Gut Health: Your Key to Everyday Wellness

Everyone seems to be trying to “fix their gut” these days, from probiotics and kombucha to food eliminations and supplement routines. Yet many people still feel bloated, tired, or low in energy even when they are eating well. The real question is not just what we eat, but whether our gut is actually able to digest, absorb and use the nutrients we give it.

In this episode of The Wellness Algorithm, I am joined by Ashley Koff, a registered dietitian, integrative nutritionist, author of the upcoming book, Your Best Shot: The Personalized System for Optimal Weight Health—GLP-1 Shot or Not and founder of The Better Nutrition Program. Together, we cut through the noise around gut health. 

We explore how gut imbalances often show up beyond digestion, through skin, mood, energy, sleep, and hormones. We also talk about how learning to notice the body’s signals can lead to long term gut health.

To help you understand the tools mentioned in this conversation, here are some of the key assessments and tests discussed:

• Digestive Assessment Questionnaires: To identify issues with motility, digestion, absorption and elimination
• Bristol Stool Scale: To understand bowel patterns
• Stool Tests: Commonly used to look at gut function and balance
• Food Allergy and Food Intolerance Tests:  To understand why they can be misleading when the gut is irritated
• Leaky Gut and Gut Irritation Testing 

This episode is not about quick fixes or perfect diets. It is about understanding how your gut works so you can make more informed choices.

📌 Follow us for more expert-led conversations where science meets self-care.

Transcript

Anshu Bahanda: Imagine this scenario. You're eating all the right foods, you're consuming your greens, you're taking all the supplements that you need to, yet you're feeling bloated, you're feeling tired, you're feeling irritable, your skin is breaking out, your mood is dipping. And no matter how hard you try, something just doesn't feel right. You start wondering, is it stress? Is it hormones? Do I need more water? Do I need more sleep? What if the real reason lies deep within your gut? The gut is not just where digestion happens. It's a living ecosystem, home to trillions of microbes that communicate with your brain, they influence your immune system and they affect your hormones.

Research from the National Institute of Health has shown that 90% of serotonin, that's the happiness hormone, is produced in the gut, not in the brain. This means your mood, your focus, your energy is all deeply connected to what is happening in your digestive system. When your gut is out of balance, everything feels off. Your skin, your sleep, your sense of calm. But when it's in harmony, your body runs like it's meant to run. Clear, strong, full of life. This is Anshu Bahanda from Wellness Curated, and today we're talking about gut health, your key to everyday wellness. From digestion and immunity to mood and metabolism, we will explore how the health of your gut influences every part of your life and what you can do to support it every single day.

Welcome to Wellness Curated, where wellness is not fixed. It evolves as we do with every new experience in every season of our lives. In this episode, we're turning our focus inwards to one of the most fascinating and overlooked systems in the body, the gut. It's more than a place where food is broken down. It's the foundation of our energy, our immunity, and our emotional well being. The ancient systems understood this really well, like Ayurveda and Chinese medicine. And to help us understand this incredible inner world, I'm joined by Ashley Koff. She's a registered dietitian, integrative nutritionist, and founder of The Better Nutrition Program. She's recently written a book and she spent years helping people create lasting health by understanding their unique gut needs. She is also the author of the upcoming book, Your Best Shot: The Personalized System for Optimal Weight Health—GLP-1 Shot or Not. Before we begin, a small request. Please subscribe to the podcast. It's free and it helps us to continue to bring you meaningful science-backed conversations that make wellness simpler and more personal. Thank you. Good morning Ashley, how are you? 

Ashley Koff: I'm wonderful, thank you. How are you? 

AB: Thank you for waking up so early in the morning to do this.

AK: Yeah, totally. Well, it's very fortunate because in the States we had the fallback, like daylight saving. I got an extra hour, so I'm fine. 

AB: Okay, wonderful. So, Ashley, tell me, what does gut health actually mean? There's this buzzword that everyone is talking about at the moment about gut health, but most people think it's only about digestion. How will you explain it? 

AK: Yeah, I think that when we understand that the body is an operating system and then we focus on the gut as the enabler of all of those operations, we start to understand the massive, complex, but actually very simple way that the gut works, you know, throughout the body, essentially. You know, we think a lot about nutrition, and nutrition gives our body X. So if I eat protein, I have muscles, you know, if I take in fat, I build hormones. But it's really the process of that, the gut, that when we take in those, that food, the gut turns it into nutrients and then enables it to get to the cells for usage and at the same time, it's also a vetting system to say, is this actually even going to be okay for my body? And if it's not, then it's part of the elimination or even the immune system. So when we think about it in that way, we really aren't what we eat. You know, in the States, we say you are what you eat, but we aren't. We are what we digest and absorb and that we want to make sure that we're eliminating what we no longer use. So in my book, I actually break down digestion into four parts. So we look at motility, the digestive tract's ability to move because it moves things along, breaking down.

