Resolve IBS and IBD Naturally
This podcast is for you if you are struggling with symptoms of IBS and IBD and want to get to the root cause of your symptoms so you can take back your health through a holistic, whole-person approach.
Resolve IBS and IBD Naturally
Episode 45: Functional Testing Reveals Hidden Gut Imbalances: One Client's Journey to Recovery
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
This client case study reveals how functional gut testing uncovered the root causes of post-cancer treatment symptoms including brain fog, fatigue, and pain, leading to dramatic health improvements through targeted interventions.
• GI Map testing identified H. pylori, low beneficial bacteria, and gluten sensitivity
• Most patient's chronic health issues show either too-low or overgrown bacterial patterns
• Anti-gliadin antibodies confirmed gluten sensitivity despite minimal perceived consumption
• Gluten antibodies can remain elevated for 3-6 months, requiring strict elimination
• Gluten sensitivity often presents as joint pain, fatigue and brain inflammation rather than gut symptoms
• Upper GI support addressed insufficient enzyme production indicated by test results
• Client lost 5-7 pounds without trying simply by reducing inflammation
• Nutrition assessment scores improved across almost all health markers
• Client became an advocate for nutrition's role in health after experiencing benefits
• Targeted testing and customized protocols produce noticeable symptom improvements
Did you find this episode informative and helpful? I'd love to have you leave me a five-star rating. Do you have questions about holistic approaches to optimizing gut health? Please leave your question or comment below and I will address it personally or in a future episode.
Link to a free 30 minute Gut Check Call
Disclaimer: None of the content discussed is meant to be taken as medical advice. All information presented is for educational purposes only and listeners and viewers assume all responsibility around implementing any changes to their health and medical regimen.
Introduction to Resolve IBS & IBD
Speaker 1Welcome to Resolve IBS and IBD. Naturally, I'm Courtney Cowie, a nutrition therapy and functional diagnostic nutrition practitioner. If you are struggling with the symptoms of IBS or IBD and want to get to the root cause of your symptoms so you can take back your health through a whole person approach, this podcast is for you. Just a disclaimer that the information I'm presenting in this podcast is for educational purposes only and should not be taken as medical advice. You should always consult a qualified practitioner before making any changes to your health or medical regimen. That being said, let's get on with the show. I'd like to do a client case study where I actually show an example of some of the testing I do and go through that with you at, hopefully, a level that's very understandable and helps you see how this type of testing can be very helpful. I actually even yesterday had a gut check call where, surprisingly, the prospective client was very skeptical about just testing in general and I did essentially a mini version of the very thing I'm about to do now with her, just to show her like, hey, the tests that we run in functional medicine are very different. We get very good data that always, from my experience, explains what's going on with the client and their symptoms and this helps us scope a very specific plan to help them restore their health. So if we just dive right in here and take a look at this particular case, this is my client, elizabeth, and when she first came to me she was probably about 18, maybe 24 months post breast cancer she had had had a double mastectomy. Everything was fine, no evidence of any cancer left, so best possible case scenario for her. However, because she had had I believe it was mostly radiation in her case, she had some residual issues, just oddities that were there, things like swollen hands. Of course, fatigue was, I would say, as she described it, worse than it had been prior to all of this. Just incidentally, as a background factor, she has a history of seizures for most of her life and she does take medication to control that, but that's just a background factor that she has surrounding her health.
Speaker 1And then she's had just a struggle with pain as well for a long time in her adult life. Sometimes it's the back, sometimes it's the shoulder. Sometimes this comes from specific accidents or injuries she's having, but sometimes it's just idiopathic pain, pain at a level that isn't really comprehensible, and so there's the pain element. And then brain fog was the other big issue and so specific to the work she wanted to do with me. I think in general she felt there was a connection with the gut. I think she felt like there was a very intuitive connection with her diet and her energy level as well as her brain function.
Analyzing the GI Map Results
Speaker 1But I think in general she also just wanted to know was there a preventative check after someone's been through a major event like cancer treatment? Equally, it can be done at any point and of course, commonly I'm doing it with people who are in the throes of a struggle and often it's after they've been to their regular doctor, tried all of those tests, tried all of those different approaches and really didn't come up with anything that was, you know, helping them get to a place they want to be. So the test I'm showing right now is Elizabeth's GI map, or at least parts of it, and again let me just kind of go through this with you. So this particular test looks at a number of different factors in the gut. It does a very comprehensive look at pathogens of all sorts, including the body's own bacteria, including the normal bacterial flora. You can actually see that on the left-hand side about halfway down.
Speaker 1So I pulled out some relevant sections from her test just with her context of symptoms. First thing she is showing that's notable to me is some level of H pylori. Now you know this is one where in functional medicine, the way I'm trained sometimes we rule it in, sometimes we rule it out. It always depends on, to me, considering the client's symptoms. In the case of any gut stuff going on, I almost always consider that a positive sign and something we want to consider in the plan to self-treat. In this particular case I ruled this in just because she had a number of different things going on, of course had the history of cancer. So I tend to be a little bit more conservative and wanting to make sure you know absolutely we're not disregarding anything erroneously. We want to be covering the bases and getting as much proactive action against the things we're finding on the GI map as possible. So this was a factor that we did end up including in her plan.
