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’re here to do it differently. Alongside my team of functional registered dietitians, I’ve helped hundreds of women around the world overcome their chronic digestive issues when nothing else worked.

I’ve learned a thing or two about what it really takes to transform your health from the inside out. And I’m here to share it all with you. Please keep in mind that this podcast is for educational purposes only and should never be used as medical advice. Now let’s dive in. Your transformation is waiting.

Welcome you guys today we’re going to be diving into all things constipation. Um, so we’ll be diving into the deeper root causes of chronic constipation. So would love to know how many of you here are struggling with constipation, struggling with regular or irregular bowel movements. And we’re going to be digging into these deeper underlying root causes of these irregular bowel movements and something like constipation. So really peeling back the layers, um, and understanding the

underlying root causes that go far beyond things like fiber or needing more water or laxatives, that kind of thing. If you’re new here, my name is Hannah Aylward. I’m a certified holistic health coach. the CEO and founder of PAN and I lead a team of functional, functionally trained practitioners. And we really help women get to the bottom of their chronic gut and digestive issues by taking a root cause approach to repairing the gut.

digestive function and the health of the gut microbiome. So we dig a bit deeper, understand what are those deeper whys, what are those deeper roots to the things that someone may be experiencing like constipation, bloating, gas, acne, whatever it might be. So I would love to know how many of you guys are struggling with chronic constipation. Maybe you feel like you’ve gone in to see your doctor, right? And you’re like, I’m constipated, I can’t go to the bathroom for days.

Hannah Aylward (02:09.091)

And they’re like, Hey, just take, you know, a laxative, just take Lindsest, just take Miralax, something like that. And maybe you’ve tried adding in more fiber rich foods for your gut health. Maybe you’ve tried drinking more water. Maybe you’ve tried things like taking probiotics, even prescription laxatives, right? We see a lot of women that come to work with us after they’ve kind of just been handed like a low FODMAP diet or told everything looks normal. They’re just handed a prescription for a laxative and told to just take this for the rest of your life. And that’s not really something that they’re interested in doing.

to help with the constipation. So we like to dig a bit deeper. You may have been told everything looks normal, right? It’s fine. You’re just constipated. But here on my team and with my community, we ask why. So if someone’s presenting with chronic constipation, maybe they’re not going every day. They’re going one to two times a week. Or when you go, it’s kind of like rabbit pellets or that really nice situation.

and it’s dehydrated and you don’t feel like you’re having a complete full bowel movement. You’re never really getting that relief after using the bathroom. Maybe you go to the bathroom and you feel like I still have to go. I’m not completely empty. It’s a horrible, horrible feeling. So I just want you to understand that it’s really just a sign, right? So your body is always communicating with you, giving you these signals that something else is going on underneath the surface, right? So very often when we

look at something like constipation, the first kind of lines of intervention are fiber. Maybe it’s metamucil, right? And then it’s like possibly laxative or it’s hydration or maybe it’s a low FODMAP diet. But there’s so much more that we can dig into to understand like why you’re presenting with the constipation in the first place. So that’s how we do things a little, a little bit different here. And we’re going to be digging into, I have about 10 hidden underlying root causes that contribute to the chronic constipation that people are experiencing.

And there may be more, but we’re going to dive into about 10 of them today. And these are what we see clients struggling with and kind of presenting with the most often. So what is a normal healthy bowel movement, right? We’re looking at using the bathroom at least one to possibly even three times a day. We don’t want things to flow through too quickly or else we can’t absorb our nutrients. So if we’re on the other side of the spectrum where we’re struggling with something like diarrhea and things are moving through too quickly,

Hannah Aylward (04:30.534)

then we’ll end up with dehydration and we’ll end up, you know, unable to actually absorb the nutrients from the food that we are eating. So we don’t want our transit time to be too quick where things are kind of flowing through too quickly. And we also don’t want things to be too slow and have a slower transit time. And or else, I mean, constipation will just lead to other issues, right? It will lead to, it can cause, it increases your risk for acne, right? So it can contribute to acne. It can contribute to estrogen dominance.

It can contribute to chronic bloating that many women suffer with today, brain fog, nausea, even reflux, things like that. So in my opinion, I think it’s something that we should be taking really seriously. It’s not, you know, an intense diagnosis or anything like that. But if I, I, if I see someone that’s constipated, we have to work through it, right? We have to get to the bottom of that or else we can’t get them feeling better because to put it very, very simply.

You excrete the toxins that you’re exposed to through your sweat, your urine, and your stool. So if you are not using the bathroom every single day, you will end up estrogen dominant. This is how we dump excess estrogen in the body. You will end up with higher levels of toxins being reabsorbed back and brought back into circulation because we’re not actually excreting these things. it’s something that’s not to like freak you out, but.

something that I think we should be taking really seriously, right? Because it’s only gonna lead to bigger, potentially bigger issues down the line. So what we want, right? We want daily or daily bowel movements. I would say one to possibly three. I don’t think everyone needs three. I know some people say that, but I just wanna see you going at least once a day. I want it to be easy to pass. It should be full and complete. It should look like a sausage. It should not look like little rabbit pellets.

or pebbles or anything like that. It should not be floating. It shouldn’t be really runny. It should be well-formed. That’s how we know that it’s nice and healthy. And it shouldn’t be a color other than a darker brown. So it shouldn’t be gray. It shouldn’t be orange. These are all some signs of deeper underlying issues happening in our digestive tract. Going every few days is not optimal. I would say that that would be considered, that constipation.

