Episode 63: From IBS to Autoimmunity: Why SIBO Keeps Coming Back—and What Actually Fixes It

We trace SIBO back to the upstream issues that let it thrive—weak digestion, poor motility, inflamed terrain, and toxin load—and map a smarter path to lasting relief. Stories, tools, and testing strategies show why antibiotics or herbs alone often aren’t enough.

• SIBO as a downstream signal, not the sole cause
• Role of stomach acid, enzymes, and bile in preventing fermentation
• Migrating motor complex, food poisoning, and autoimmunity links
• Leaky gut, molecular mimicry, and wheat as a trigger
• Testing strategy: breath tests vs comprehensive stool analysis
• Hidden drivers: mold, metals, parasites, biofilms
• Detox pathways, drainage, and why “kill” phases backfire
• Vagus nerve, stress, and trauma-informed gut care
• Treatment options: rifaximin, botanicals, elemental diet
• Case insights on reflux, Hashimoto’s, and recurrent SIBO
• Sequencing protocols to prevent relapse and rebuild resilience

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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.

Transcript

What SIBO Is and Why It Matters

SIBO as a Secondary Problem

Digestion 101: Stomach, Pancreas, Bile

When Good Bugs Overstay: Symptoms and Links

Motility and the Migrating Motor Complex

Food Poisoning and Autoimmune Triggers

Treatment Paths: Pharma, Herbs, Starvation

Expert Training and Perspective

Is SIBO Cause or Consequence?

