absolutely everyone’s different, but once again, we are all about digging deep, finding the root cause and really understanding where is this dysfunction coming from? Is it an absorption issue? Like you mentioned, sometimes people will actually have normal thyroid hormone in the blood. Like their thyroid panel looks totally normal, but they have those like low thyroid symptoms, for example. So that’s kind of another piece to it is…

If you’re lacking certain minerals, and this comes back to the blood work, if you’re lacking certain nutrients essentially, to use that thyroid hormone properly, that might be why someone basically feels like crap, feels those low-fiber symptoms, but it looks normal in the blood. So once again, it’s like you really need to have someone who knows how to interpret the blood work, but also kind of putting all the pieces together to understand.

Hannah Aylward (16:18.22)
picture. Yeah. Yeah. So it’s kind of like, I think you hit it spot on when mentioning that it’s helping us actually identify like where the breakdown in the chain is, right? So exactly what you said, if someone’s getting thyroid blood work and everything quote unquote looks normal, TSH is normal, whatever, but they’re having all of those symptoms. And the first symptoms that come to mind for me with sluggish thyroid function would be like really low energy, weight gain or difficulty losing weight, constipation.

hair thinning, dry skin. Those are some of the first things that pop up for me. Would you add anything to that? Yeah, I would say the only thing I would add is like feeling full all the time or like having full extremities, just like a cold for body temperature. So yeah, once again, it’s like you can actually do that full thyroid panel and it can come back normal. But if you’re lacking those minerals, the body just isn’t able to use the thyroid more appropriately. Yeah.

Right. So there’s two kind of differences that I want to make sure everyone’s clear on here. So first off is in most cases, a traditional doctor will run like TSH and if TSH looks good, they won’t do any further investigation. But as Leslie mentioned, there’s so much more that we can test via blood for the thyroid, like reverse T3 antibodies, all of that good stuff. And I’ll try to get a resource for you guys together so you can get all of those markers. So you guys can go and kind of

get a better understanding of what actually is all in a full thyroid panel and then the other blood work that we run. So that’s really the first like differentiation. So that’s how we can take it a step, I mean like 10 steps, much, much deeper and see where is the breakdown, right? Is it reverse T3 is too high? Is it the conversion of thyroid hormone into active thyroid hormone is off, right? We can see more of that with a full thyroid blood panel.

But then the next layer to that would be, okay, so what if the full thyroid panel looks normal? All of that blood work actually looks okay, but you’re still having all of these symptoms. You’ve got the cold hands and feet, you’ve got constipation, you’ve got weight loss resistance, you’ve got, you know, maybe your hair is falling out, dry skin, lots and lots of fatigue. Those symptoms that are very common with the hypothyroidism, but your blood panel, full blood panel looks okay. Then we can even take it a layer deeper and do something like an HTMA.

Hannah Aylward (18:38.166)
to see like what is contributing to essentially the thyroid hormone not being like utilized or not being able to get into the cell properly. Yep. Exactly. Yeah. So we can go very deep with all of this, depending on what we need. Right. So that’s not to kind of like scare people and be like, my gosh, I’m never going to get to the bottom of this. That’s what working with someone can do and why it can be so valuable. Cause we will keep digging. Right. So

A lot of the times clients are like, well, what’s the guarantee? What if I spend this money with you guys and nothing changes or what if I, people are scared and I get it, especially if you’ve been like failed by many, many people before. And I always say like, we can’t guarantee anything. Like I don’t give like a, you know, 30 day back money back guarantee, whatever. However, what I can fully commit to is that we’re going to keep digging. If something’s not making sense, we’re going to keep digging. We’re going to take it that way or deeper. We’re not going to.

just give up if like the first line of defense is not working, right? So whether it’s like the gut work and we’re using some of the gut repairing work and that’s not working, we’re going to take that a step deeper. We’re going to explore other things. Do we need to pull in blood work? Is it a possible mold situation? What about iodine? There’s so much more that we can dig into there to help to find these deeper root causes for clients. So I always feel very confident in saying like,

Like we can’t guarantee, however, if you show up, like we’re going to show up. We’re going to keep digging to find everything that we can that could be contributing to some of these health symptoms or health issues that you’re experiencing. So yeah, that’s great with the full thyroid panel. The other thing that’s one of the bigger things that we do differently is the iron, the full iron panel, which we can get into as well. But briefly, before we get into that, I want to just talk about like absorption a little bit. a lot of clients come into us.

