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 health care. 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.

Hannah Aylward (00:52.664)

Hello, hello, my dears, and welcome back to another episode of the Nutrient Dense podcast. Today’s episode features a few highlights from this past Wednesday’s Good Gut Formula Masterclass. We’re diving into what can contribute to food sensitivities and IBS, what leaky gut actually means, and how your gut barrier connects to your immune system and inflammation, and why getting to the bottom of these things and really truly understanding them.

Is absolutely essential if you want to finally overcome your chronic gut and digestive issues. And this is really just a sneak peek of the entire class. Nothing excites me more than teaching about gut health and helping women have those aha moments, especially when they’ve spent years feeling totally confused about their digestive issues. To watch the full class, you can grab the replay using the link in the show notes below, or you can head to hannahaylward.kit.com/replay

We threw together a little page for anyone that missed signing up for the master classes live and wants to just access the replay. But make sure you watch before the replay expires on Saturday, September 5th. And if you’re thinking, okay, but I need help putting all of this together for my unique body, the doors are officially open for my signature healing guts and shake and butts program. HGSB is my 16-week program designed to help you understand what.

may be causing your bloating, gas, constipation, diarrhea, and food reactions, and really build a personalized plan to support you. We combine functional soul testing, targeted nutrition, customized supplement protocols, and lifestyle strategies to look under the hood and guide your next steps. You’ll work through our step-by-step process with four months of full support from my team and myself so you don’t have to figure anything out on your own.

Enrollment for HGSB closes on September 10th at 11:59 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. And at the time of recording this, this cohort is already about 45% full. So if we fill it before then, the doors will close early. This is our final round of HGSB for the year. So if you’ve been considering joining us inside of the program, now is the time to jump in. You can find all the details in the show notes below, or you can head to go.hannahaylward.com/yes to save your spot inside of the program. 

And as always, reach out if you have any questions. We’re happy to help. All right, let’s dive into the episode. So when we are looking at your digestive issues, things like bloating, constipation, gas, food sensitivity, even something like reflux or or diarrhea, right? There’s there’s a myriad of different kinds of presentations that deeper gut issues can take. But all of these things are more so the results of underlying root causes. They’re not really the main issue. So sometimes

I will talk to people and they’ll be like, okay, I have diarrhea and I have bloating. Can you help me? And I’m like, it it doesn’t a hundred percent matter if you have diarrhea and bloating or if you have constipation and pain. Underneath it is a damaged gut microbiome and gut dysfunction. And that’s what we need to work on. So I you can I like to use this analogy. You can think of like walk, you’re walking on on the street and you step on a thumbtack, and the thumbtack gets stuck in your foot. Now

In order to feel better, you can take an Advil. You can take like an N said. It will help decrease the swelling, the inflammation. It will help numb the pain a little bit. You could even, you know, like rinse it in the sink with soap and water, but nothing’s gonna fully resolve until you remove the thumb tack from your foot. And then the body can begin to repair on its own. So that is more so the work that we do. Instead of going, you’re constipated, take mirror.

Or Linzus, we go, you’re constipated. Well, why? Why are you constipated? What else is going on? What with your digestive function, with your anatomy, with your gut microbiome, with your gut barrier? What is leading to this chronic constipation? That’s what concerns me more than the actual presentation, right? So at the root of a lot of these things, including even, you know, skin issues and sometimes anxiety and even slow thyroid function, low energy, not just digestive issues, at the core is a damaged gut. And that’s what we want.

To work on. So you can, you know, you can throw like peppermint capsules or mirroracs at the issue, but we’re not actually addressing those underlying group causes. So that’s what that’s the work that we do with our clients. And why is the gut so important overall? So when I first got into this work 10 years ago, gut health was way less talked about. I feel like it’s it’s way more talked about, and that’s for good reason because it impacts everything. When we’re looking at hormone issues, allergies, autoimmune conditions.