So it takes protein and it makes it into amino acids, or it takes fats and it makes it into the fatty acids. And then it might help rebuild those absorption, which interestingly is not just about being absorbed through the lining of the digestive tract, but it's, you know, through the oral cavity. And then also about hydration. And then the final part would be eliminated on that piece. So the gut might, when we think about our gut, we really want to think about it as the core of the operating system of the body. 

AB: Oh, wow, I like that. Core of the operating system. So tell me, what are some of the early signs that our gut might be out of balance? You know, the sort that might appear and we'll ignore them, thinking there's something else or mistaking them for something else.

AK: Yeah, I love that. And we've even been marketed to actually override or cover them up. You know, so when we use deodorant or when we take mints, right. Or we use mouthwash, like these things actually are, they help us not notice, unfortunately, some of those early signals and those can build up. So, and I actually have these assessment questions and they're free for anyone to, to go through and, and do, but what we want to do is we want to pay attention to all the ways that our gut could be sending us those signals. So probably the most blatant ones are if things are not going, if they're going too quickly or if they're going in the wrong direction. So if you're not pooping, or if your poop doesn't look a certain way, or if it feels really hard to eliminate, then that's going to actually tell us that there are some early signals.

If you are moving things through too quickly, if you have loose stools or diarrhea, that's going to be a key digestive sign. And then if you have reflux, if you notice things that are coming up so they're going the wrong way, that's really important. A set of signals that we don't pay attention to are the ones that I talked about, you know, that we tend to override or try to cover up are the way that we smell. So under our body odor, mouth changes in mouth odor, gas, so it's okay if we have gas, you know, things can make us gassy. But when our gas smells a certain way, if it smells more putrid, more stinky, that's going to give us good information. And then probably where people don't associate it at all are all the issues with our skin.

So if you have acne, if you have it on your shoulders, you have it on your backside, you have it on your face, if you notice changes in your skin, if you notice changes underneath your eyes, right, that's also going to tell us. And then some of the ones that we definitely, and even I think a lot of medicine doesn't associate with the gut are things like your blood sugar. So when your blood sugar is going higher, low, your gut is related to your hydration status. So when your hydration isn't better and then even things like your hair, skin and nails, your energy, your mood, the list can go on and on. And so that's really important for us to understand again, the potential, how the gut is core to our overall operating system.

AB: Thank you for that. Ashley, I want to ask you about a couple of things you mentioned. One is, I mean a lot actually. We grew up with this whole system of Ayurveda in India. I grew up in India and we were told to actually look at our poop. Which sounds disgusting, but you've just, you know, confirmed that.

AK: Yes, yeah. There's something called the Bristol scale that we look at. And I love Ayurveda. It's one of my favorite approaches to medicine. Because what we look at and in Ayurveda is, we look at imbalances. So where imbalances are showing up and you can see that in your poop. Now the one thing we don't need to do is we don't need to give too much attention to any, an initial change in our poop. Like so there are going to be days when we eat certain things, we might have looser poop or it might be a little bit more greasy or it could be more dry. But you know, after three to four days if something is occurring. So I usually have people assess this over the course of a week. I recall even having a patient who came in, he had taken this, years and years ago, so different technology. But he had taken a picture of his poop and brought it in to show me.

He was, so, he was just like a 70-year-old man and he was so proud of his poop, you know, and said, look, you know, and now there are even apps that, that you know, have you, like, you, you can show your poop next to the app and see, how, how it, how it compares. So it is really important that we pay attention for sure.

AB: Now Ashley, the other thing you mentioned was acne. Now, as we know a lot of teenagers get acne. How can you relate that to the gut? Is there something very quickly that you can tell me that they can do which will help them? 

AK: Well, so first let's understand the operating system, then let's look at what that means for what to do. And I want to be careful to never, when it comes to our gut, we want to understand the root cause, what's really going on. And so you don't want to just prescribe. So anyone listening, I don't want you to say, oh, I'm going to have my teenage son or daughter do this. What I want us to do is to do the assessment and then understand what's actually going on. But one of the things to note is that our sex hormones, so estrogen, testosterone, progesterone, when those are shifting, they throw our digestion off course. So there's an interrelationship between them. 

So, number one, when we're teenagers, we might not be eating in a way that nourishes our gut. We also may be experiencing stress and other things that impact our gut. We haven't talked about that yet, but we do want to understand that when we have hormonal shifts and puberty is a time of significant hormonal shifts, then our gut is going to be impacted. And equally, our gut shifting or things happening in our gut will impact our sex hormones, right? So what we do with teenagers is we want to understand, first of all, does my gut have what it needs to run better? So if I'm experiencing a tremendous amount of tension or stress, and sometimes this is very intentional. So I have a lot of teenagers who play sports. When you play sports, you have these bouts of very high intensity stress moments that contract the digestive system. It slows it down. It might even stop for a time period. We need to make sure that we're relaxing those muscles. So that's where magnesium comes into play. So maybe they're not getting enough magnesium. Maybe we need to look at food choices, you know, and look at that piece. 