And they’ll say that they’ve been told that they have like low vitamin D, they’ve got low B12, they’ve got low iron. Usually they’re talking about ferritin, right? So there’s a lot more that we can explore here. So can you tell me what, when you start to see this on someone’s intake form or you start to, they tell you that they’ve had their low in this and they’ve been low in this previously, where does your brain start to go with that? Yeah. So I always like to start with the gut where

Hannah Aylward (20:52.817)
you know, as we’ve talked about, it’s sublimin, and this is pretty common too. work with mostly lindin, but typically women are saying, you know, I have low B12, low vitamin D forever, like for as long as I can remember. And then they’re recommended to supplement with those vitamins. And really for anyone, like you could be eating the best food and taking thousands of dollars of supplements, but if you’re not absorbing them, they’re not really doing much good. So yeah, if I see that on an intake form, you know,

I’ve had low vitamin D, I have low B12. Typically those people will also feel like pretty crummy, pretty low energy. We’re looking at the gut first. We’re looking at assuming low stomach acids. If you don’t have enough stomach acid to break down your food, break apart with simile and absorb those nutrients and minerals, you’re going to be deficient in certain vitamins and minerals. So we’re kind of looking at the whole picture in the gut of like

what the balance of bacteria looks like, if there’s really low bacteria, as I mentioned, if there’s bacteria overgrowth, all of those things can contribute to this low stomach acid picture. So we really were first on improving the microbiome balance of bacteria in the gut, making sure that we’re healing the gut, if that’s probably an issue for people, and working on boosting stomach acid levels. So those things

first and then coming back to the B12 and the D. Typically, I recommend for people to get their blood work done twice a year so they can just kind of keep an eye, keep track of these harfurs. But a lot of times that’ll be enough for people just boosting stomach acid levels, improving the integrity of the gut lining, cleaning up the whole microbiome in general. That will help with the absorption so that people can actually retain those vitamins and minerals.

If they’re still low, they were once again going deeper asking why minerals work either antagonistically, so against each other or synergistically with each other. So if you’re like over supplementing with a single mineral, sometimes they contain another mineral. So I rarely recommend supplementing with single mineral levels based on your blood work. Sometimes it’s absolutely important.

Hannah Aylward (23:15.133)
A lot of times I like to focus on like food forms of vitamins and minerals first, just because they’re more readily absorbed by the body. But yeah, like I said, I’m always kind of looking at the gut first and then once again, just drawing conclusions and having the information from the blood work next to the gut health test. Yeah. So it’s, I think it’s just really important for everyone listening to understand that.

There was one year where I swear everyone that came in was like, I’ve been told I have SIBO, I have low B12, I have low vitamin D and I have low iron. And I’m like, these are all connected. So the good news is that once we work on cleaning up the gut and enhancing absorption and all of that, like we’re going to see all of this get better. We should, right? We should start to see all of this get better, which is really cool.

But it may be one of the reasons why, and even sometimes when you go to a functional doctor, right? Like they love checking vitamin D and they’ll check vitamin D and then they’ll put you on a supplement for that. And it’s as if that’s causing all of your symptoms. And for most people, it’s probably not. And once again, we want to look at like, why is this low in the first place? And there’s definitely like, yeah, time to bring in some supplementation, but also a time to dig a little bit deeper, but kind of going back to like,

If you feel like you’ve tried everything and you’ve gone and you’ve seen the functional doctor or whatever, the naturopath, and it’s like, you have low vitamin D and you need to be 12, and then you just add in supplements for that, that’s still not really hitting the root cause of the issue in many cases, right? Sometimes, yeah. Like we were speaking before this and I’m like, it’s winter, my skin is like translucent, I haven’t seen the sun, like my vitamin D levels being a little lower makes some sense right now.