Hannah Aylward (05:28.438)

liver disease, chronic fatigue, skin issues like eczema and rosacea, even something like anxiety and depression, the gut microbiome can be playing a role in many of these different disease states and presentations. And I just like this diagram here on the right because it can kind of it kind of gives you an idea, right? The the gut, what happens in the gut doesn’t stay in the gut. It impacts everything. So when we see women that have, you know, maybe thyroid issues or our skin breakouts, chronic skin breakouts that aren’t responding to topicals. And then of course,

the digestive issues, bloating, constipation, all of that. The gut is we’re always looking at the gut here. There is, there’s essentially never a case where I’m not looking at the gut and how it’s impacting things. Even sometimes in the case of you know, someone that’s looking to get pregnant and dealing with fertility issues, we have a pretty good track record of helping helping women get pregnant. All of these things are connected. So the gut microbiome and these the microbiota impact all of these different systems in the body. So

It’s like taking a root cause approach to your gut health is kind of like taking a root cause approach to your overall health because there’s almost never a time where the gut is not involved. And up to 70% of your immune system actually resides in your gut. So we have the biggest reservoir of the immune system all along that gut lining. And your gut lining is kind of like a border control and it’s constantly checking what’s coming in and what’s what’s what’s coming in. Is it good or is it bad? Is it friend or is it foe? And if we have something that’s coming through that gut barrier.

That is not supposed to be there. Maybe it’s like an undigested protein, a toxin, bacteria, something like that. It’s going to flow through that gut barrier and trigger that immune system that’s then gonna trigger more so systemic inflammation. So if something gets through that gut lining that shouldn’t, we’re gonna get that error message sent. And that’s gonna look like feel like inflammation, right? But but what does that actually feel like? Systemic inflammation can appear as.

Brain fog, skin issues, acne, eczema, anxiety, joint pain, weakened immune function, migraines, and and much more, right? So it’s it’s not just digestive issues, although of course we specialize in digestive issues and the gut is absolutely impacting that. But we will often see these things present together because of the impact that the gut has on the immune system. Now let’s talk about food sensitivities for a second here, because this is something that I see a lot of our clients and community struggle with. So I would love to know.

Hannah Aylward (07:52.576)

In the chat. Are you struggling with food sensitivities? Have you ever had food sensitivity testing? Do you feel like you’re reacting to everything that you eat? Are you guessing that you have like a bunch of food sensitivities because you can’t tolerate anything? Let me know in the chat so I can kind of get a gauge of where everyone is at here. This is something we see a lot of and we help improve in so many cases, which is really amazing. So, food sensitivities are not the cause, right? They are the result of underlying gut issues. So that’s probably the most

Important thing that I want you to take away from this little section. If you find yourself reacting to tons and tons of foods. So you eat something, you’re bloated, you get a headache, you’re constipated, your stomach hurts, you’re you’re gassy, whatever it might be, you’re running to the bathroom. These are kind of food reactions, right? So we have food sensitivities and we have food intolerances, and just like generally speaking, food reactions where you’re just responding to a lot of stuff. You’re reacting to everything that you eat. If you’re constantly removing more and more foods, which I think is so common.

In this functional health space, it’s like the first thing that we learn to do is elimination diet. Take it all out. Gluten, dairy, sugar, soy, corn, the list goes on and on. FOD maps, right? Oxalates. It’s like, what are we left with at the end of the day? Well, can we eat at the end of the day? I don’t want you guys feeling like that. So if you feel like you’re reacting to all of these different foods and you’re constantly removing more, this is a sign of deeper gut issues. The food is not necessarily causing the issue. I always say, Don’t blame the food for what the food didn’t do.

If you’re reacting, here’s an example for you. If you’re reacting to something like fiber-rich foods, say you’re eating, you do, you do your research and you’re like, okay, I need to eat fiber for my gut health, and prebiotics are really good for my gut. And that’s all true. Now you eat those foods. So you eat garlic or onions or you eat chia seeds or whatever, and you notice that you’re more bloated, you’re more gassy, you’re burping, you’re distended, you’re the bloating leads to constipation. It’s harder to pass stool, right? That is

Due to a deeper gut issue, it’s very common when we have bacterial overgrowth in the gut. So it’s not that, you know, prebiotics aren’t good for you. Prebiotics are very good for your gut. It’s how we re-inoculate the gut with good gut microbes. And also, if you have these deeper gut issues, say, for example, bacterial overgrowth, you’re gonna find yourself responding to a lot of these healthier foods. So it doesn’t even my my whole point is like the food is not really the issue here. It’s what’s going on in your gut environment. So

Hannah Aylward (10:16.662)

When you have a compromised intestinal barrier, when you have poor digestive output, when you have bacterial overgrowth, you will not be able to tolerate many foods and you’ll be mounting responses to many of these foods. And your immune system is going to start to react to these things and go into kind of overdrive as any of these partially digested food proteins are starting to pass through your gut lining in the case of something like leaky gut. And you’ll react you’ll react to even healthy foods. So, you know, we’ll see clients come in and they’re like, I we had a client.