At the same time, we may also have been on and we may actually use antibiotics because we're thinking those are better for our skin. Or we may be using birth control in the case of young women to help regulate cycles that are, that are off. And those could be impacting the lining of the digestive tract. 

We could have also been using things like tylenol or advil or aspirin, which could also be a factor. And then it's really important to note that again, food choices for kids can sometimes be what we call more acid forming. So maybe more meat, more cheese, more sugar, and less of things like greens and alkaline formers, you know, fruits like a kiwi or, you know, a watermelon or an apple, you know, things that will just be a little bit calmer to the system. And maybe they're having coffee and soda instead of having water, you know, and that. And they're dehydrated as a result. So it can be multifactorial, but before we start down a path of medicating acne, whether that's topically or systemically, you know, taking something in orally, we want to make sure that we start off with an assessment of the gut and then can look to do some repair work. 

And I will do things with amino acids. There's one particular amino acid like glutamine, which is so important for the lining of the digestive tract. That and the right probiotics may actually help nourish the gut lining. You might still need medication or you might still have bouts of, you know, where you want to use something topically. But we aren't doing something that is also going to be harming our gut and harming our gut from a longer standpoint on that piece. 

AB: Okay, thank you for that. I also want to ask you about the gut brain connection because you know, it's talked about a lot that the gut is our second brain. Now, can you explain how the gut communicates with our brain and how this actually affects our mood, our focus, our mental health? 

AK: Yeah. So important. So one of what connects our brain to our gut, I mean, there are many pieces, but there's one nerve called the vagus nerve. And we really want to understand how important it is to nourish and nurture our vagus nerve, because our vagus nerve is going to send signals from the brain to the gut, but it also is going to pick up things. One example of what it picks up are the hormones, the peptide hormones that I call our weight health hormones, GLP-1 ((Glucagon-Like Peptide-1) which we know is also now done as a mimic, some, a biosimilar hormone replacement such as ozempic or semaglutide, GIP, PYY, CCK, and then throughout the nerve, there's also a bunch of serotonin receptor sites and throughout our digestive tract.

And so when we have serotonin receptor sites in the gut, those are neurotransmitters. So there's a lot of communication that is occurring between the brain and the gut. And what we want to make sure is that the signals get to the gut in a timely manner. And then whatever the gut is sending out to the brain either gets to the receptor sites or gets to the receptor sites in the brain. You know, in terms of that. So it's, when we think about that, it's not so much that our gut is actually the second brain, because I think they, in my opinion, do things very differently. The other part is the gut is so massive that it's hard to think about it, you know, as another brain. But I do think that they have a lot of similarities. One similarity is that the lining of the gut, the lining of the digestive tract, we call that the mucosal layer, protects us. It's where our immune system is. It's also where these hormones are deployed from. It's very metabolically active. It's responsible for helping make sure that nutrients are absorbed and go where, where they're supposed to go. And that goes throughout, from our mouth all the way out through the anus. So it's like all along it's that tubing. 

Well, in the brain, we also have the blood brain barrier, and that keeps certain things from passing, and it protects our brain cells, you know, inside of the brain. So there are a lot of similarities. But what we're really trying to do is make sure the two dance together, right?

That, anything that comes in, you know, when I see something, when I smell something, when I taste something, those signals get sent down to the gut. Otherwise, if we break them up and they don't get sent down there successfully, then the gut doesn't get the action required that then doesn't send out the hormones, and the hormones don't get to the receptor sites. So it is a very, what I'll call symbiotic relationship.

AB: Right. You know, when people are trying to fix their gut, sometimes they'll cut out foods or a food group. Sometimes they'll take huge amounts of supplements. What would you say are some of the mistakes that people make? What would you like to warn people about that they shouldn't do?

AK: Yeah, well, this is 25 years of helping people rebuild their guts. But it started off with me. I had a belly as a young kid. It was, like, cute until I was about 10. And then I was a fat kid. You know, I got called fat because I had a belly. And then I tried all these things. I tried all the dieting, right? I tried avoiding food, all food, right? And then I tried avoiding specific foods. It wasn't at a time where we were supplementing so much, but I really tried manipulating my diet with, you know, manipulating my diet a lot. 

And then I also focus on exercise. And medically, they kept telling me there was nothing wrong with me but my digestion. I had been on so many antibiotics that I had weakened the lining of my digestive tract, and I had almost no good bacteria in there. But the problem was each suggestion, you know, eat fibre to feel full or don't have carbohydrates. When I stopped having carbohydrates, I no longer was getting enough magnesium. That actually slowed my digestive tract even further and I was really stressed out and it didn't allow me any relaxation. So it contributed to panic attacks, which also contributed to my gut feeling worse, right? Which ultimately led to my skin looking worse. And then I tried skin medication. So you can see where we can really go down a path of, you know, avoiding things isn't the issue. I actually, at the end of the day, a very, unsuccessful dramatic cleanse.