Now, if I got outside and it was summertime, and if I rechecked in August after I’ve had sun exposure and it’s not the dead of winter and my levels are still low, okay, let’s look into why. Sometimes it makes sense, but other times it warrants digging a little bit deeper. Absolutely. Yeah. I know we were talking about this earlier too, on the conventional panel that doctors run, they’re typically only ordering

Hannah Aylward (25:23.067)
the storage form of vitamin D. So in the functional blood work panel that we run, we’re looking at the active form of vitamin D and the storage form. And once again, it’s really the blood work of all about looking at these patterns and having additional information. So we’re looking at each of those values. We’re looking at the ratio between them. But we can draw certain conclusions based on that information.

a lot of times people will tend to have low vitamin D. But if the doctor’s not ordering that other form of vitamin D, that might be a high. And that is the case often, which is an indication of inflammation. So supplementing with the vitamin D is a little bit more of a band-aid rather than like what’s the source of this inflammation. Low vitamin D is really the body’s way of saying that it’s either lacking certain nutrients and minerals like

factors of that vitamin D, or it’s just dealing with this high level of inflammation that’s basically suppressing that form of vitamin D. So once again, it’s all patterns. Yeah. So much nuance. And this is why I have a team, because they’re better at this than I am.

So they know all of the ins and outs of this and I know the base level, but this is, you know, why working with someone, even though I know a lot in this field or in this like area, it’s so good to have someone that, that it can just dig, dig and dig and dig and dig. Okay, cool. So we covered a lot of that and then kind of touching on just like the iron recycling system and an iron panel, because we see that a lot, like we get a lot of clients that come in to us taking iron, right? They’re supplementing with iron.

They’re being told they have low iron. I mean, we get emails about this all the time. And what’s interesting is I remember, gosh, she was a student inside of Healing Guts and Shaking Butts a couple years ago, but her doctor diagnosed her and told her she had anemia for like 15 years, right? And nothing would get this to budge. And then she went through Healing Guts and Shaking Butts and then the anemia was gone, right?

Hannah Aylward (27:28.877)
just like incredible after like 15 years. you know, with her, I don’t even think we ran a blood work. I think she just got the blood work done with her doctor afterwards. And the doctor was like, wait, what happened? But what we found in her stool test, I mean, she had like a parasite, maybe one or two parasites that was contributing to this. The iron level is looking low and she had dysbiosis and inside of HDSB, we’re supporting liver function, adrenal function, gut function, all of that stuff. pretty like

amazing, right? And sometimes people will even have gotten like iron infusions. I mean, we could like go down that rabbit hole if we want, but there’s so much to explore here and so much that can be done by essentially like working on that absorption and cleaning up the gut, right? But when it comes to like running a full iron panel, when I learned this a couple years ago, it was like brand new to me. Like I didn’t really know that much about it. And most doctors are only testing what ferritin, right? So can you break down for me?

what we check for and what makes it different and like why does it matter? Yes, so great questions. So the iron recycling picture and the iron picture can get a little complex so I’ll try to make this as simplified as possible, easy to understand. So yes, all that conventional blood work panel that doctors are typically ordering, they are typically ordering ferritin. So ferritin should be in the cell.

So we’re testing ferritin in the blood. I think what the piece that’s missed often is there’s a lot more to the iron picture than just ferritin, because ferritin actually should be on the lower end, not necessarily lab low, but between 20 and 50 is kind of like the functional range for ferritin. But also we want to look at iron, so it’s serum iron, iron in the blood.

We want to look at other co-factors like Ti and C, percent iron saturation, transferrin. We also want to look at a couple other minerals outside of the iron markers specifically, but like vitamin A, copper, and serialoplasmin. All of these markers combined once again give us the best amount of information. Once again, like those pieces of the puzzle to understand what the iron recycling picture looks like.