Why Digestion Weakens—and What Docs Miss

Nervous System, Vagus Nerve, and Trauma

Leaky Gut, Molecular Mimicry, and Wheat

Testing Strategy: GI-MAP vs Breath Tests

Hidden Drivers: Mold, Metals, Parasites, Biofilms

Detox Pathways and Why Kill-Protocols Backfire

Antibiotics, Mold Illness, and Reactions

Case Lessons: Stubborn SIBO and Elemental Diet

Hashimoto’s, Reflux, and Finding the Real Culprits

Next Steps, Support, and How to Work Together

SPEAKER_00 0:33

That being said, let's get on with the show. So I'm excited to talk about today's topic, which is all about SIBO. Just to dive into it as a condition, what it is, different connections I see with it. And this is very well timed because I just got done presenting on SIBO inside another practitioner's membership group. Before we kind of dive into some of the things I want to talk about about SIBO, let's kind of start very basic with what is SIBO and what does that acronym mean? So it stands for Small Intestinal Bacteria Overgrowth. It's thought that up to 70 to 80% of all IBS diagnoses actually have SIBO happening underneath, right? And it's a condition where the body's own good bacteria overgrow and overpopulate in the small intestine, which is not the area of the digestive system that should be housing a lot of bacteria. And when these bugs overgrow in the small intestine, they can feed off of the food you eat, they can cause a lot of inflammation, they can ferment food, they can cause a lot of bloating, a lot of cramping, a lot of bowel issues, whether that's loose stool and urgency or constipation. And so there's a lot of just GI symptomology that can come from this condition, which is why it's so common with IBS, right? As well as IBD. In fact, it's thought that upwards of 70% of all autoimmune conditions also have SIBO underlying them, including inflammatory bowel disease. Now, if you understand kind of this trend in the chronic inflammatory spectrum, right, of all these different conditions that aren't necessarily gut related, what this really kind of points to is that SIBO tends to be more a result of an inflamed and dysfunctional gut that is part and parcel of, you know, often a dysregulated immune system and overall weakness and nutrient deficiencies that are showing up in a lot of these different chronic health conditions. And so to that end, going in and trying to focus on exclusively getting rid of SIBO or, you know, um treating it isn't always going to necessarily yield the best result. And in my world, when I'm looking at client cases from a holistic standpoint, if I know a client's been diagnosed with SIBO or I suspect they have it based on some of the functional testing that I run, I usually don't just hyperfocus right there. I keep it in mind and I keep aware of it, but I always see it as sort of a second-tier issue that's being driven by deeper root cause factors that we have to focus on first and foremost. And so if you understand that, you'll kind of know that this is, I think, why in two-thirds of all cases of small intestinal bacteria overgrowth, they tend to be chronic and recurrent cases where even if a client or patient is able to achieve symptom relief and the the treatment process works, in a lot of cases, it's just a matter of time before the overgrowth comes back and now they're having symptoms again and they need to go back in and get some sort of treatment or go through some sort of process to try to deal with that overgrowth. So today I want to talk a lot about just some of the root cause issues driving SIBO, and probably one of the biggest ones that's most missed or most underrated is poor digestion, right? And I've spoken a lot about digestion, so I'm gonna kind of hammer this nail again here, but when I'm talking about digestion, I really am talking about the stomach's ability to break down food, the pancreas' ability to add to that process, as well as the liver and gallbladder's ability to support that as well. And so each of these three upper GI organs play a role in digesting food. The stomach has a role of producing a substance called stomach acid, which is needed to help fully break down the food you eat, turn it into kind of a paste that's ready to go through the small intestine. It's especially important to have good stomach acid production to break down protein effectively, right? And protein would be your animal foods, eggs, beans, those types of foods, fish, right, are going to be higher protein. The pancreas produces a fluid called enzymes, which help to come in and neutralize the acid as it's moving the food through into the intestines. The enzymes have a breakdown component as well, particular to supporting breaking down carbohydrates. Those would be your grains, your breads, your pastas, your fruits, your vegetables, those types of foods. And so both of these organs have to be working to good capacity. And again, I've mentioned this before, but typically when the stomach isn't doing its job to par, it's usually a matter of time that the pancreas will start to fall off too. And when I'm doing a good functional stool test on a client that looks at the function of the stomach in the pancreas, I can often see that both of them are actually weak. They're not producing the types of stomach acid and enzymes needed to fully digest food. Now we've got the liver gallbladder. These are the other organs responsible for producing a substance called bile, which is basically an emulsifier, kind of like uh soap will cut grease on dishes. Bile goes in and it kind of sluices through these bigger fats that are part of, you know, whether it's animal meats or coconut oil or butter or what have you, nuts and seeds, right? High in fat. Those are things that actually get broken down by bile into smaller substances called fatty acids. And all of this needs to be working appropriately for food to be in its most absorbable, smallest state by the time it reaches the small intestine, which is the organ of nutrient absorption. It's also the organ where some of these good bacteria can overgrow and start to actually feed off of these food particles if they haven't been properly digested by these upper GI organs. And so there's a very real relationship between these three upper GI organs working together and working well and getting food to a place where it's going to get easily absorbed and go to feed the cells of the