More recently, and she’s like, I can only eat like four vegetables. And we all know, I mean, generally speaking, vegetables are good for us, right? It wasn’t the food, it wasn’t the carrot that was causing the issue. It was the deeper gut environment, which was leading to her feeling like she couldn’t tolerate these foods. And by the end of working with us, she was like, I can eat 20 different vegetables now, which is amazing progress, right? So

We want you to be able to tolerate more foods with less pain. And food sensitivities are really just the result of other stuff. They’re not that underlying root cause. And we’re gonna get into those underlying root causes here. So I touched on leaky gut there briefly, but let’s talk about it a little bit more. I’m sure you’ve heard of leaky gut. I feel like this kind of like made the rounds in like a trendy way. Every everything’s leaky gut, leaky gut. Leaky gut, you know, I’d say the more accepted term for that is increased intestinal permeability. So your gut lining, you have a gut barrier.

You have an epithelial barrier and you have a mucosal barrier. So you have kind of two layers to your gut lining there. Now, when this gut barrier, it’s really supposed to be comprised of these tight junctions. The cellular layer is comprised of these healthy tight junctions. You can see it in the diagram here. if you look over to the left, right, you’ll see these tight junctions, they’re kind of locking these cells up. Think of like a brick wall where everything’s kind of nice and it’s like Tetris, it all clicks in well.

That’s how it’s supposed to be. Now your gut barrier is semi-permeable in nature because it that’s how you absorb the nutrients from your food. So it’s already semi-permeable. So you can absorb the nutrients from the food that you’re eating, which then allows your body to do all of the amazing things that it needs to do. But when it gets starts to get leaky or we get that increased intestinal permeability, we will have harmful microbes, undigested food particles, different toxins, endotoxin, lipopolysaccharide. These things will start to flow through that gut barrier and enter the bloodstream.

Hannah Aylward (12:27.584)

And that’s when we’re going to get that immune activation and we’re gonna have that more systemic impact as the immune system really starts to respond with inflammation throughout the body and react to these foreign substances. So when it comes to leaky gut, it’s really a condition where your GI tract starts to leak or it’s it’s just extra permeable due to chronic inflammation and damage. Now, it’s really important to understand this because people will hear leaky gut and then they’re like, okay.

I need L-glutamine or I need zinc carnosine or whatever. And those can all be great. We totally utilize those tools. But the gut barrier doesn’t break down from nothing. It doesn’t break down out of nowhere. We have to address what led to the breakdown of the gut barrier in the first place. So we can see harmful gut microbes, toxin exposure, undigested food particles as a result of maldigestion, right? Sometimes gluten can even cause the gut barrier to be more permeable.

It’s not an issue for everyone, but there are other things that are contributing to this breakdown in the gut barrier. Chronic cortis high cortisol will also wear away that mucosal layer. Having inadequate levels of your healthy, beneficial good gut bacteria will wear away at that mucosal barrier as well.

Hannah Aylward (13:38.444)

Are you dealing with chronic bloating, gas, constipation, diarrhea, or stomach pain, regardless of what you eat? The doors to my signature Healin’ Guts and Shakin’ Butts program are currently open for enrollment. HGSB is my 16-week gut repairing program that repairs the gut at the root cause level. We use a combination of functional stool testing, targeted nutrition, customized supplement protocols, and lifestyle strategies to look under the hood and address that deeper why behind your digestive issues.

And then naturally repair from there. Inside of the program, we will walk you through our entire step-by-step gut repairing process, and you’ll get full support for four months. You’ll be paired with a functional coach on my team to review your test results, identify the root causes of your chronic digestive issues, and walk through your own customized protocols. Inside of HGSB, we also have live group coaching and QA sessions with me, so no questions go unanswered.

The doors close on September 10th at 1159 p.m. EST. If you’re ready to finally overcome your chronic digestive issues with expert guidance and no more guesswork, we would love to help you. You can find more details in the link to sign up in the show notes below, or you can go to go.hannahaylward.com/yes to join us for this round of HGSB. This is the final round for 2026, so it’s now or never. It’s time to get your life back, and we cannot wait to help you.

Hannah Aylward (15:09.774)

So it’s never just leaky gut. Leaky gut is also kind of the result of other stuff going awry in the gut, which is why we have to really look at this more thoroughly and holistically to really get someone feeling better. But when we do get this hyperpermeability, we start to react to all kinds of different things that we’re eating. And it’s not really the food’s fault. So it’s not about the food. It comes down to the environment that the food is entering. And taking out more and more foods from your diet is not gonna get you anywhere.