I did a seven day goat's milk-only cleanse because some wow told me, yeah, it was crazy, raw goat's milk. And it was, I had 40 ounces a day and she told me I had a worm in my body and I was going to kill the worm. And I. It sounds so insane, but I was so desperate. I had tried everything, you know? And so at the end of that, I ended up randomly meeting a gastroenterologist who was trained as more as somebody who actually had some background in Ayurveda, Chinese medicine, who was trained a little bit more integratively.

He said something really important to me and this was at age 20 and changed the trajectory of my life and my career. He said to me, it's not what you're eating or what you're not eating. Your body, your gut doesn't have what it needs to run better. So what I encourage each of you to do is to go out there and find out if your gut has what it needs to run better. Now I'm so passionate about this and today we have all of these tools and each one of them has a publicist. So each one of them is telling you that they are it, like they are the solution. There is no one tool that is a solution, nothing, no one thing was what repaired my gut or any of my patients. But what we need to do is, we need to figure out what's actually going on for you. And that's why in this book, in Your Best Shot and also, you know, free on my website, et cetera, we have a digestive assessment that then tells us where to look.

So as an example, the mistakes that people make are, number one, they'll be constipated and they'll try fibre. And it turns out that their constipation is actually that the gut isn't moving and that we need to move the body more, or that maybe we need more magnesium for it to be able to relax. And maybe we need to adjust our calcium and our iron. Or maybe we're taking in too much coffee, and the coffee is actually moving things through, and we need to actually pull back on the coffee if we have loose stools, you know, or these kinds of things. And if I'm not breaking protein down successfully, maybe I need to look at how I'm chewing, you know? 

Maybe I need to double the amount of time that I'm chewing. Maybe I need to breathe more. Maybe I actually need to give my gut more digestive enzymes. Maybe I need to reduce a proton pump inhibitor. So there's a lot of things. Many people today, and many practitioners, unfortunately, will also just do a gut test. They'll do a stool test, or they'll do an allergy test. And it's actually in the States, it's available for you, to just order one yourself and then go get the results. The problem with this is these do tend to pinpoint. They say, what is your body allergic to?

What is your body intolerant to? And I will get people coming into my office, they've spent, you know, anywhere from a hundred to $600 on a test, and they're panicking, they're freaking out because the test showed them that they're allergic to everything that they're eating. When your gut is irritated, it doesn't like anything you're putting into it. So if you get test results that come back that match literally what you have for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, or what you have most days, it's telling me that your gut is irritated, right? So then we have to get to the core of irritation. We have to look at things like alcohol. Is alcohol contributing to inflammation in my gut or challenging my liver? You know, do I have a history of medications? What am I doing from a hormone standpoint? And could that be, you know, impacting it? And how can I start that repair work? So, you know, there are several different models for how to repair the gut.

But I think when you ask the question of what's the most important thing to avoid, the avoidant is thinking that there is a one size fits all or any gut solution. And the other thing that I challenge everybody to do, recognizing how often our gut is changing, you should be assessing your gut health. And I call it a digestive assessment. And every single quarter, just like you're changing your clothes when the seasons change, so that you stay in front of it, and really identify when there are challenges, yeah. 

AB: So, Ashley, you've given us so much information. Thank you for that in that one answer. So I'm going to ask you a bit, I'm going to ask you to explain bit One: you said that when you, you were on antibiotics a lot and that affected your gut. So for people who are on antibiotics and I, you know, a lot of children, for various things have been put on antibiotics, what would you say is the best way to help sort out the side effects of the antibiotics? Would you say it's to take a good probiotic pill? Would you say something else? 

AK: Great question. Yeah. So there's a difference. And I am not against antibiotics. They save lives. I'm against overusing them or inappropriate use of them or not using them, not figuring out how to, to counter the side effects of the, or the effects of the antibiotic. So number one, recognize that antibiotics, and these can be topical or oral, that they do go in and they get rid of anything that could be challenging. The intention is for them to get rid of the bad bacteria, but they also get rid of our better bacteria, of our good bacteria. 

So, you mentioned probiotics. So we can replace probiotics, but there's a caution there. And if we only replace the probiotics and we don't look at the gut lining, that mucosal layer and we don't repair that, you know, things like getting in glutamine, using things like bone broth or, you know, getting in good quality meats, or if we don't consume meats, really looking at things like our avocado and our hemp seeds and others that have nutrients and fatty acids that can help with the repairing the lining of the digestive tract.