Speaker 1If we look at just normal bacterial flora, we'll actually see for her that mostly things are showing up on the lower end and this is actually, I'd say, a somewhat common picture I see on the GI map Normally people who are dealing with a background of chronic health issues will have either a picture that looks very much kind of too low, sort of like what we're seeing here with Elizabeth, or the other end of the spectrum, we'll see several of these strains high, which would then suggest more overgrowth, which to me starts to point to small intestinal bacteria. Overgrowth is a very real possibility. In her case I don't think that's the case because things are trending more low. We call this more of an insufficient picture of keystone bacteria or the types of bacteria we want to see in good numbers, at least to keep the microbiome in balance. Although the acromantium musafinil is not noted here in red, the less than DL is to me notable because it's basically saying she's missing this specific strain of bacteria which I can actually see fairly frequently on this test. So again, normally when things are trending low or trending high, that's just overall indicating imbalances, the presence of infections, sometimes food sensitivities, and it's not just a matter of pumping a bunch of probiotics into her to try to boost these numbers. We really do have to carefully consider how inflamed is her gut? Are there other co-infections? Diet-wise? Do we need to do anything to try to lay the stage so that these bacterial compositions will balance out the way they should.
Speaker 1If we look at her opportunistic bacteria actually, for her in particular, this is not, I would say, a really bad GI map. I mean, I would still put this in the camp of like fairly normal things I see on the GI map. But sometimes, quite honestly, I'm seeing a lot more elevated in the opportunistic bacteria section, sometimes even in the normal bacterial flora. I'll just see more yellows and reds here, depending on how out of balance the gut is. So hers really isn't, I would say, in the worst of the tests I've looked at. This is to me a very easy it should be a theoretically much easier case to try to get back into balance and resolve, I would say, with the right intervention.
Speaker 1She had a little bit of streptococcus elevated. Which little bit of streptococcus elevated which commonly not always, but commonly is associated with low stomach acid or just GI upper GI function. That's not robust enough and so often not breaking down food appropriately at the level of the upper GI. So sometimes this can indicate a need for upper GI support. Now if we look down at the intestinal health section again, the one thing that's being flagged in red was her anti-gliadin IgA, and I love when this does come back definitively in the high zone, because then it's an inarguable you absolutely are having antibodies to gluten. You're consuming it, whether you know you are or you're not.
Gluten Sensitivity & Digestive Function
Speaker 1In her particular case, she was aware she was having it. She stated that she felt she wasn't having a lot of it. I had to remind her and this is something I'll remind all of you of as well that antibodies stay elevated in the system for a long time upwards of 90 days, in some cases six months and so when we're attempting to go gluten-free, this isn't something we can do six out of seven days a week and have one cheat day. Essentially, it's got to be a valiant effort put forth for a while I would say at least three months. Now again, often people do feel that that's what they're doing and they're getting accidental exposures or hidden exposures.
Speaker 1Going out to eat is a very common route of exposure for a lot of people, so it's not always as simple as it seems, but this test is great because it will definitively verify whether or not this person is really gluten-free and also verify whether or not they have an immune response to gluten, which a lot of the people I work with do. I would say it's more the rule than the exception, and it does make sense because generally a lot of the people I work with have significant gut stuff going on an IBS diagnosis, gerd, something like that. Now in her case she didn't exactly have that, but this is also just very illustrative of the fact that sometimes leaky gut and gluten sensitivities or antibodies to gluten can yield more predominantly in the body as joint pain or fatigue or you know again absolutely relate to brain inflammation, and not to say that this is the driver of her seizures. But certainly the more she's struggling with a leaky gut picture and inflammation and immune reactivity to gluten, the more that's going to worsen the potential for seizures or just really any of these chronic symptoms. So this was very notable.
Treatment Results & Weight Loss
Speaker 1The only other thing I really want to remark on in her intestinal health section was that, although this elastase one was not flagged as red to me this level is slightly low. So this would correlate with the suspicion I'm seeing, with a little bit of streptococcus overgrowth, that there's a good likelihood that her stomach pancreas aren't producing as much hydrochloric acid enzymes as we would like to be seeing and then that upper GI function could be better supported, and doing that would help her digest her food better and, in and of itself, help to balance out the imbalances we're seeing in the bacterial flora. So this was a really great test for her, just because we did identify a number of things, both with the gluten, especially on the diet end, we could do right away to intervene and start to bring her inflammation down, deal with the leaky gut and help to balance out her microbiome right away. Of course we could bring in a little bit of upper GI support and then develop a bit of a strategy around using some herbals to try to balance out the bacterial things we're seeing here, whether you know the high streptococcus or the low commensal species and in general, she had, after a couple of months, like a very, very significant positive change in her perception of her symptoms. So I would say specifically let me just click and see if I've got this on the next screen your struggles with bloating, constipation and diarrhea, keeping you home on Friday, Saturday nights clicking through Netflix because you're dealing with stomach cramping or simply need to have a bathroom nearby. Have you stopped being active and joining your friends at the gym because it flares your symptoms and wipes you out for the rest of the day. How about avoiding social gatherings involving food because of extreme anxiety over food reactions or sudden bathroom runs in public, or because you are too embarrassed to explain your limited diet to others? The isolation, loneliness and depression that comes with an IBS or IBD struggle is real and often worse than the physical symptoms. I'm here to tell you that you deserve better than just living with this reality and suffering alone, from a person who has lived this nightmare and come out the other end, and who has helped many others do the same. There is hope and you are worth the investment. Click the link below to schedule your free 15-minute gut check call.