Hannah Aylward (06:40.166)

People have varying opinions on this. All I know is that if I don’t go to the bathroom every day, I am not feeling very good. So it’s really, really important to maintain optimal gut health and to maintain overall health really. So conventional advice, you know, most of the time, once again, we’re told fiber, laxatives, hydration, like what else can they offer us? Maybe a probiotic. Now, when we’re looking at

chronic constipation cases, most of our clients have already tried these things. They’ve already tried drinking more water. Maybe they’ve tried the low FODMAP diet. Maybe they have tried taking even something like magnesium. Maybe they have, you know, tried, like I said, drinking more water, eating more fiber. And that can even backfire as well. Because if the gut microbiome is really imbalanced and we start to add more fiber into the situation, it can lead to worsening constipation and worsening bloating because we aren’t actually addressing that deeper underlying root.

So let’s uncover what’s actually going on underneath the surface. So let’s break down these 10 hidden root causes of chronic constipation. So number one underlying root cause of chronic constipation is going to be low stomach acid production. So I talk a lot about stomach acid on this page. If you listen to my podcast, I talk a lot about stomach acid.

And when we go into utilizing tools like restrictive diets, we are not addressing stomach acid whatsoever, which is why many, many times these things fail us, right? So stomach acid, essentially to keep it really concise and simple and easy for you to understand, if you’re not producing adequate stomach acid, everything’s going to be slowed down. You will not be optimally digesting your food, and then that’s going to impact your gut motility.

And when I say your gut motility, your motility is just the rate at which food is moving through your GI tract. Once again, we don’t want it too fast or else we’re dealing with that diarrhea situation can lead to dehydration, can lead to nutrient deficiencies, right? But we also don’t want it moving through too slowly. That’s going to increase our risk for bacterial overgrowth. That’s going to contribute to something like SIBO or small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. It’s also just going to leave you not feeling great. You’re going to feel heavy. You’re going to feel bloated.

Hannah Aylward (08:50.248)

gassy, maybe even experienced some burning like heartburn. It’s coming back up the GI tract and, and so forth. So some signs that you may have something like low stomach acid, bloating after meals, burping within 30 minutes of eating. This is a very common sign feeling full very quickly. So if you’re like, I have a couple of bites of food and then I’m like totally full. Well, you’re not able to properly break down and digest the food that you’re eating. So we want to dig deeper and support your body and actually being able to properly digest your food.

Another thing that we’ll see is undigested food in the stool as well. So you go to the bathroom and there’s kind of like undigested food your stool. You’ve got like particles, right? You can kind of see that things are still lingering. When you take a look at your stool, it can look like crumbles. I’m like trying to access the right word, but you’ll see it, right? It’ll look like undigested food. could be kernels. It could be other things, plant matter, whatever. This is a sign that you’re not optimally breaking down the food that you’re eating. Now, if you’re not breaking down the food that you’re eating well enough,

you’re gonna be bloated, you’re gonna be gassy, and it’s going to lead to bigger issues down the line. So low stomach acid is gonna slow everything else down downstream, because digestion is a north to south process, right? So it starts up here and it goes all the way down. Stomach acid is one of these first mechanisms in the digestive process that helps to break down and digest our food. If stomach acid levels are low, everything south is going to be negatively impacted by that. So this is

a big underlying root cause of chronic constipation. We always want to kind of reverse engineer and, and peel back the layers and understand what’s contributing to the low stomach acid in the first place, which can be many different things. So if you guys have any questions about that, feel free to let me know. So that would be the number one underlying root cause, right? Probiotics are not going to address this. Restricted diets are not going to address this. Hydration, fiber, none of these things are addressing this underlying root cause, which will hopefully make you feel better.

because you may, it’s very easy to feel like I have tried it all and nothing has worked, but I can assure you, you haven’t. And that’s good. That’s a good thing. Cause there’s a lot that we can do there. Right. So let that be kind of like reassuring to you. Okay. The second underlying root cause here is going to be nervous system dysregulation. So we have this chronic stress piece and we have the nervous system kind of more so being stuck in that fight or flight state. So when the nervous system has a couple of different branches, right? When we are stressed,

Hannah Aylward (11:18.024)

We’re going to enter that sympathetic dominant nervous system state. In order to properly digest our food, we need to be in that parasympathetic dominant state. So if we are chronically stressed and we’re wound up really tight, mean, think of, think of the energy behind being wound up really tight and then trying to release stool from your colon. They’re, they’re, they’re not the same, right? They’re on opposite ends of the spectrum.