Hannah Aylward (29:50.733)
iron recycling, basically our body actually produces iron every day. The issue lies where if we’re lacking certain minerals to help move recycle iron in around the body and out of the body, if we’re lacking those nutrients, the iron can get can build up so it can actually get like stored in the tissues. So if you’re just looking at ferritin,

you’re not seeing this whole other picture where someone could have this iron overload. Basically, too much iron in the blood, maybe iron even stuck in the tissue like the liver and the brain contributing to inflammation, oxidative stress. We don’t want to have an overload of iron or copper or any of those minerals in the body. yeah, if somebody is diagnosed with anemia, maybe they got their iron levels tested too and everything comes back low.

Sometimes it’s true anemia. There’s actually a couple of different types. The absorption issue like we’ve talked about. So as you, you know, with the client you were talking about, you worked on thinning out the gut, likely their absorption got a lot better and then their iron status was, you know, more robust. I know I mentioned this before too, but like parasites can actually feed. Percocytes, yeast, mold can all feed on iron. So you can actually see this with

high iron and low iron, if there’s a lot of iron, that’s a good food source for bacteria, overgrowth, other things in the body. And then on the flip side, if it’s low, it can also be an indication that more long-term, like the parasites or the yeast or whatever it is have actually been feeding on that iron. So as you work on eradicating those overgrowth, getting rid of the parasite, down the yeast,

getting the bacteria in a better place and then addressing mold if that’s an issue. Then a lot of times people will come out of that more anemic state. It’s amazing. I’m like reflecting on this client as well. And I feel like she had fungal overgrowth too from her job. It was like the job that she was working. It wasn’t like that she was in mold in a water damaged building, but I want to say she was like, I’m going to butcher this, but she was some sort, she did some sort of work where like she was actually working with materials that were like

Hannah Aylward (32:13.967)
moldy like soil kind of thing. And that was contributing. we did catch the fungal overgrowth in her gut and she had the anemia. I think she had a parasite too. And then yeah, after that, the anemia, the 15 year long anemia was gone. So it’s pretty amazing. my question for you, cause like all of this stuff, I obviously geek out on all of this. think it’s like fascinating and so cool, but why does this matter to someone? Right? So like if someone listening to the podcast and they’re like, okay, cool. Like my iron recycling system. Yeah, whatever.

What is this causing for them in their life? Like what symptoms can this contribute to? What can this kind of cause for them? Yeah. So I know I mentioned iron overload and then also anemia, so the flip side of having low iron. So once again, if you have low iron, typically those symptoms are like feeling pretty crummy, like low energy. So you want to look at the gut. Obviously you don’t want to be experiencing those symptoms of having low iron, low energy.

that, what gets talked about less is this iron overload picture, which once again, if you’re only looking at ferrets in, you’re going to miss what works. So like I mentioned, having high iron is a big source of inflammation and oxidative stress. This can show up in a lot of different ways for people. A lot of skin clients clients with skin issues, acne, x-ray psoriasis. I have seen that

These clients specifically with iron levels off the charts, you know, when we’re looking at the full iron picture, as we work on the iron recycling system, we’re looking at those other co-founders, copper, vitamin A, zinc, serialoplastin. As we’re working on all of those, it helps move iron out of the body and recycle appropriately rather than just building up. When it builds up, it’s basically like rust in the body.

big source of oxidative stress. Oftentimes people with long lasting skin issues will find relief after working through this and resolving this. So that’s why I love blood work, not just obviously for skin issues, but for people with just high levels of inflammation and yeah, maybe the parasite that keeps coming back and can’t eat it, won’t go away. Just looking at the iron panel alone is, this is probably.