Speaker 1Okay, yeah, I wanted to actually include a note she sent to me, so you can see the title. She had responded back to an email that I had sent around week 10 of us working together. So we're about a couple months and a few weeks in and she definitely is noticing a really good response to some of the supplements I had suggested for her. You know she, you know, was kind of talking about her week and some of the busyness there, but you know she was really happy because she had a wellness check and all of her blood work was coming back great.
Speaker 1This was the interesting thing with her particular case. She actually inadvertently ended up dropping. At the time she wrote me this note, it was three or four pounds. In total it was actually five to seven and she wasn't a heavy person. I wouldn't, at least think by my standards, or you know. Just looking at her she looked very healthy weight to begin with. But that's not to say that again, with a lot of women weight can be in that healthy zone but still lose, you know, five to 10 pounds and actually feel even better and have that be a positive change. And so this was sort of her case, which was really interesting because we weren't actively trying to help her lose weight.
Speaker 1We were basically making her diet less inflammatory, getting her a little more whole foods oriented. I mean, she was already pretty good, I would say, right out of the gate, but just made some things to take some of these burdens off of her body. Adjustments to the diet gave her some support for the gut and, lo and behold, the extra weight her body had been holding onto. I often tell people a lot of times there is a toxic burden component to excess weight on the body just ended up melting off and so that was like just icing on the cake for her. I mean, she was like super happy because she kind of had that, I guess, in her head for a long time actually and you know it sort of effortlessly came off as we were doing this work together.
Client's Improved Quality of Life
Speaker 1But the other thing I really wanted to show you here is her before and after nutrition assessment questionnaire results, and so you can see the orange line was where she was at when we first started in April. And you know, again, we're not seeing like huge, huge difference. But I'm telling you and I know I did this last month with my last case study, if you look and compare each column really side by side the blue being the later score which is generally in most of these cases coming down I'm telling you this is definitely indicating a very felt difference. For her, even just a score dropping from borderline medium priority down to low is huge. You know you can see that the pattern follows pretty closely. So she did a good job assessing herself, I think, true to how she was feeling both times.
Speaker 1The other thing we're seeing that's really awesome is kind of this middle range of the graph. These are what I would call the second tier foundations that are really important. I generally tend to focus on the health. If we air the gut, if we see anything over here in these first four columns, first because working at the level of the gut is going to go so much further for everything else on this graph. But after that it's generally the stuff in the middle that's super important as well. So when I'm just noting progress on a client, I'm absolutely looking for improvement in the gut, but I'm also looking for some level of improvement in some of these middle columns as well, which we are definitely seeing with her and actually quite, quite a ways all the way through to the right hand side of the graph. I mean really in every single count except for one she was at or under her score, which is exceptional. Like this would be an ideal type of result for a client.
Speaker 1So you know I can tell you where she ended up was very happy with the weight loss. Obviously, as I mentioned, she felt her energy was so much better. She was actually quite excited about some of the diet changes she had made and discovered she really liked, and the brain fog was much better as well, and I think what was really pretty cool about her case is that she became just such an advocate for nutrition and even educating her friends and family about what she had learned, and so she, even to this, still reports back to me and will tell me stories about just traveling and telling people what she learned about you know cow's milk versus drinking, you know non-dairy milk in her coffee and all these different little incidental things, and it's great, and she's got sort of a naturally exuberant personality and so to me that's just super fulfilling to know I've got this person who's had great results. They're going out and advocating for the importance of the work and even sharing you know these tidbits with other people, which my hope would be. They get interested, they start trying some of these. You know these changes themselves and have a really good you know experience with using food to help tame symptoms in the body.
Speaker 1Now it's not always just that easy as getting diet right, of course, otherwise I wouldn't run tests and I wouldn't be doing what I do for a living. But I'm hoping that again, this was somewhat helpful to give you a different look at a different client's case, some of the symptoms that might actually relate or resonate with you. Often, fatigue is a huge one and brain fog is a huge one for a lot of people. Someone can start to feel change If we do targeted testing. We write a very customized plan and they make the effort to follow it. Did you find this episode informative and helpful? I'd love to have you leave me a five-star rating. Do you have questions about holistic approaches to optimizing gut health that you'd like to ask? Please leave your question or comment below and I will be sure to address it personally or cover it in a future episode. Be sure to check the show notes for any resources mentioned in today's episode. See you next time.