So when people are really tightly wound, and even if you studied traditional Chinese medicine, the colon that helps, right, you excrete your stool, the colon is really associated with letting go. So we have to be able to let go and exit that chronic fight or flight state. So to keep it very simple, when your body is stuck in that chronically stressed out state,

can be due to a myriad of different reasons, right? We can have emotional and mental stressors. We can have financial stressors. We can have physical stressors, under eating, not getting enough sleep on a day-to-day basis, over training, over exercising without proper recovery. All of these things are gonna contribute to that chronic fight or flight state. Environmental toxin exposure as well, like living in a home with mold can also contribute to this too. The body’s gonna be stuck in that state. And in that state, digestion is an afterthought.

And I talk about this a ton with my clients and on my podcast and all of that. So if you want to learn more, please go dive in. have like tons of trainings for you to learn more on that and how the gut influences anxiety and how anxiety influences the gut and that deeper gut brain connection. But when your body is stuck in that fight or flight state, you’re stuck in that sympathetic dominant state, digestion is an afterthought that will negatively impact your bowel movements. And one of the things that we can see here too is like a lot of the times clients will travel

and then they’ll be constipated, right? So you’ll travel and you won’t be able to use the bathroom at all for many days. Raise your hand if that’s happened to you. This used to happen to me and it was like absolutely horrible. ruined my whole trip. Like there was no point in even going because I would be able to go to the bathroom and then I’d feel sick to my stomach and I would be able to wear the cute outfits that I wanted to wear. I have extra clothes based on how my stomach was actually feeling. And then it’s like, you don’t even want to eat and enjoy the food that you’re.

Hannah Aylward (13:32.658)

that you’re traveling to like go enjoy because you’re so constipated and nauseous. It’s a horrible feeling. After I repaired my gut function, I no longer deal with that, which is like 90 day difference for my quality of life and my overall health. But like it actually just makes traveling and living my life possible and more enjoyable. So that’s what’s on the other side, a side for you. I used to travel and I will never forget. I mean, there was one time I didn’t go to bathroom for probably like seven days. And I was just like, I’m going to explode. Like this is

horrible and I was crying and I was like completely breaking down and at the underneath it all I had a lot of gut dysbiosis, I had a lot of microbiome imbalances, I had low stomach acid, I had a lot of other stuff that was contributing to that but I was beating myself up for it because I was just like I can’t get out of my routine, I have to eat perfectly and I have to make sure I’m getting enough sleep and I have to make sure I’m getting enough exercise and it was like this negative downward spiral when really I just had this deeper gut stuff going on and once I cleared that up all the other stuff went away.

That’s what’s available to you on the other side, but we’ll see a lot of the times when people are traveling, right? The nervous system piece gets a little bit, hijacked because we’re usually more stressed. We’re not in our normal routine. We don’t have our normal comforts and oftentimes who are waking up and then we’re kind of just like jumping into it. So if you’re traveling, you’re just like jumping into your day. You don’t have that regular routine. You don’t have that nervous system support for your body to actually relax and release. then.

pass the stool and have that regular bowel movement. So nervous system dysregulation is a big underlying root cause of something like chronic constipation. So don’t overlook this. mean, your body does not prioritize digestion if it doesn’t feel safe. That’s like the simplest way to put it. I could break down all of the science and exactly what happens in the gut if you want. have a lot of trainings on that, but to keep it super simple, like

Your body just, it’s not going to prioritize digestion if you’re not feeling safe in your body. So a lot of the times when I’m working with clients, I’m asking them, how can we help you feel safe in your body? What does that look like? What does that feel like and what supports you there? and one thing that is, that can be really helpful is when you travel before you jump into your day and you jump into like family or running out the door or whatever it might be taking five to 10 minutes to yourself, hydrate, do a little breath work.

Hannah Aylward (15:53.334)

do a little meditation, really self-regulate and take that moment to shift that body into that parasympathetic rest and digest state and then kind of go about your day from there. So that’s a little hack that you can take with you. Yeah. I mean, so many women that we work with benefit from it. so that’s something to try. So we’ve talked about the first underlying root cause being low stomach acid. The second one being nervous systems regulation and that chronic stress state. Now the number three, and I would say something we see

very, very, very commonly with our clients is going to be large intestinal gut dysbiosis. So it’s just a big fancy word for saying we have an imbalance in our gut bacteria in the large intestine or the colon. Now, when we get overgrowth of certain bacteria in the large intestine, that can contribute to gas bloating inconsistent stools. This can happen as a result of chronic stress. It can happen as a result of a poor diet. It can happen as a result of chronic antibiotic use.

Uh, many different things can contribute to this dysbiosis in large intestine. So when we have an imbalance of these gut bacteria that can lead to things like constipation, it can also lead to something like diarrhea as well. And it will cause a lot, a lot of gas and bloating. And this is where people get very confused because you could be eating the healthiest diet in the world. You could be eating gluten-free and dairy-free and sugar-free and all of the things and taking the supplements and taking the magnesium.

But if you are dealing with a lot of this dysbiosis, you will be constipated. So the food is not going to fix this. We have to go in and address the microbial dysbiosis in the gut. And then you’ll be able to tolerate more foods and you’ll feel a lot better going forward. When I first ran my first functional stool tests, like years and years ago at this point, like seven years ago, I had a ton of dysbiosis and things finally started to make sense because I would feel fine.