Hannah Aylward (34:37.711)
a pretty big contributing factor to this issue. And as you work through it, people tend to just feel so much better. And that can be the roadblock, that missing piece that people just haven’t understood yet. And what about painful periods, like menstrual cycle symptoms? Do you see a lot of that when someone has iron overload? Definitely. Yeah. So once again, big source of oxidative stress and inflammation. Women with

PMS or maybe like painful having pain during regulation, irregular cycles. mean, all of that, that iron overload picture can be a big contributing factor for sure. Also, typically when someone has iron overload, they’ll have lower copper, lower vitamin A, lower stereoplasm. And so when someone is lower in those minerals too, that’s also a reason, can be a reason for having those pain periods, PMS.

Right, true, yeah. What is causing this iron overload? I mean, I’m going to assume, yes, being lower in these other things, these important co-factors can play a role, which can happen. Well, you can get into why that could happen. That feels like easier to access for my brain. It’s like, yeah, well, we’re low in this stuff, so it’s impacting that. But what else kind of causes or contributes to this, like, you know, someone’s iron levels being like super high? so I mean, first and foremost, obviously,

looking at if someone is supplementing with iron, that’s going to drive it up because like I said, your body actually produces like the recommended daily amount of iron your body is naturally producing every day. And then of course the issue lies if you don’t have these co-factors to move it out, it’s just going to continue building up. So, serialoplasm, I’ve mentioned a couple of times, an enzyme that is crucial in the iron recycling picture

The way that typically gets depleted is stress, like the liver struggling, stress of the liver, but also the adrenals is the bigger hitting one. So people love to talk about high cortisol, but on the flip side, when you had high cortisol for a while, you’re going to crash. You’re going to have that lower cortisol picture where the adrenals are really just struggling. So it still puts a huge amount of stress on the body. Typically people, I always talk about

Hannah Aylward (37:01.661)
mental stress, but also the physical stress that it’s putting on the body. So if the adrenals are struggling, your body is not able to produce this serial plasma. And then it’s kind of like a triple down effect. like, if you don’t have enough of the serial plasma, then you’re probably going to be lower than the size of an A. Over supplementing with certain minerals can also, like I said, they can work against each other and push their minerals down. There’s kind of a few things that we’re looking at, as always. Yeah.

And vitamin A, I mean, don’t we get a lot of vitamin A in dairy? Yes. And a lot of people that we’re working with have gut and skin issues and they’ve been told to avoid dairy. Some people, they truly can’t tolerate it well. Not even an allergy, but it’s just more of an intolerance. But dairy is a really good source of vitamin A and calcium and a lot of people are told to avoid it, kind of as another band-aid solution.

Not everyone is sensitive to it. Not everyone needs to eliminate it. It can’t be just an additional source of inflammation for someone whose inflammatory bucket is what I like to call it. If that bucket is already full of inflammation from other things, they might not be able to tolerate the dairy. But other vitamin A food sources are eggs, cod liver oil is one that we recommend for a lot of clients as well. Yeah, I just like to point that out, right? Because I

Feel like I talk like ad nauseums about these restrictive diets and how they’re just really not the answer. And we’re, we’ve just been told over and over and over again that they are the answer. And I feel like it starts with like diet culture and it’s like, Oh, just pull out all these foods and then you’ll, know, you’ll be skinny or whatever. Like it gets a big eye roll from me. However, that was my life for years. Like I rode that diet roller coaster for many, many, many years of my life. So I get it. We’ve started pulling out foods. started at like 13. I was pulling out tons of foods, very, very young, right?

And then we have the other side of the coin where I think it’s very prevalent in this functional medicine space, this more holistic space where elimination diets and just taking out loads of foods, it’s quote unquote going to fix all of your gut issues. As we see every single day, it just doesn’t work like that. And then on top of that, on top of it not even solving the gut issues, it’s like pushing people farther into restriction.

