DIGESTION & MICROBIOME

Digestive disturbances can be some of the most disruptive symptoms that interfere with quality of life. From belching and flatulence to bloating and discomfort feeling “pregnant with a food baby” imbalance in your gut bacteria and food sensitivity can have you feeling all kinds of yuck and the aftermath is far from sexy. A majority of my success stories are those with digestive distress which often gets overlooked as IBS without seeking the root cause and thus “treated” with a blanket approach of antacids, laxatives, or antispasmodics which often drive more imbalance when temporarily silencing rather than resolving the symptoms.

START WITH THESE PROGRAMS

Beat the Bloat Candida Cleanse

When dealing with dysbiosis or imbalance in your gut bacteria, you have to kill off and cleanse the bad to reseed for the good probiotics.

My Beat the Bloat Candida Cleanse includes a 6 week program to reduce both yeast and dysbiosis (beyond yeast strains) using a therapeutic diet to starve off bacteria imbalance while supporting the liver and kidneys in detoxification. The program provides dietary guidelines, grocery lists, as well as lifestyle support and tips to cope with symptoms in my Beat the Bloat ebook. The program also includes the Candida Cleanse supplement bundle to provide pharmaceutical-grade support with pure potent formulas to yield results from even stubborn symptoms. The 6 week cleanse is followed by a Bacteria Rebuild supplement bundle and the incorporation of probiotic-rich foods to inoculate the probiotic strains in your microbiome as your body’s natural defense for immune and digestive support.

Optimal Gut Health

If looking to brush up on your knowledge and understanding of functional medicine approaches to digestion and gut health, start with my webinar!

If looking to brush up on your knowledge and understanding of functional medicine approaches to digestion and gut health, start with my recorded webinar on the 3 Functional Medicine Rs: Remove, Restore, Repair of Gut Health! From leaky gut and autoimmune disease, food sensitivities, diarrhea, constipation, bloating, yeast/bacterial overgrowth, and beyond, this webinar will cover the 3Rs of creating optimal gut health addressing a multitude of conditions. Learn about how to remove dietary irritants including foods and chemicals as well as biological irritants such as parasites, dysbiosis, and candida or other yeast strains. The role of a healthy gut lining plays a role in long-term repair and recovery, learn about bone broth, probiotics, and other therapeutic foods to heal your gut and lead to optimal outcomes.

If you have Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) such as Crohn’s or ulcerative colitis, consider skipping these programs and going right to a functional lab and starting with my Inflammatory Gut Bundle.

NOT SURE IF DYSBIOSIS IS YOU CONCERN? OR LOOKING FOR TANGIBLE DATA?

Take my Candida and Dysbiosis Quiz | Take my Probiotic Challenge

START WITH THESE SUPPLEMENTS FOR WEIGHT LOSS AND KETO

ADVANCED FUNCTIONAL LABS

The best way to get to the root cause of digestive distress is a stool test that looks at the microbiome, inflammation, leaky gut, and malabsorption. The Comprehensive Digestive Analysis panel looks at the strains of bacteria and yeast in the gut (the good, the bad, the neutral) as well as their end products of fermentation as short-chain fatty acids such as butyrate. The stool test also looks at clinical markers of inflammation including calprotectin (the primary disease marker for Inflammatory Bowel Diseases), and elevated immune response with lysozyme, lactoferrin, and white blood cells. Finally, this stool test looks at a marker for leaky gut called secretory IgA as well as malabsorption in stool with enzyme activity and undigested food particles. The add on of parasite assessment with the Comprehensive Digestive Analysis with 3-day Parasitology adds on the opportunity to assess parasite presence living or egg in your intestines and colon as well (this is recommended if digestive distress is associated after travel, time in natural waters, or time spent with food-borne illness). If a pathogenic (bad) bacteria or yeast strain are found in your results, we will also receive guidance on what natural and pharmaceutical agents will have most resistance as well as most success to tailor a cleanse for your body’s needs.

If you test positive for leaky gut with a low secretory IgA, your digestive distress is related to unknown food sensitivity reaction, or you are also dealing with inflammation or autoimmune activity, the Mediator Release Test (MRT) food sensitivity panel is the best entry point. This blood test is the only food sensitivity panel on the market that looks at results based on the inflammatory response in your body. Many food panels look simply at immunological tagging (IgG) that can often yield a false positive, the MRT test looks at 170 foods and chemicals and takes both IgG type 3 and 4 along with the presence of inflammatory chemicals (interleukins, cytokines, prostaglandins, etc.) to assess reactivity response. This panel is used as a GPS of your body where you will remove moderate reactions for 3 months and significant reactions for 6 months while limiting diet to known non-reactive foods, then progressing with an elimination diet reentry approach. As you heal the gut lining with specific supplement regimen and food-as-medicine you will become more resilient and less reactive to foods creating both food freedom and symptom resolution.

ADDITIONAL LEARNING BLOGS AND PODCASTS

Naturally Nourished Episode 105
Perfecting Your Poop

Do you deal with IBS, constipation or are your bowel movements all over the map? Wondering if your poop is normal? Want to learn how to perfect your poop? Tune in to hear Ali and Becki dive into the often overlooked topic of constipation and what your poop is telling you about your overall health!…

Naturally Nourished Episode 87
The Gut Brain Axis

Have you heard about the gut being the second brain of the body? Are you curious about the connection between gut health and anxiety? Want to know how to best support mental health starting with the gut? Tune in to hear Ali and Becki discuss the upcoming release of The Anti-Anxiety Diet and cover the…

Naturally Nourished Episode 60
Dysbiosis and the Microbiome

Did you know that the microbiome is made up of 100 trillion cells of bacteria and yeast that line the mouth, skin and gut? Curious about the role they play in our health? Want to know how to make your bacteria work in your favor? Tune in to hear Ali and Becki go down the…

Constipation and Perfecting Your Poop

CONSTIPATION AND PERFECTING YOUR POOP Having a daily bowel movement is so important to overall health and our poop can tell us so much about digestion, absorption, bacterial overgrowth and inflammatory status in the body! In the Naturally Nourished clinic, there is an entire section of a new client intake dedicated to digestion and 10+…

Elimination Diet 101

ELIMINATION DIET 101 While many of you are likely already avoiding gluten and processed and refined foods, it can be tricky to figure out what foods work for your body and which ones are truly driving bothersome symptoms like joint pain, GI distress or skin conditions. When starting with diet overhaul, we often use a basic Elimination…

DYSBIOSIS AND PROBIOTICS

DYSBIOSIS AND PROBIOTICS  The word probiotic, meaning “for life,” is a live microbial organism that is beneficial to health, having direct and indirect effects on the physiology of the body. In 1994, the World Health Organization claimed probiotics to be “the next-most important immune defense system when commonly prescribed antibiotics are rendered useless by antibiotic…