And then I would flare really bad and I would feel fine. And then I would flare really bad. And I was eating the same thing. I wasn’t changing anything, right? Yeah, I was feeling a little stressed. My life’s a little stressful, just like the rest of our lives are. I was exercising. I was doing my thing, but it was like, I’d feel good for two days and I’d flare really bad. I’d feel good for two days and I’d play really bad. And it was because I was dealing with a lot of large intestinal microbial dysbiosis. Once I cleaned that up, it was like truly night and day, night and day difference. A couple of good targeted months of work, change, changed my life and

Hannah Aylward (18:14.34)

That’s why I’m here with you. That’s why I’m here with you all today to share this work because of the impact that I had on my life. So that’s going to be one of those main things here. I also want to talk about gut infections. So when we talk about gut infections, we’re referring to infections anywhere in the stomach, right through to the small intestine and then into the colon or the large intestine. And they’re caused by pathogens.

And the most common ones that we see in clients are gonna be parasites. So we’ll see blastocystis hominis, Entamoeba histolytica, Giardia, we see a lot in our clients as well. Dientamoeba fragilis, you don’t need to understand the words of all of these, don’t worry about it. But when we have these parasitic infections, they are a big underlying root cause of chronic constipation.

Then we can also have bacterial infections as well. So something like Helicobacter pylori, Citrobacter campylobacter, these are these infections that can also contribute to the chronic constipation. So once again, this is the case where it’s like you’ve tried the fiber, you’ve tried the water, you’ve tried the low FODMAP diet, you’ve tried magnesium even, and nothing is budging this constipation. We have to look at what’s going on in your gut microbiome that is actually contributing to the chronic constipation that you are experiencing. We see a ton of this. I know these words,

Sometimes they sound like crazy and you’re like, there’s no way I have that you’d be surprised we run stool tests We run like a couple hundred stool tests every single year and I’ve been doing this for nine plus years And we see a lot of it It’s very very common just due to like what we’re exposed to in modern day and chronic stress levels and antibiotics that shift the state of the microbiome and all of that kind of stuff birth control different medications so it’s more common than you then you may think it is right so it doesn’t need to freak you out or anything like that, but

we always want to dig deeper and look at that gut microbiome piece. Now the next kind of piece of this dysbiosis is going to be methane dominant SIBO. So it’s very commonly known that when we have small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, we have an overgrowth of bacteria in the small intestine.

Hannah Aylward (20:19.867)

we can get these methane producing bacteria. It’s technically now called intestinal methanogen overgrowth. It used to be called methane dominant SIBO. And now it’s more so called intestinal methanogen overgrowth. These are certain gut bacteria that produce methane gas. Methane gas is going to slow your transit time. So we can do different testing here, functional stool testing, because we can also have methane, an overgrowth of methane dominant SIBO, or excuse me, methane dominant bacteria.

in the large intestine and then we can also have the overgrowth in the small intestine. That was one thing that I was dealing with personally. I had high levels of methane dominant bacteria overgrowing in my large intestine that was contributing to the constipation that would flare me so, so badly. And it would be like days, right? And I would be like doing everything that I could and it was not working. Supplements, tons of magnesium, magnesium oxide, so much water, so many minerals. It didn’t matter because I had to address this bacteria piece.

So we can get this methane dominant SIBO, right? Or this intestinal methanogen overgrowth. And this is basically when we have the bacterial overgrowth in the small intestine and the methanogenic overgrowth throughout the rest of the GI tract. So we will see those that present within this intestinal methanogen overgrowth have slower transit time. They will have typically more constipation, will lean more toward constipation, whereas hydrogen dominant producing bacteria.

We’ll more so lean towards diarrhea. That’s what we were trained and that’s what the literature says. But I will say we do see it go both ways. We see a lot of people with methane dominant having diarrhea. We see a lot of people with hydrogen dominant having constipation. So this is why testing and working with a professional is just like, it’s just a non-negotiable. It’s going to get you the best results because that’s how we’re going to see what’s actually going on. We have to do the proper testing and we have to address it with the correct intervention. So

Some cases, SIBO can present with mild constipation. Some of them can present with more mixed. You may have constipation and then you get that overflow diarrhea. But I would say it’s pretty consistent that we see that methanogen overgrowth contribute to constipation. So it can feel like you’re doing everything. You’re like trying all of the different interventions and they’re not working. We need to bring down those levels of methane producing bacteria or archaea.

Hannah Aylward (22:43.655)

We are big fans of eating enough protein over here on Team Han. Protein is essential for muscle repair, a strong gut lining, balanced blood sugar levels, and so much more. For most of our clients, we like recommending around 100 grams of protein per day to start, and adding in a good quality protein powder can be super helpful for hitting those numbers. It’s an easy add-in. You can throw it into a smoothie or even add it to oatmeal. Choosing the right protein powder can feel so overwhelming.