Hannah Aylward (39:20.357)
And then when you really learn what your body needs for all this stuff, you’re like, okay, well, I really need vitamin A for thyroid function and for my iron recycling system and for all these other things. And then you’re like, wait, I haven’t eaten dairy in 10 years, right? And I’m not taking, I’m not eating cod liver oil every day either. So it’s like so quickly these things can push more imbalance in the body, you know? So I like to highlight that. It’s like the goal for everyone is to get them to a place where they can tolerate as many foods.

as possible, like as many healthy foods as possible, right? I’m not recommending like eating junk food every day, but we want you tolerating most of these foods and not pulling things like dairy out unless you really truly need to. a lot of the times in client cases, we’ll see parasitic infections contributing to the inability to tolerate dairy, poor enzyme secretion, know, like just mal-digestion overall, different gut microbial imbalance patterns kind of contributing to

the picture of a client really not tolerating dairy. And it’s honestly one thing that we see people be able to reintroduce the quickest. So I would say after clients work with us in a one-on-one program or inside of Healing Guts and Shaking Butts, we see them be able to reintroduce dairy. I would say like 85 % of these people are eating dairy again, which is pretty cool, right? Because we know it’s important. It has all these important vitamins and minerals in it. Yep.

Yeah. So the other thing that I want to address here is with the blood work and how we do look for little things that the functional stool tests may have missed when it comes to blood work. specifically, and these are some like pretty basic blood labs that you can get through your traditional doctor as well. Of course, like you want someone to be able to put the pieces of the puzzle together and take a look at everything in context. But when we’re looking at this more like basic blood work, we can see, yeah, just

just get more information and see like, for example, it’s great if we’re working with a client and their stool test result comes back and it doesn’t fully match their symptoms. Like the picture, we’re not seeing tons of overgrowth. We’re not seeing tons of undergrowth. We’re not seeing infections. We’re not seeing fungal overgrowth, which can be missed on the stool testing a good bit. So we do some further investigation there. However, we saw it, I would say the last round of HGSP, I think like Marley got all of them. It was like three clients where it was like stool test results are not matching their symptoms.

Hannah Aylward (41:43.766)
We’re suspecting something else. And then in some cases, the blood work really verified that. So can you kind of walk us through that a little bit? Yeah. So just another gem of being able to look at the blood work alongside the stool tests. So with the stool tests, I absolutely love it for looking at all things gut health. There are a couple of nuances in that it can miss, like you said, fungal overgrowth. Sometimes it will definitely show up.

The candida basically can get missed, parasites can also get missed in the stool. So they can hide, they can be in other parts of the body. So in blood work, just looking at even that basic blood work panel of your doctor, looking at that CDC and the CMT, there are certain markers that if they are either low or high, it can indicate having a parasitic infection or even a mold, response to the mold. Basically,

it’s these immune markers. So the immune markers are, like I said, either low or high, and they’re responding to something like the parasite or basically just the immune system is in overdrive trying to deal with this infection. So like I said, that’s like really a clinical pearl with the blood work in that we’re able to, like you said, looking at just the blood work alone, we might not be able to draw that conclusion. We’re always treating the person and not the

test results. like if someone’s symptoms, like you said, fall in line with having a parasite, we’re going to look at the blood work. We’re going to look at these markers and see it matches. Yeah, exactly. I don’t think there’s like really a way around the stool test. We’ll work with all of these different tests, like HTMA, mycotoxin panel, stool test, blood work, iodine testing. Like there’s so much that we can pull in, but I’m like this stool test, like I think it’s really, I mean, with our clients with the gut issues, like we’ve got around the stool test.

But then on top of that, I mean, the blood work can be really complimentary to it for that reason. It’s making me think of a client who I think she was, I want to say she was a school teacher and then her GDI map came back and it didn’t really have much going on, but she had like loads of symptoms of having a parasitic infection and with her line of work, right? Plus I think her secretory IGA was like elevated. So I think Marley was like, we need to do some further investigation because like this isn’t making sense.

Hannah Aylward (44:07.432)
And then move forward as if there was a parasitic infection and she completely won 180. Right. So the stool test had just kind of missed it. I know I say it over and over again, but why you want someone who like will dig deeper has seen a lot of this, right. Has seen a lot of cases because the straight up piece of paper that you get back that is your lab results, it’s not as black and white as you might think it is. Right. We wish it was. We wouldn’t need to have all this additional training and we would, it would take us like less time, all of that.