body instead of become a perfect environment for bacteria to migrate up or overgrow and then feed off of these cells. And so, you know, just realize that when you go in to potentially take a test to get checked for small intestinal bacteria overgrowth, if you're fortunate enough to have a GI doctor say who's willing to check that for you, very rarely are they actually going to look for and assess for signs that you are properly digesting your food. And so, you know, that's kind of the deeper root cause piece of this, where to really correct the problem of SIBO, we want to actually think about and identify as many of the root cause contributing factors that could be playing a role here, right? Um, and so with SIBO, just from a symptom standpoint, one thing I want to touch upon real quickly is that although bloating can be very common with SIBO, as can bowel irregularities, there are people who are prone to having SIBO, which can still create malabsorption issues for them and lead to leaky gut, lead to immune dysregulation, and perpetuate systemic inflammation, but they don't necessarily have overt GI symptoms like bloating or bowel issues, right? And this often is people who might have like other autoimmune conditions or they might have been diagnosed with something like chronic fatigue or fibromyalgia or um that type of thing. That's kind of again more in that chronic inflammatory realm, but not necessarily gut specific. Just because of the state of chronic inflammation the body's in, it facilitates and makes it much more likely for SIBO to actually be a component to the overall picture of dysfunction. And so remember that in the functional health world, we really do consider the gut to be foundational to all chronic issues, right? All chronic inflammatory issues, because a lot of what's going on in the body outside of the gut can come from issues stemming from the gut. So whether that's food particles that are leaking out in the case of leaky gut and then getting circulated and then activating the immune system, creating inflammation in the body, whether that's bad bacteria or parasites that are creating toxic chemicals that again might be leaving the gut and stimulating the immune system, causing this inflammation in other areas of the body. All of this is really important, and we want to consider this as we're kind of digging into all of the factors that might be contributing. Now, just understand that the small intestine is also held in check by good motility, and it's got its own inbuilt wave-like peristaltic motion that functions during the times between meals when we're fasting. And this peristalsis is called the migrating motor complex. It's got this mechanism of sweeping any debris through the intestines, helping to move any food particles that are residually hanging out in there, all of that kind of through the gut, and basically housekeeping. And so a lot of what's thought to contribute to SIBO on top of things like weak digestion is not having a very good functioning migrating motor complex. And this can happen for a lot of reasons. Um, one of the more common root cause factors could be a food poisoning event. And sometimes when I've had these conversations with clients who have eventually developed IBS or SIBO or they've been diagnosed with SIBO, they'll tell me that historically they can pinpoint the start of their symptoms back to some sort of experience at a restaurant or maybe traveling abroad where they had an exposure and then they got sick, right? And their their gut just has never been the same since. And so that could very well be the start of something like SIBO if it's coming from a food poisoning event. And really what's thought to happen in those situations is that the body has an acute immune reaction and it can actually, again, like an autoimmune condition, start to continue to perpetuate this attack response that's now getting directed at the small intestine itself. Even after the acute infection passes, the autoimmune thing is still happening. And then that can inhibit the migrating motor complex from doing its job and actually moving food through and housekeeping the way it should. And when that's not working, that can be another reason why bacteria can overgrow and migrate up into the small intestine and then lead to this problem of SIBO, right? So um, so that's just important to keep in mind in terms of like two fairly common uh root cause issues that could be leading to SIBO. This is a condition that does not tend to fully resolve based on just diet change alone. Even if you're making the right changes in your diet to help support controlling that bacterial overgrowth, this is a challenging enough problem from a bacterial population standpoint that almost always there needs to be something used to help clear or eradicate some of that overgrowth, whether it's a pharmaceutical approach, an herbal approach, or starving the bacteria out, which is a different approach entirely. But those are kind of the three general options that you know both doctors and functional health practitioners would use to support their patients or clients to overcome and recover from SIBO. I couldn't even go for a walk without planning my bathroom breaks. If you have IBSD or IBD and feel trapped by your gut, you're not alone. I used to plan my life around bathroom breaks until I found a three-step solution that finally worked. To get my free guide, IBSD and IBD relief, a three-step solution to end bowel urgency and loose stool, click the link in the show notes below. I hope that if you're struggling with SIBO, you've already been down the path of seeing a GI doc, they've done something like a lactolose breath test on you, you feel like you've maybe tried a round of rifaxamen or some other type of antibiotic to try to knock that down. Maybe you saw some improvement, maybe you didn't see any improvement at all. This episode or this conversation will hold a lot of value for you and get you thinking about things from a different perspective. So, um, as I may have mentioned before, I did do Dr. Allison Seebecker SIBO ProCourse training. I think I was in the first official practitioner cohort group to go through that a number of years ago. Um, she's considered one of the top SIBO experts in the country when she wasn't practicing clients on a one-on-one basis. She saw many, many, many hundreds of