Half of them are full of fillers and crap ingredients and the other half honestly just tastes bad. Equip Protein is one of my go-to recommendations for our clients and one of my personal favorites. We love it because it only has a small handful of ingredients. It’s 100 % carefully sourced, real foods, no additives, allergens, chemicals, fillers or other junk. It’s gluten-free and it contains 21 grams of protein per serving. Equip’s Prime Protein also offers

a complete amino acid profile. It’s also independently tested to make sure that the protein powder is free of harmful amounts of heavy metals and toxins like glyphosate, which is honestly super hard to find. EquipPrime protein is a grass-fed beef protein. So it is animal-based, but it’s dairy-free, unlike whey or casein protein powders. Grass-fed beef protein is packed with collagen, gelatin, and micronutrients that your body needs.

We also see that it’s typically much better tolerated in our clients with chronic gut and digestive issues over something like a plant-based protein powder. In addition, some of their flavors do contain natural flavors, but they’re distilled vapors from natural and organic compounds or fruits like vanilla, coconut, and strawberry, and are processed without any chemicals, fillers, binders, or artificial ingredients, which once again is incredibly hard to find. Personally, I buy both the chocolate and the vanilla.

flavors of the Equip Prime Protein, but honestly, they have like so many other incredible flavors out now. If you’re interested in trying out Equip Prime Protein, you can use the code HANNAHAYLWARDHHC at checkout for 15 % off, and we’ll pop that code in the show notes of this episode for you as well. So once again, you can go to equipfoods.com, choose the flavor of protein powder that you want, and then use code HANNAHAYLWARDHHC for 15 % off.

Hannah Aylward (24:59.656)

Okay, so the next piece that I want to talk about here too, is this yeast overgrowth. So we talked about, let’s just do a quick recap before we move on. Number one, low stomach acid. Number two, nervous system dysregulation. Number three, this large intestinal dysbiosis. Then we have these gut infections. We can kind of group these into like the same category because they’re all microbiome imbalances, but they’re different microbiome imbalances. So this large intestinal dysbiosis.

Then we have the gut infections, right, like the protozoa and the parasites and things like that. And then also certain bacterial infections like Helicobacter pylori. Then we have that methane dominant SIBO piece or an increase in overgrowth of those methanogens and those methane producing bacteria. So then we can also have this yeast overgrowth picture. And it’s quite common to see the yeast overgrowth contribute to constipation. I will say once again, I see it both ways.

When we do training, I mean, we’ve been doing this, me and my team, between all of us for like 30 plus years, we’ve seen hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of cases at this point. And we’ve taken every training, every training out there and we’re in a new training right now. We’re constantly educating ourselves to help our clients get better quicker, right? So we’re always, always learning. And when you go through many trainings from functional medicine, doctors and other practitioners, you’ll commonly see, you know, the methane causes the constipation, but we’ll see it flipped.

And then the yeast can cause the constipation as well, but we will also see that flipped. So there’s a big difference between what you see in the literature and then also what you actually see in your clients and what actually works with your clients. Cause we can learn all this stuff, but if we can’t apply it and we can’t get the results, then we have to go digging and, and workshopping. Right. So just that’s once again, why working with someone is so important here because it’s not.

super duper black and white in everyone’s case. Everyone’s case is a little different. Nothing that we do is cookie cutter and we’re going to customize everything to our clients needs, to their history, to their test results, to what they’re presenting with, et cetera. Because it’s going to vary per person, right? There’s not one like four step supplement regimen that I could give every single one of you. It’s just not going to work because as we can already see when we’re looking at chronic constipation,

Hannah Aylward (27:14.934)

I’ve already listed off like five different root causes. So there can be, two people can have constipation and they can be dealing with different root causes, which is why the same interventions don’t work for everyone. So once again, let that help you feel like relief, cause you’re like, cool, I just haven’t gotten the right intervention versus like nothing will ever work cause I tried it all. It’s likely that you just haven’t had the right interventions and strategy and that’s it. So let’s get you the right support that you need. Okay, so this yeast overgrowth picture.

We can get this fungal overgrowth or yeast overgrowth in the large intestine as well. We can also see that overgrow in the small intestine, which is more difficult to test for. The testing that we have available for that isn’t great, I will say. So we always add in client questionnaires and we’ll do additional labs and we’ll cross check stuff because your average functional stool test, well, your average stool test at your doctor won’t catch really any of this.

your average functional stool test can also miss this, I will say. So this is something that I learned after probably like three years into doing this. I was like, wait, there’s something else going on here and the test is not reflecting it. So working with someone that has a lot of experience is very important to like read between the lines there. We won’t always see it on a functional stool test because fungal overgrowth and the candida that can overgrow in the gut is usually in the small intestine.

versus the large intestine and a stool test is checking the large intestine. also what can also happen is biofilms. We can have a lot of biofilms that are not allowing the test to really show the full picture and kind of hiding the levels of bacteria that are going on in the gut. So there’s two different kinds of things going on there. But when we get this fungal overgrowth,

that can contribute to chronic constipation as well. It can also contribute to diarrhea. I see it cause a lot of different food reactions and sensitivities. It’s also considered a histamine liberator. So it can contribute to a lot of those like histamine overload symptoms that you may be experiencing too. I would say what I see most commonly is people with this are very sensitive to sugar. They’re very sensitive to alcohol. So maybe you have.