Antibiotics can increase inflammation in the gut, so we want to work on reducing that or resolving that inflammation. And that's where fish can come into play. Really good quality fish and fish oils and something called pro resolving mediators, which is, is what's found in fish. It's where the omegas have gone through an enzyme reaction. So I look at the key things for me, typically with a digestive tune up would be glutamine as an amino acid. It's the glue for the lining of the digestive tract, magnesium to make sure we have motility. And then when we come in and look at the probiotics, we want to look at strain specificity. So Bifidobacterium are very grounding. Bifidobacteria is like the quarterback. So you want to make sure you're getting in some Bifido. And Bifido usually is not found in most foods, and certainly not in enough diversity and quantity.

So that's one I often will supplement with. Then there are different strains of lactobacilli that may be helpful in that part. And then even in the lining of the digestive tract, we have things like Akkermansia, mucinophilia, we have clostridium. So you start to get in a place where you're like, well, Ashley, like, you know, which one do I take? You shouldn't, you probably shouldn't try to figure that out yourself. I do in my book have some guidance, but this is where working with a practitioner is really helpful because there are even beneficial yeast. So something called, when we look at Saccharomyces Boulardi or we look at you know, that coming in and that might be actually what we need to be to help you, especially if we're noticing more loose stool or we've noticed, you know, that you know that things feel out of balance in that capacity.

So just using a probiotic is not going to address it. And we can get probiotics in food, but the food sources also need to be ones that are better for our gut. So as an example, in India you have beautiful yogurt. In the States we have a lot of yogurt that is very processed, highly pasteurized, you know, comes with artificial or non-nutritive sweeteners, you know, and may also be fat-free. So shifting how our body responds to it, you know, etc. And I'm not saying you don't have those in India, right?

But for some people the casein really isn't well absorbed. Yeah, that's not better for digestion. So in that case, a supplement might be more helpful than say turning, you know, directly to, to turning to the yogurt. So my advice in that space is also there's something really important to pay attention to when you're on the antibiotic you can absolutely do all these things to nurture you and you're trying to help your body feel better. So alkaline formers, you know, lemons, limes, olive oil, like you know, really, really supports the body. But for about six weeks after, you really want to limit your intake of the acid formers, in particular added sugars because the sugar feeds, it's the easiest food for bad bacteria.

So if you can, if you can pace yourself to restore your gut, and give your got the time for those new bacteria to grow and to thrive and to root by not giving, putting a lot of added sugar into the body which would feed the bad bacteria, that's going to be better for you.

And if those six weeks after the antibiotic you can also recognize that you're more likely to take in bad bacteria and just practice simple things. Take your shoes off when you come in the house, wash your hands, you know, use, you know, you know, look at like if you're you know out and like I go to a lot of fitness centres out, you know and I might share a mat or I might share machines or things like that or I'm traveling, I might wrap a scarf around my neck, you know, around my mouth or wear a mask, you know, different things like that to try to reduce your exposure to other bacteria. That's going to really help you longer term from a healing standpoint. 

AB: So when we're talking about, I was going to ask you about three simple things that you can do to make a real difference. So would you say that some of these are when you're saying when you're out and about. One of them you said was to cut sugar, right?

AK: Yeah, yeah. Don't replace it. Okay, so cut. So here's what I want to be clear. Cut the added sugar, reduce the added sugar. Look, I love manuka honey, a little bit of maple syrup, that kind of thing. But one to two teaspoons in a day is going to be the absolute mass max for you. And when you're immediately post antibiotic, I don't recommend any. But don't replace it with non-nutritive sweeteners. Don't replace it with stevia or monk fruit. Go to your foods, your sweet potato, your oranges, your apples, your pears, you know, use cinnamon. Things that help things naturally taste sweet. So that's number one. Number two is to actually optimize your hydration so that you're actually supporting your body's ability to bring nutrients around the body and to eliminate, you know, what isn't better. So that's pit stopping about every three hours for eight to 10 ounces of water and it may be adding an electrolyte, adding maybe a pinch of salt and some lemon to your water or maybe an electrolyte supplement depending on how else you get minerals on that piece.

And then the third one, as I mentioned, well, ooh, the third one would be tough. Remember I said to be more conscious of what's in the environment. But I'll tell you the tried and true is getting enough sleep. So if you focus on your sleep. But what's interesting is a lot of us are mouth breathers at night. So one of the things that's very popular now is to actually do a mouth taping. And a lot of. Yes, yeah, immediately following, you know, being sick. Like not when you're coughing or, you know that. Because I don't, I don't want it to be dangerous for you. But once you feel better, you may want to employ that mouth taping or do what you can to have your room, your environment, you know, be a little bit more helpful to try to reduce some of that mouth breathing and try to really learn to do nose breathing on that part. Yeah. 

AB: Okay. So you said cut down on sugar, try to do nose breathing and hydration. Those are the three things which could make a difference to your gut on an everyday basis.

AK: Yes.

AB:  What about food? Can you tell me what are the best kinds of foods to support the gut and what do you say would harm you? Even though, you know, there's foods that people think are healthy, but they actually may not be. 