However, we can dig deeper in a lot of areas. So just let that like bring you, I don’t want it to overwhelm anyone, but I want it to validate some of these feelings that you’re having. If you feel like you’ve gotten the test back and they all look normal and you feel like nothing’s really being flagged and you’re like, I have all these chronic digestive issues or I have this eczema or I have this acne that’s not going away. We can take this like 10 layers deeper and really start to look at the patterns as Cecily has mentioned and see what is contributing to.

what you are experiencing. just another example of a client, we see it, right? We see the test results back. Most of the time they make a good bit of sense, right? Like we just got someone’s test result back and she had so much going on her gut. And I’m like, you know, no question, you’re going to feel a million times better after this work. Like there’s so much that we can clean up here. And then we do. And sometimes we get quite a few of them at once, but we do get the cases where the test results come back, the GI map comes back and it’s like, well,

doesn’t really look like too much is going on here and your symptoms don’t match this. So we dig deeper, right? Is it liver, adrenal, fungal stuff? What is the blood work showing? Is there a potential parasitic infection? So it’s not as, yeah, clear cut as you may think it is. And that’s also, I think why it just takes a little bit of time. It takes some time. You want to work with someone over the course of a couple of months, I would say, like at least to dig deeper into all of this. We get some requests for people.

wanting just a test in like one session. And I’m just like, it’s just literally not going to get you what you want. It’s not going to get you the results you want. There’s going be more questions. We have to do things in phases. There’s so much to investigate here. If you truly want to take a root cause approach, if you don’t, that’s fine, but we’re probably not the people for you. Yeah. So much to investigate. Okay. I’m just looking at my notes here. I think we covered a ton and we’re at about 15 minutes. So I feel like we can probably just wrap it up there.

Hannah Aylward (46:29.9)
If you had to say, like if I had to ask you, what’s the thing that you like most about bringing in the blood work, what would that be? I would say the iron and the thyroid, but probably more so than iron, like if I had to take one. Yeah, because it can kind of make sense of things that weren’t making sense before. Yeah, once again, the inflammation, like obviously, inflammation is the body’s way of protecting itself. It’s not.

a bad thing with Bonnie creates inflammation. It’s just, once again, I like to use that image of the inflammatory bucket. Like we have so many external sources out of our control that cause inflammation in the body. Once again, if you’re struggling with bacteria overgrowth or nutrient deficiencies, you’re going to have a harder time dealing with that inflammation. So when we see that full

iron panel, can really get a good picture of like just how much inflammation is in the body. Those other cofactors, if there’s certain ones that are low, you can infer that there’s probably even more inflammation with the iron stored in the tissues and all of that. So that’s one of my favorite pieces. And then also that full thyroid channel, just with those markers if they get missed. Yeah. And just for anyone who’s like lacking some clarity there with the thyroid,

The gut influences the thyroid and the thyroid influences the gut. So essentially like a sluggish thyroid will cause like sluggish bowels. So you’ll see people with hypothyroidism have a slower gut motility, which can then cause bacterial overgrowth. Sometimes it can cause SIBO, right? It can cause constipation. So if the thyroid isn’t optimal, we can also get gut and digestive issues and a ton of other stuff that we mentioned earlier.

And then if the gut isn’t optimal, right, some percentage, not all, but a percentage of thyroid hormone is converted into active usable thyroid hormone through our gut bacteria. I mean, I don’t think we’ve ever seen a case of someone with like sluggish thyroid picture who hasn’t had gut issues, right? Who hasn’t had like poor absorption or an infection. Like we’ll see H. pylori a lot with that, parasitic infection a lot with that. So that’s kind of the connection of like

Hannah Aylward (48:41.972)
why we would want to bring in this thyroid panel and do it in conjunction. It’s also why a lot of women that have Hashimoto’s have IBS, a lot of women that have hypothyroidism have IBS. All of these things go together and that’s not how Western medicine kind of thinks of the body or looks at the body. Everyone has their specialization, which I also get because it’s a lot to know, like everything about everything. You kind of can’t, however, weave you the body a little differently, understanding that.