Hannah Aylward (29:20.694)

You know, one glass of wine and you’re recovering for like three days with your digestive tract. It really flares you up. That’s a big sign. We’re either looking at histamine or candida overgrowth. More, more often than not in that case. And these things are connected because the candida will cause the histamine issue. What else will I see? Lots of different food sensitivities, kind of random ones, but typically like carbs, fermented foods, sauerkraut, kimchi, these really gut healthy foods. You will not tolerate them. Well, they can cause flushing of the face. They can cause.

more abdominal pain and bloating and gas. And this will come with a lot of chronic digestive issues, not just constipation, but it is a very common underlying root cause of chronic constipation. Once again, adding in more fiber is not going to fix this. Adding in more magnesium is not going to fix this. Drinking more water is not going to fix this. Adding in more probiotics can actually make this worse. So we want to run the right testing and understand what’s actually going on in your case and customize interventions from there.

The next underlying root cause that I have for you guys today is going to be sluggish bile flow. So bile helps to stimulate bowel movements. And it’s one of these digestive juices that the body produces to actually break down and digest your food. So bile helps us to break down fats and absorb our fat-soluble nutrients. It helps to keep the small intestine relatively sterile. You can kind of picture it as like

this soapy substance that gets pushed into your small intestine from your gallbladder and then can kind of keep this ecosystem of your gut environment balanced, right? So it’s going to prevent things like overgrowth. It’s very supportive in preventing something like SIBO or small intestinal bacterial overgrowth from taking place. So bile helps to break down our foods, keep our small intestine relatively sterile.

It’s produced by the liver and it’s pushed out by the gallbladder into the small intestine when you eat fats to help you break down your fats and absorb these fat soluble nutrients like vitamins A, D, E and K. So if you have chronic low vitamin D levels, despite supplementation, we always want to take a look at your bile. Are you producing adequate bile? Are you having issues with absorption, et cetera? It’s kind of a bigger conversation. We can always dig into that.

Hannah Aylward (31:31.648)

Without adequate bio flow, you’ll have dry, harder stools. So what we’ll commonly see when this is an underlying root cause is constipation and difficulty digesting fats. So you may feel nauseous after eating foods higher in fat. And this can feel, this can be totally healthy fats like avocado or olive oil or nuts and seeds or coconut milk. It can also be those, those, you know, less, healthy fatty foods like

french fries or you know, burger with like tons of cheese and lots of lots of grease, right? That kind of thing that can also, if you feel really flared after that, that can be a sign that we have a deeper bile issue going on and we need to support that to help support healthy bowel movements. This is a big underlying root cause of chronic bloating, hormone issues, hormonal acne that comes along the chin, right? Estrogen dominance, histamine issues, chronic constipation.

Bile is a big underlying root cause of this. We always want to ask what contributed to the more sludgy bile that you may be experiencing, which we can have many different things contributing to that as well. Chronic stress, dehydration, not eating enough healthy fats, mold exposure, all of these things can cause that bile to be a bit more sludgy and then contribute to that constipation. So if you feel nausea after eating fatty foods, if you have to run to the bathroom after eating fatty foods,

If your stool is floating, if it is like green or gray in color, if you have low vitamin D, if you have hormonal acne, if you have really bad PMS, these are all signs that we need to take a look at supporting optimal bile flow and also getting everything else out of the way that is negatively impacting that too. In addition, if you’ve had your gallbladder removed, I get this question a lot. Okay, cool. But what if I’ve had my gallbladder removed? Does this apply to me? It applies to you even more.

If you’ve had your gallbladder removed, it applies to you even more because without your gallbladder, your gallbladder is what pushes that bile into the small intestine to help you break down and digest these fats at meal times. Once that gallbladder is removed, you’re going to struggle to break down these fats. You will need bile support forever going forward. They do not tell you this. I do not know why they don’t tell you this because it’s considered like a non-essential organ. Like you can survive without it.

Hannah Aylward (33:51.35)

However, by the time you needed the gallbladder removal, we’ve been having liver issues for a long time, right? Because we need the removal due to stones, sludge, whatever it might be, things blocking the bile ducts. We have to ask, why did that happen? And we have to support your liver and proper bile flow forever going forward, right? And really optimizing that bile flow at meal times forever going forward so you can actually break down your fats. You may have gone to get a gallbladder removal and they’re like, cool, just like eat less fat.

Well, we need to eat good, good fats. Fat is really important for our hormone health, our brain health, our blood sugar regulation. It’s not that we want to avoid all these things. It’s that we want to optimize digestion so we can then tolerate them again. But I can assure you, you didn’t need a gallbladder removal just out of nowhere, right? Something was kind of brewing underneath the surface and we want to support liver bioflow and liver detoxification to get you really feeling better more long-term. Okay. So that was going to be the sluggish bioflow.

Now let me check for other questions here. Someone asked, what is good for methane SIBO? So many different things, but methane SIBO has underlying root causes, right? So we want to understand what actually contributed to the methane dominant SIBO. We can use different herbal interventions. We would definitely want to support bio flow. You can trial an antibiotic with your doctor. There are other options for that. But SIBO is never just SIBO.

kind of wind it back and understand what contributed to this overgrowth in the small intestine in the first place. And that’s what we really need to address and take a look at to get someone feeling fully better. So let’s jump into the next underlying cause of chronic constipation. So this is going to be mineral deficiencies. And these go really, really, really overlooked. minerals are really important for our overall health.