people and um was able to just really dive deep on different patterns, what she saw worked, what she didn't work. She works very closely with Dr. Mark Pimentel, who's at Cedar Sinai Clinic in California, who is similarly also considered a nationwide SIBO expert. He's more on the conventional side. Allison's more on the functional medicine side, but I would say that the two of them are very like-minded and there's a lot of collaboration there. And so I've been fortunate enough to tap into her knowledge set and then um some of his knowledge through that training I did with her. So this is an issue that I know quite well just from a professional experience and training perspective. And it's also an issue I know quite well from a personal perspective. SIBO, chronic recurring SIBO was a very long-standing component to my GI struggle, both back in the time when I thought I was only dealing with IBS D, but also during the second diagnosis I got of collaginous colitis many years after that. And as I've mentioned before, SIBO is responsible for upwards of 70% or more of all IBS diagnoses. It can go hand in hand with that and be one of the root cause driving factors, but also covers a large portion of autoimmune disease diagnoses, whether that's inflammatory bowel disease or other types of autoimmune conditions. And that can even include things that don't have GI symptoms like rheumatard arthritis, MS, Hashimoto's thyroiditis, right? Like there's a very interesting uh association we see with SIBO and these chronic inflammatory conditions. And a lot of these autoimmune conditions in general share characteristics, whether that's you know, GI inflammation, imbalance in the bacteria in the gut, fatigue, body pain, um, you know, stress and uh stress hormone dysregulation, right? There's a lot of things that can be very common across these different conditions. And although they're more complex, we could argue there's a lot that goes into switching the genetic switches on of expression, right? We we know these things are not necessarily your genetic destiny. The whole study of epigenetics, which is what functional medicine is really all about, really demonstrates that if you've got the genetic blueprint that codes for potential expression of this disease, it still takes certain environmental and lifestyle triggers to trigger the disease state on. Just know that SIBO is kind of one of those issues that tends to appear in a lot of chronic inflammatory conditions. And so to that end, I think we're kind of starting to dive into this whole piece on why it's a second-tier problem. And there's really, I think, a lot of um inconclusion in the functional medicine field as to whether or not SIBO is truly causative and contributing to a lot of these inflammatory conditions, or is it more reflective of the overall state of the body when somebody's in one of these conditions, right? So is it a phenomenon that tends to show up at the level of the gut when the body as a whole is chronically inflamed and has an autoimmune or chronic inflammation process going on? Or is it literally one of the phenomena that develops that then contributes to the switching on and the diagnoses of these conditions? And I don't think anyone's truly clearly sussed that out. And from my perspective, I think we could argue it either way, but I do feel a little bit more intuitively that it's more representative of the overall state of the body. And if we can actually get the state of the body to a more balanced place and look for deeper root causes that might be driving the chronic inflammation, we have a greater capacity to actually reduce or eliminate the SIBO. And so I think if we look at that way and then we look at the statistics of two-thirds of all people having SIBO, even if they're able to effectively clear it, it does tend to come back in two-thirds of those cases. That would also explain why it tends to just kind of keep showing up and be more challenging to resolve. So just keep in mind that when we're thinking about all of the contributing factors that lead to the potential of small intestinal bacteria overgrowth, there's a lot of things going on here. Of course, as I've mentioned previously, I feel like weakened digestive function, digestive weakness is always a piece of this puzzle. For whatever reason, we're often seeing low stomach acid, low pancreatic enzyme output, issues with bile quality, and all of those different components of digestion need to be strong and working properly to break food down and make it such that the small intestine doesn't become this space conducive to bacterial overgrowth and fermentation of the food. And so there's a lot of things that could lead to digestive weakness, and of course, you know, we won't go into all of that today, but just know that if this is an issue you've been diagnosed with from a conventional GI doctor, oftentimes the digestive function assessment and giving you strategies and ways to troubleshoot that and try to restore good digestive function is not necessarily something that they focus on. They're more about getting a diagnosis and giving an antibiotic to try to eradicate the problem, which is a part of SIBO, but it's not the whole enchilada. And in my experience, that's why a lot of people that go down that path tend to find they only get minimal success or the issue keeps coming back repeatedly. You have to get to the root. And if weak digestion is a part of that, if we aren't figuring that out, if we aren't discerning that, and then trying to work on restoring good digestive function, that root cause is always going to set the stage for that SIBO issue to come back. So that's first and foremost. The other would be, again, vagus nerve dysfunction. And this kind of gets back to a lot of research that's been done on just chronically ill populations of people and autoimmune disease being, you know, a very widely studied field, autoimmune conditions of all types, there's really been more and more evidence coming out showing that a lot of these folks have had either early childhood experiences, ACEs, right? Adverse childhood experiences, where they, if they were to take that assessment, and this is a validated assessment, you can go look up and take for yourself, they would score quite high, right? Um, these are folks that might have had immense hardship, stress, trauma, abuse over their