In fact, it can actually lead to more hypersensitivity. And some of you may have already experienced that where you’re like, okay, I thought it was dairy, so I stopped eating dairy. And I kind of could tolerate it before, but now I really can’t tolerate any dairy. Gives me a migraine, it flares my skin and it hurts my stomach. Or maybe it’s other foods. It’s like certain nuts or seeds or vegetables. And you’re like, I kind of could eat them before. I thought they were maybe triggering an issue. And now I cannot tolerate any of anything like that. I have this kind of bigger response to them.

When we’re not addressing those underlying issues, that that gut environment picture, it can actually increase our risk for more sensitivity. So this is something that I like like blew my mind when I started to really realize the depth of this because I spent my life just removing foods, FODMAPS, gluten, dairy, sugar, this, this. And of course, like sugar’s not good for us. We know that, right? But I was so strict about what I was eating to the point where I was kind of like driving myself nuts. And I wasn’t even feeling fully better.

So the irony in that is really something. But I was just willing to do anything. I was like, if I never get to eat cheese again in my life, that’s fine. I just want to feel normal. But I started to realize that digestive function, your gut microbiome, your gut environment, all your gut motility, right? We’re gonna get into all of that. This is what is contributing to these different food reactions and digestive issues. So in order to overcome these sensitivities, we really need to address the gut environment. Now, I would love to know here too, how many of you have been told that you have IBS or maybe you just

think you have IBS. We have some people that come to work with us who are like, I’m pretty sure I have IBS, but I’ve never been diagnosed. And then I would say a good, a good portion of the people we work with have been diagnosed with IBS from their medical doctor. So would love to kind of get a gauge here. Feel free to share in the chat if you if you feel comfortable sharing. So let’s talk about it. IBS is, in my opinion, a BS diagnosis. So IBS stands for irritable bowel syndrome. Now when we look at a syndrome, a syndrome is just a group of symptoms that occur together.

Hannah Aylward (17:32.696)

So when we have IBS, it’s usually like cramping, bloating, gas, pain, irregular bowel movements. We can have diarrhea, constipation. We could have both, right? So we could have IBS C, IBS D, we could have like alternate IBS where you kind of waver between the two. Saying that your gut issues are just because you have IBS is like saying that your gut, that your bloating and your constipation diarrhea are because you have bloating and constipation and diarrhea. That doesn’t really make any sense, right?

So when they’re when they are diagnosing IBS, it’s really a diagnosis of exclusion. They’re looking to see, do you have any of this big stuff going on? So it’s usually colonoscopy, endoscopy, blood work, everything looks normal. Okay. Everything’s fine. You’re fine, right? There’s there’s nothing wrong. You just have IBS. We look at it a bit differently. Instead of going, okay, all this stuff came back normal, which is always a good thing. So I know it can be really frustrating when you go for your labs and they’re like, your colonoscopy is is normal. And you’re like almost hoping that they found something. I understand.

But just know it’s a good thing. Always go for your colonoscopy. It can save your life. And it’s a good thing when it comes back normal and with no, you know, notable findings. Now, where we come in is what happens after that? What happens after you go for the test? Things are normal and you’re still struggling. You’re you still look four months pregnant after eating anything, right? Or you have to unbutton your pants at the end of the day or whatever it might be. That’s where this deeper gut dysfunction comes into play.

So, in order to really overcome your IBS, we need to be looking at those underlying root causes that contribute to the bowels being irritable. So, here are some of the many root causes that can be at play here. So when we look at those with IBS, there was some research that showed that a huge percentage of these people had SIBO or small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. And I’m happy to answer more questions about this topic at the end of class too, if you have them.

There’s only so much I can cover in this class. It could be seven hours long. So if if you have questions about these specifics, just ask me at the end and I’ll I’ll get back to you. But we have sing things like SIBO, so where we get an overgrowth of bacteria in the small intestine, when the majority of our gut bacteria should be in the large intestine or the colon, right? So this happens. SIBO is really not a root cause in and of itself because we have to ask what led to the overgrowth of the small intestine in the first place.