They are, you can kind of think of them as spark plugs for different enzymatic reactions that occur in the body. They’re needed to help the body then do all of these other things that it needs to do. So they’re like, they’re needed for the body to actually fulfill the many different processes that it has, like hormone production or liver detoxification or stomach acid production. need certain minerals, right? I just said sodium. We need sodium for stomach acid production. So minerals are

Hannah Aylward (36:08.698)

You can kind of think of them as these like raw materials that the body needs to actually do its job. When we are dealing with certain mineral deficiencies, we can see constipation take place. And the biggest ones that I want to point out in this training are magnesium. Most people are magnesium deficient. And then also potassium. So potassium is really important for supporting peristalsis or the movement of food through the GI tract. So if you are low in potassium levels,

due to not getting enough in your diet. We actually need a lot per day. unless you’re like really thinking about it, it’s kind of hard or chronic stress. You’re going to burn through all these minerals when you’re really stressed, including magnesium and sodium and potassium. You need adequate levels of these minerals to actually go to the bathroom, right? So potassium is going to support peristalsis. It also supports thyroid function, which plays a huge role in things like constipation.

When we’re looking, I’m jumping ahead a little bit, but it’s my next point. So I’ll just, I’ll just go into it. But when we’re looking at those with sluggish thyroid function, you know, one of the first things that someone would look for to see if you have hypothyroidism would be constipation, right? You’re chronically constipated, you’re cold, you’re bloated. You have cold hands and feet, have thinning of the outer third of your eyebrows. These are all some signs. You may feel absolutely exhausted regardless of how much sleep that you get.

These are awesome signs that you would look that would identify slow thyroid function that you would then want to confirm testing. But we will see gut motility slow down when we have slow thyroid function. Now potassium helps to sensitize the cells to thyroid hormone so they can do their job. So when we are looking at low levels of magnesium and or potassium, that can be an underlying contributor of chronic constipation.

Low levels of magnesium can lead to just slower movement as does those low levels of potassium. Some other signs that you may be low in magnesium, mean, magnesium is needed for like almost everything, you guys. It’s when you look at everything that’s needed for liver detoxification, magnesium plays a role in that. When you look at nervous system support, chronic stress support, magnesium is really important there. It plays a role in so much and most people are deficient because if you drink coffee, that will lower your levels.

Hannah Aylward (38:26.004)

If you’re chronically stressed, that will lower your levels. And it’s really just hard to get in enough from the food that we’re eating because it’s really in like leafy greens and our soil is so depleted of these minerals. So I would say magnesium supplementation is one of the only things that I would say like 99 % of people would benefit from. With that note, if you feel very sensitive to magnesium supplementation, we want to dig into that too. It’s likely due to really low levels of sodium and potassium.

But I’m jumping, I’m jumping into another conversation there too. So if you’re like, that sounds great and I feel like I need magnesium, but I can’t tolerate it. It makes me feel jittery or more anxious or more irritable or it has the opposite effect on me. It rubs up my nervous system. There’s a deeper root cause that too, that we want to kind of dig into, but low magnesium can look like headaches. It can look like constipation. It can look like, I mean, so many different things, right? Chronic stress will deplete it. So we want to check in on these levels there too.

Someone asks, are these deficiencies checked via blood work? You can check RBC magnesium. Yes, we like to run an HTMA with our clients. We will check magnesium in the blood as well. We will, but we’ll also run an HTMA with these clients to check in on their levels via the hair. And we’ll check for sodium potassium levels there too. So yeah, that would be my biggest recommendation. We’ll usually pair the two together and cross-reference. Okay, so we’ll have these mineral deficiencies, potassium and magnesium that can be causing chronic constipation.

Then I kind of went into that next and final root cause, which was the slow thyroid function. So just to kind of recap there, you guys, one of the biggest signs of hypothyroidism is chronic constipation. Your thyroid impacts your gut and your gut impacts your thyroid function. I have a whole podcast episode on this connection. If you want to dive in deeper, go have a listen, send me a message. Hey, hey girl, send me that episode. I’ll send it right over to you. It’s like a 50 minute training on.

the gut and thyroid and estrogen connection. So happy to send you that so you can learn a bit more. But the thyroid, the thyroid has, it’s going to have an impact on virtually all different body, bodily tissues. So it’s going to impact the metabolic function. It’s going to impact your gut function. And once that thyroid starts to slow down, we have that suboptimal thyroid function. can, that can leave us with something like constipation that will then cause bloating. And we will also be at a higher risk for SIBO or small intestinal bacterial overgrowth when that gut motility

Hannah Aylward (40:47.746)

it slows down. So if we have, if your thyroid’s not working optimally and you don’t just check that with running TSH, you want to get a full thyroid panel. I break all that down for you in the episode. We want to run TSH, T4, T3, reverse T3 and different antibodies as well to fully check in on your thyroid function. Simply having a quote unquote normal TSH is not enough. It does not give us all of the information that we need. You can have normal TSH, your antibodies can be elevated. You can have normal TSH.