AK: Yeah, I will say that. So number one, every gut is individual and every culture, like what your body may resonate with and also what's delicious to you may be a little bit different, but we can just draw a line in the sand. All the foods that exist in nature themselves, those are going to be good for your body. There's a role for them. So all the different colors, there's a role for them. What's not better for you are colors that are made in a chemistry lab. So synthetic artificial colors, and the reason for that is they don't bring you any of the good antioxidants, excuse me, any of the plant nutrients that we find in all the, the colors in nature. On the other hand, those things that are made in the lab, the body may get irritated by. Right. They may be problematic, but things like meats and cheeses and dairy, like in the right quantities for your body, though if they're good quality, your body should know how to use them.

And so the whole variety is out there. We all need a variety of plants, so every one of us needs to be plant-based. The question is, do you need to be plant-monogamous? Do you need to get rid of all animal products? And I don't agree with that. I think, you know, around the world and in individual homes, some people really like, they find it very efficient, they find it very enjoyable to get in their proteins, their fats, et cetera, from things like, you know, lamb and goat and cow and sheep and, you know, like all of these different. Whether it's meat or, you know, dairy, that's fine. We just have to have that counterbalance or that foundation in plants and be able to get that in.

Now, the second place where there's an issue is if you take something in nature and you transform it by way of processing. So if I take wheat as an example, which everybody's like, oh, gluten, stay away from. We probably have too much gluten.

Like, we've. We've really hybridized in the States, especially our wheat. But, you know, we can have our wheat where it has a lot of gluten. But really, what's more harmful about that is, number one, what's been sprayed on it. You know, whether there's glyphosate or there's other, you know, environmental toxins that have been used as part of the growth.

But really, when you process it and you go from a shaft of wheat in nature to white refined flour, or what wheat call enriched flour, which really gets me going, where, you know, it's. It's had all the nutrients removed from it, you see an 80% decrease in magnesium alone, right?

So we see these changes. We see that what was protective about the wheat, the fibre in there, the essential fatty acids, the proteins, that's all meant to be in wheat in that flour, and it's gone, right? And many of the trace minerals, the amounts of minerals. So the key thing to look at, I mentioned this with yogurt before. When we take full fat yogurt and we go through the processing of where we pull out all of the fat from it, we change the way that it works in the body. So one of my, favorite people, an old podcast partner of mine, Robin, o', Brien, she, you know, said in her very early on, because she was really exploring children and allergies, because she had a child that had a ton of allergies, and she said, are we allergic to food or what's been done to it?

And I think that's a really good line for us to look at. So instead of beating up on, like, the potato or trying to determine, you know, are chia seeds better than flax seeds? That's not the issue. It's what we have done to them, you know, by the time they're going into our mouth. 

AB: Yes, yes. And that's a very, very important point about how we process them and exactly what has been done to it. Because we were meant to be able to consume what nature has. We are. We're not meant to be, you know, I mean, people did. All through the generations, people have just consumed it. But I also want to ask you about stress. I know my gut goes for a six when I'm stressed. How exactly does that work? And, you know, I'm someone who does yoga, I do pranayama, I do breathwork, I do meditation, and even then, my gut goes for a six. Do you have any suggestions as to how when life gets overwhelming, how can I calm my gut? 

AK: Yeah. So one of the things that we have not done a better job of is not explaining the relationship between stress and our gut. Because I think all of us would probably live a little bit differently if we understood it, you know, that well. So remember I talked about the vagus nerve. So when our vagus nerve feels unsafe, there are at least five different ways. My colleague, Dr. Nawaz Habib wrote this book, upgrading your vagus nerve. And he talks about five ways, five forms of safety. So we all have traumas. From our lived experience, we may be experiencing acute traumas, like, you know, in the moment. Our vagus nerve may not have enough of the nutrients. They may. Our body may have a limited amount, and so our vagus nerve isn't being fed. But our vagus nerve may also be experiencing the stress that we're taking in from our own thoughts. Or from our sight or from, you know, from, from, from our experience. When that happens, messages don't get where they're supposed to go. So they don't go from the brain to the gut or the gut is supposed to secrete and take to the brain or take elsewhere in the body. That doesn't happen effectively. So that's one effect. The second effect is when we experience stress in a cell, we have calcium that comes into the cell, and in our cells we should have magnesium. And that magnesium should kick the calcium back out when stress occurs. And calcium comes into the cells that creates tension. So think of it like a flexed muscle. When magnesium kicks it out, it relaxes.

That's how our heart muscles pumps. And that's also how our digestive tract moves. So whenever you're experiencing stress, your digestive tract is not moving effectively. And then research has also shown that when we are experiencing stress, the types of bacteria that are able to thrive versus the ones that don't survive in our gut and in our gut lining, and also that stress impacts the leakiness of our gut lining. So there are so many different places in the body. I haven't even touched on, you know, the immune system and all of the other pieces that occur as a result. So what we've done is we've said with stress, you know, we've talked about how to do these behaviors. And we tend to think about things like breathing or meditation or other things very much like we think about exercise. I'm going to do them for 30 minutes or 10 minutes or 15 minutes, like once a day. But the reality is that our body is experiencing stress all throughout the day, right?