Hannah Aylward (19:43.544)

So we have to always dig a bit deeper there. There are other things that can lead to that overgrowth taking place in the small intestine, but it’s very common when with those that have bacterial overgrowth, large intestine or small intestine, but definitely specifically small intestine, where you’ll be like really bloated and gassy. You really can’t tolerate fibers, you can’t tolerate FODMAPs, you know, that kind of thing, which is just fermentable carbohydrates. They’re good for our gut. We just need to be able to tolerate them. But this is absolutely something that can cause that bloat, that bloating pain and gas, right?

Then we have something like fungal overgrowth. You may have heard of something like candida. Candida is a naturally occurring part of our gut microbiome. It’s considered commensal in smaller levels. The gut microbiome is full of trillions of gut microbes, right? So we we don’t want it sterile. We don’t want to have inadequate levels of our good gut bugs. And these things are naturally occurring. Small amounts of H. pylori are naturally occurring. Small amounts of candida are naturally occurring. This is all kind of expected to be there. We run into issues when these things, when when we have higher levels of these things.

So fungal overgrowth can be an underlying root cause driver as well. Something like candida. It’s not always candida though. Then we also have certain gut infections like parasitic infections or a Helicobacter pylori infection, which is a bacteria that burrows into the stomach and it damages the parietal cells. That it it basically leads to lower stomach acid. And we can kind of get into more of that a little later too, but it can cause major digestive issues. Then we have leaky gut. We already spoke to that, right? So that can be the result of this other stuff going on. We can have microbial dysbiosis. So

More so in the large intestine, we can have different patterns here. We can have insufficiency dysbiosis where we don’t have enough of our good gut microbes. We can have an overgrowth of more opportunistic gut bacteria. We can also have an overgrowth of histamine-producing gut bacteria that presents like histamine overload when really it’s a deeper gut and liver issue in many cases. So imbalances in our gut bacteria can cause reactions to foods and things like bloating and constipation.

Then we have poor digestive output. So stomach acid, bile flow, enzyme production. This is how we break down and digest our food. If we are low in any of these, if we’re not producing adequate levels of these, if we’re having trouble here, you will feel bloated. You will feel gassy. You’ll have undigested food in your stool. Maybe you’re burping within 30 minutes of eating. You can’t break down your food efficiently. And that’s going to lead to dysbiosis later, like further down the chain in the gut.

Hannah Aylward (22:02.348)

Then we also have chronic stress and trauma. We’re gonna talk about the stress piece and how, like directly how that impacts your gut function in a couple more slides. So I’ll get into that. But usually when we’re looking at those that have quote unquote IBS or chronic digestive issues, we’re looking at a combination of a few of these things. It’s not usually one of these things, it’s many of these things present presenting at the same time because everything is connected. So for for an example here.

Say we work with someone and they have low stomach acid and poor bile flow. Maybe an H. pylori infection was contributing to that. So they have an infection, they have maldigestion, and then that’s leading to microbial overgrowth in the gut. And then that’s breaking down the gut barrier. That’s a couple of things at once, right? And also it usually happens that way because how everything impacts itself. Without adequate digestive output, we’ll have bacterial overgrowth. With bacterial overgrowth, we’ll have degradation of the gut barrier. Then we’ll throw in some stress into that. It’s like all of these things at once. So

This is why one supplement is like never gonna solve everything. A one elimination diet is never gonna solve everything. It shouldn’t overwhelm you. I hope it makes you feel relief because there’s so much more that we can do. You just kind of need like a more comprehensive approach when it comes to getting to the bottom of all of this. And what does this actually look like in real life? So as I mentioned, we’ve worked with like over 1200 people at this point. We’ve run lots of labs and we’ve built out lots and lots of protocols.

and we’ve coached a lot of people. So in the previous round of students in my gut repairing program, 58% of these people had been diagnosed with IBS from their doctors. So they went in, normal labs look fine, you have IBS, you know, take Linzest, take mirrorac, do a low FODMAP diet, whatever. So helpful. Thank you. That really helped me. Now, 36% of these people had a parasitic infection, 100% of these people had microbial dysbiosis, 83% of them had elevated levels of helicobacter pylori, and 25% of them had.

Candied overgrowth in the gut, too. And this is just one round, right? So this was a round of like 50 clients that we’ve worked with. And obviously we’ve worked with many more. So this does not represent all of the clients that we’ve worked with percentage-wise, but this is just one snapshot. When we’re looking at something like IBS and being told everything looks normal, what I want to say is we just haven’t really dug deep enough. We haven’t run the right labs and we haven’t dug deep enough to understand what is at the core of your chronic digestive issues.

Hannah Aylward (24:23.042)

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.