Adrenal function is going to influence skin and energy and gut function and thyroid is going to influence gut and iron is going to influence skin and all of this stuff is really like working together. there’s, I say you can view it two ways. You can think of it as this is really overwhelming or you can think of it as this is really cool because once I start doing some of this work, I’m going to see benefit like full system wide, which is, what we love. Yeah, totally.

Cool, so we were thinking of like maybe running through, because Cecily inspired me to get my own blood work done and just check in on some stuff because it had been a few years. so I did get my blood work done, but we’re kind of running out of time. maybe I can, we chatted about my results before recording you guys and she gave me lots of pointers and kind of a breakdown. So maybe I can record another little episode or I can pop on Instagram stories and like kind of review mine so you guys can get a better idea of all of this.

And you can kind of see how we put it all together. We’ll see what we can make happen there. And then we’ll also see if we can get together. I’m thinking of a resource for you guys of just like some of the functional markers that we have have run. That we typically run with clients and making a PDF or something, a downloadable so you guys can get access to that. So you can learn more about it, see if you can bring it to, to your doctor.

The two cents that I have there is you can always try to get it through your health insurance and through your doctor. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. So we’ll order these labs separately for clients. However, sometimes, you know, like your basic CBC and CMP, can get covered through your GP. They’ll run that pretty typically. That’s all good. It’s just like, of course, those are the cheapest and they cost like five bucks. you know.

Hannah Aylward (50:49.47)
It’s not like a huge win. However, you know, we always say like, go see what you can get through your doctor and then bring it to us and we’ll order from there. Right. So we can always take off things you already have and all of that good stuff. So yeah, to kind of run that out, we’ll see if we can get you a little resource for what are we looking for and what’s kind of the point there and help you guys learn more about your health. And then of course, if you’re interested in working with us, working with us one-on-one, Cecily supports clients inside of the Healing Guests and Shangabouts program and inside of our one-on-one programs.

So she’s there to support you guys in either one of those. And if you’re interested in taking this next step, digging deeper, understanding root causes of your different painful symptoms and stuff like that, we would love to help you do that. Do you have any last thoughts or comments to make Cecily for everyone listening? Yeah, I think, you know, we covered so much, but once again, it’s just another tool in our toolbox that tends to be.

missing piece. might not necessarily be everyone’s missing piece, but it’s it’s always useful to have this information. I always like to say knowledge is power. So the more information that we can bring together about the body, the body is so complex. There’s so many different systems that are working together that we need to kind of look at. So that’s just one of the reasons why I love this blood work as well as all the other tests. But yeah.

I think we covered a lot. hopefully you guys got some clinical pearls out of this episode. Yes, I love it. Just remember there’s kind of always like something that we can dig into. So if you feel like you’ve tried it all, you’ve done all the things, you’ve done all the testing, you’ve seen all the different practitioners, I wouldn’t let that discourage you, especially if you feel like deep in your gut that something is off here. Like you’re very likely right.

Listen to your intuition, listen to your gut. And there’s just so much more that we can explore and dig deeper into if you are feeling that way. So don’t lose hope and don’t give up. We’ve helped way too many people that have been at that point for me to not believe that I see it over and over again in clients, clients turning the corner with their health issues after quote unquote, nothing has worked in the past. So typically what we see then is like, you just didn’t have the right approach. Didn’t have the right strategy. You didn’t get the right tests and not just the test. What comes next after the test?

Hannah Aylward (53:10.398)
So let that like actually encourage you and know that there’s more that can be done. Hope this was helpful for you guys. Thank you. Thank you for listening and we’ll see you in next week’s episode. Okay. Bye everyone.

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.