Some of it is even great stress of our own making. I could be really excited and nervous about doing this podcast and I could be stressed out, or I could go to the gym and work out really hard. And that produces stress. And so we want to remember that all of these stress experiences are constantly happening. So the number one thing that you can do, in my opinion, is to, number one, decode your body signals for elevated stress. So for me, it's that my shoulders go up, I start to breathe from about here on up, I am not breathing in my belly.

I talk very fast, and I'm not taking in a breath on that part. So when those things are happening, I start to notice that I'm more stressed, right? And I'll like you, I'll notice it too. In my belly, I might feel a little bit more bloated or like just a little distended, you know, in that regard. So when those things are happening. Oh, and I should also mention, I get a little bit of a racy mind. Like, and I'm maybe not the nicest to myself, right? So when those things happen, I pause. I do something called a stress check in. On a scale of 1 to 10, what is my stress experience right now? And I've defined what one looks like for me. I've defined what a ten looks like for me. And I kind of have a sense of what a 4, 5 or 6 looks like. If I'm a 7 or greater, I have to do an intervention at that moment. I need to laugh, I need to, to do some intentional breathing. Like maybe three rounds of 478 or box breathing.

I need to, maybe, you know, pet the dog or, you know, release some oxytocin. I need to step away from the computer. And this is a really important one. I need to acknowledge that the thing that is inspiring stress in me right now is something that is out of my control. So many of us today, with the way the world is and with the way we have access to information, we're stressed about things over which we have almost no or have absolutely no control. We need to take those and we need to like, move them away. Like we're, you know, literally moving dirt away off of a floor and we want to try to bring our stress back down. So like, what do I do to help my shoulders lower, right? Is it the question, or how do I, you know, change the pacing of things, and be able to do that? We have to do that throughout the day. So I challenge, and invite everybody to really think about your body like a race car.

So a race car goes, it starts off, it has everything that it needs, and it runs three laps. I'll just say three laps. It runs a couple of laps, it stops and you pit stop. And it gets refreshed, right? The whole team comes around it and it refreshes everything and then it goes and does a couple of laps. So I invite you to think about your day in about three hour increments and every three hours at minimum, check in on your stress, reset your breathing, have some water, do some movement, nourish your body with, you know, something that's nutrient balanced on that part. Step away from what you're doing and come back to it. You know, any of these things, so that what doesn't happen is by 5-6 PM in your day, you have an accumulation. You might have started off with a great meditation, but if you're not checking back in on your stress until 5pm your whole day, your digestion has gone suboptimally.

And that's a lot of why we maintain belly weight. We are, you know, our immune system gets suppressed and we get sick, we don't sleep as well. You know, all of these things because we, we don't end up dealing with them, you know, later in the day on that part.

AB:  Ashley, I have two more questions for you which we address very quickly because we're kind of running out of time. One, are hormones in the gut? I'd love you to talk to me, especially for women, you know, during their cycle time, or during menopause. How does the gut get affected? How does that affect the hormones? And how do the hormones then affect the gut again? So the relationship between them. 

AK: So first of all, remember that in the lining of our digestive tract, we make our weight health hormones, GLP1, GIP, P Y Y, CCK these are really important because their sole job is to tell other hormones to go to work. So they do things like they go to our brain and tell leptin and ghrelin, and so they affect our appetite and our hunger. They go to our, our, blood sugar and they tell insulin and glucagon. They go to our bones and they tell hormones and nutrients, you know, and, and impact our bone building. They go to our muscles, you know, etc. So they're playing a very important role. And when we have a suboptimal amount where we have too much or too little of things like estrogen or testosterone or progesterone, our gut isn't functioning better.

Remember, it's that it is the core operating system. So in that time period, what will end up happening is as a perimenopausal woman, or even as a young girl or, a young boy, you might see that you're putting on belly weight, right? And you're. Maybe you were thin before, but now you have a belly. Or maybe you've battled your weight your whole life and you're like, oh my gosh, my belly is even worse right now. Or for the first time ever, you notice that your blood sugar is elevated or your cholesterol is off. So these are signals that your, your, what we tend to refer to as your sex hormones, but they do so much more in the body. Your sex hormones and your weight health hormones are not working better. So what we want to do is come back in and come to the gut. That's why I love this conversation that we're having. Every time I'm working with a perimenopausal woman or a man who is experiencing low testosterone, I'm always coming back to the gut and I'm building up from the gut.