And you can still be struggling with poor thyroid hormone conversion. can’t convert from inactive to active. So things are slowing down, right? Most thyroid medications are simply just giving you more working on one, one little piece of this, right? So we want to also dig a little deeper to see how we can optimize thyroid function altogether. Most medications are not doing that, which is why tons of women go on something like levothyroxine and they don’t really feel that much better. You know, sometimes it can really help. And sometimes it really doesn’t help.

at all. And it can also increase your risk for SIBO. So there’s a lot going on there. But so you can understand how it would impact constipation is when that thyroid slows down, metabolism is going to slow down, movement is going to slow down, and that can then lead to sluggish gut motility, which can cause constipation. In addition, your gut is going to impact your thyroid, especially when it comes to elevated antibodies, TPO or TGAB antibodies. The gut is playing a huge role in that.

because that chronic inflammation and dysbiosis in the gut will then trigger immune system, the immune system. And then that can contribute to those elevated levels of antibodies. In addition, thyroid hormone conversion, you convert most thyroid hormone from inactive to active in your liver and then also through your gut bacteria. So deeper gut issues like gut issues and thyroid issues, they go hand in hand. They’re not separate. They are one.

They’re not exactly the same, but they’re kind of one in the same, right? Because your gut’s going to impact your thyroid and your thyroid is going to impact your gut. So we will see slow thyroid function also contributing to chronic constipation that clients can be struggling with. so constipation is not just about, it’s not just about like your stool, right? It’s, really a sign of an overall deeper imbalance that’s present.

Hannah Aylward (43:09.408)

And it can be coming from your thyroid. can be coming from something else. So it’s not just about your GI tract even. It’s a more, in my opinion, it’s a more serious thing because it will contribute to elevated estrogen levels and it will contribute to a a higher toxin burden in the body too. So something just to consider. We can also have multiple root causes happening at once. So for example, someone that has low thyroid function is likely going to have bile issues, is likely going to have bacterial overgrowth.

And we also need to support thyroid hormone conversion. And we also need to support rebalancing of the gut microbiome. And we also need to support bile flow and digestive function too, because those with hypothyroidism also tend to have low stomach acid. So that’s just one example. And that client would likely present with fatigue, constipation, bloating, weight gain, possibly even hormonal acne or really painful periods. All of these things are connected.

Which is cool because once we get in there and we address the underlying roots, right, they can express in different ways, but they’ll have similar underlying roots, right? Once we address these, we can see clients start to feel better kind of across the board. So that’s the really cool thing. They’re not all separated. We can address things at the deeper foundational level and then we’ll see energy get better and skin start to clear up and et cetera, et cetera. Right. So we can have multiple root causes at once and it’s

I can tell you as well in my like almost 10 years of experience, it’s never just one thing. It’s always a few different root causes at once because it’s all connected. So a lot of people talk about finding the root cause and I would just say like finding the root causes. It’s never just one thing. If you have dysbiosis, we have to understand why, right? If your thyroid is slow, why is it slow? So there’s many things happening at once, which is why running the right testing and working with someone is just going to help you get a lot better.

way quicker than throwing random things at it to see what helps and what doesn’t. Okay. So what actually helps here taking a functional root cause approach, a whole body approach, right? So we can optimize diets, support this, we can add in, we can run functional testing to understand what is causing all of this, what’s going on in the gut, how is the thyroid looking, how are minerals looking? We can

Hannah Aylward (45:24.886)

use nutrition to balance blood sugar levels as well. We can add a customized supplement protocols to address some of these things that are going on in the gut to support digestive health, to rebalance the gut microbiome, to support the gut barrier. And then also some lifestyle strategies too, like those nervous system supports things like breath work, things like meditation, things like journaling, right? All of these can help as well. So when we develop protocols for clients, we always run functional labs.

We always are going to use targeted nutrition. We’re going to customize supplement interventions based on their needs. It’s not a one size fits all as hopefully you understand at this point. And we’re also going to bring in lifestyle strategies too, things that are really effective in that area as well. So that’s what I see working. That’s what I do today. Or that’s why I do what I do today. And that is also why if you just went in and they handed you a low FODMAP diet or they handed you a laxative or they told you just eat more fiber and it didn’t really work for chronic constipation.

There’s just a lot more to the story. you know, it’s helpful to work with someone who’s going to dig deeper into that story and help you repair at the root cause level so you can start to feel a lot better kind of across the board. Thanks for being here with me. I’ll be live again next week at 1230 PM EST. Again, I’ll be walking through a client case study. So someone in my HDSB program will be walking through her test results and.

how we got her feeling better and all of that good stuff and what were the hurt underlying root causes. You can really see like a good example of this. And then if you’re interested in working with us, getting testing, joining one of my programs, working with my team of expert functional practitioners, we’d love to help you just send me a message and we can get you booked for a call and we can go from there. Okay. Big hugs to each and every one of you and I’ll see you next week. Bye everyone.