And then if we use hormone replacement therapy, if we, if we realize, you know what, my body's not able to produce enough of this and I want to come in and use that, then my body is going to be able to receive it and also eliminate it. Now, I do also need to support detoxification. We don't have to get into that, but it's very important to make sure that we understand that part of our body's ability to eliminate things is our ability to change toxins that are fat soluble into ones that are water soluble and can be eliminated. When you think of your sex hormones, think of them as tied to your gut function. They will affect your gut function and they are affected by your gut function. So really, the first place for you to focus is on that optimization of your gut. 

AB: Wonderful. And, my last question to you is, if you are going to design your own wellness algorithm for gut health, what would be the three core pillars you'll include for better digestion and for overall vitality?

AK: Yeah. Wow. Well, it's difficult to say three. You've just met me and I've said, like, we got to assess everything, you know, but I think the most important thing would be to timestamp it. And what I mean by that is, the algorithm would be to wake up every day. And there are some things I look at every day, some things I look at monthly, some things quarterly. But to ask my body and pick up on the signals, what's going on with my body, and then make the choices that align with what my body needs on that part. So instead of waking up every day and being like, every morning I have these supplements and every day I have this espresso, and every day I do this. Really lean into what is better for my body today. You know, what, what does it need? So that's number one. Number two, I learned this. I am not good at this. So this is a good one for me to listen to and take my own advice. Set and keep the same bedtime every night and try to have it be about two to three hours after you've finished eating at least like, you know, at least that range.

So the key thing with setting the same bedtime is that even a variance of about 30 minutes will impact how well your body actually recovers. So if, you know, if you go to bed at 10 pm weekends and the weekdays, every single night, over the course of three or six months, you will notice a change in your body's ability to do all its recovery work. You know, and that piece and then the third one is something you might not have expected from me. But I think some of the worst choices that we make for our body are because they are not ones that are delicious to us at the moment. Somebody else has told us that they are healthy for us or they are better for us. So delicious might be an incredible workout. Delicious might be saying, yes, I want the burger, or yes, I want the chocolate, you know, et cetera. Now, we still have to employ principles of better nutrition. But again, on a scale of 1 to 10, if something isn't delicious to me, if it's not a seven or greater, what ends up happening is the hormones in our body don't get the messages.

We don't go from our brain to our gut. And we don't tend to feel full. We don't tend to feel satisfied, right? If I'm told that I should do a workout because it's going to help me get skinny, and I go, and I don't enjoy myself while I'm doing my head, like all of this, it's just not better. So when we make choices that really feel delicious to us in the moment, our body actually is going to respond more favorably. 

AB: So you're saying go for things that give you joy? I totally agree with you. 

AK: Yes. Yeah, yeah. Deliciousness and joy are totally tied to each other.

AB: Yeah. Okay, so now we're going to do something fun. It's called, gut feel. So I'm going to ask you a question, and it's like a rapid fire round. And you say, yes, please or no, thank you, and tell me why very quickly. Coffee on an empty stomach?

AK: No, thank you. Too acidic. I typically like to have some fuel in my body before I slam it into overdrive. 

AB: Probiotics in a capsule or on a plate?

AK: Ooh. Both. I say both. 

AB: Yeah. Okay. And why? 

AK: Well, the probiotic on a plate may not actually give me the strain specificity that I need at a particular time. And what stuck me with a capsule, sometimes I like powder probiotics too, you know, so. But a supplemental one can help. 

AB: Yeah. Late night snacking? 

AK: No, thank you. Too much digestive work for my body. And so as a result, it's not able to do the recovery work it needs to do while sleeping.

AB: Daily Kombucha?

AK: No, thank you. 

AB: Ooh. And why is that? 

AK: So the quality of probiotics in kombucha is, It's wild. Like, we just don't know. There's so much variety there. But the bubbles and the sugar and the little bit of alcohol aren't better for my digestion. They might be fine for yours, but they're not better for my digestion. 

AB: Listening to your gut, physically or emotionally? 

AK: That depends. The problem is that if your gut is dysregulated and we listen to it, we may not make good choices. When our gut is aligned and better and optimized, listening to it makes a lot of sense. 

AB: Okay, thank you. Thank you, Ashley. That was a fascinating conversation. Very practical. I'm sure a lot of people will find it very useful. I think Ashley has reminded us that gut health is not just about digestion. It's about balance between nutrition, rest, food, and emotion. I love the bit about the emotion. And between how we eat, how we live, and just between who we are. So thank you for that. What a great conversation.

AK: Thank you so much for having me. I loved it.

AB: When we take care of our gut, we take care of everything else. Our energy immunity, our mood, it truly is the foundation of everyday wellness. If this episode made you see your body in a new light, share it with someone who might need the reminder. And don't forget to subscribe. It's free, and it keeps you part of this growing community that believes true wellness always begins within. I'm Anshu Bahanda. Stay curious, stay kind to yourself, and keep rewriting your own wellness algorithm, one mindful choice at a time. Thank you.