lifetime. And that tends to unfortunately wire the nervous system in a pattern that makes it very hard to stay in a state of rest and digest it. It actually pushes it to the other extreme where a person can actually get chronically trapped in this state of stress response. And this is something that, as I mentioned in my Vegas nerve talk, is something we can get very adapted to, and also being in that chronic state of stress also tends to take us out of our bodies and be less aware of what's actually going on inside the body and more sensitive to the cues we're getting from our body, including the gut, right? Because, you know, from what I've learned in my practice, all symptomology at the physical level is the body's way of trying to communicate. There's some imbalance or some issue, and often it can be a deeper emotional, psychological, mental thing that the body is really trying to get your attention on that's coming out physically speaking. And until we can start to learn to connect in, pay attention, put our consciousness in the body, put our consciousness in that area, we're often not going to get that message, right? And by the time you're having a really overt symptom, typically the body is quite out of whack, and there could be a lot of different things going on at the message level that need to be parsed out to try to put it all together. But just know that, you know, again, this is a process, I think, of learning how to regain that capacity, learning how to regain those skills. There's a lot of great modalities out there to help people do that. Um, in fact, I have an entire nervous system reset lab that I offer my clients, especially the ones that are struggling with more complex gut issues, which could include chronic and recurring SIBO that we've tried to take a crack at and have not been able to effectively eradicate, or maybe have eradicated once and it's come back. But particularly my clients that I know have a history of trauma or abuse, or are sick with biotoxin illness, whether that's toxic mold exposure or tick-borne illness, simply because all of those folks tend to have a very dysregulated nervous system. And often there were life events or situations that set the stage for them to have more vulnerability to getting ill, right, in a deeper way from a young age on. And so I've gotten a lot of positive feedback from clients that have gone through that nervous system reset lab as to just the breadth and um, you know, novelty of the different tools in there. It's not the typical stuff that you tend to find all over the internet or social media. These are really methods and tools that even I myself personally have engaged with and curated as part of my process of trying to put the pieces together from an emotional, mental, you know, spiritual angle in my own gut health puzzle. And so just know that this is a very important piece and one that always needs to be considered when we've got a chronic recurrent SIBO, you know, issue coming back. And again, not something that you're necessarily going to get education on from your GI doc, right? Because again, we're talking about holistic root causes, not simply just we see bacterial overgrowth, let's go knock it out with an antibiotic. The other thing is leaky gut, which I know I've spoken on at length as well in past lives. And so again, I won't go too deep on this, but leaky gut is an immense problem in the modern population. I mean, in simple terms, we're really talking about tiny holes that open up in the mucosal membrane of the small intestine, right? That allow food particles, bacterial toxins, you name it, to leak out directly from the gut into the bloodstream, which is not biologically optimal, right? Like our bodies are really meant to contain our food and everything else inside the system, not actually just leak that right out into the bloodstream. And what can happen is over time that can start to activate the immune system, get it sensitized to whether it's food particles, bacterial toxins, other things that are coming out of the gut, and then through this process called molecular mimicry, the immune system can start to actually get trained to erroneously mount an attack against its own tissues and systems of the body, mostly because we see a lot of protein structure similarity in many foods that people are commonly eating in different structures of the body. And there's a ton of research done on this. Dr. Tom O'Brien is probably one of the leaders in the functional medicine field, and his big shtick is talking about how problematic wheat is for the majority of people. But I would just go so far as to say that if you're in this group and you're struggling with any degree of GI symptom, you 100% absolutely need to get wheat out of your diet. It's just been shown time and time again to be a root cause trigger for a lot of GI upset. But in his work, he's really shown that, you know, wheat can also cause the immune system to erroneously mount an attack to even things like the thyroid gland, right? Which is a very common type of autoimmune condition in today's world, and that wheat protein does have structural similarities to our body's own thyroid glands. So just know that this can really set the stage for a lot of dysregulation. And when we've got leaky gut going on, we've got a lot of immune activation, by definition, we're gonna have a lot of inflammation. Now we've got an inflamed small intestine. Guess what condition can show up in that type of environment? SIBO, right? So just think about all of those different um connections that you know really can be driving a lot of this. So, you know, when I do functional stool testing on clients, I really want to get as many root cause contributing factors as I possibly can to understand how many different levels of imbalance or weakness we might need to work on, even if I suspect they have SIBO. And the beauty in running a functional stool test like the GI map is I can get a pretty good guesstimate as to whether or not a client might be dealing with SIBO based on the type of bacteria presenting, um, how the whole picture looks on that test, just from looking at hundreds and hundreds of these tests and also looking at lactose breath tests, you know, without being 100% gold standard, it's still a very reasonable and inactionable test to run to get that idea, while also getting these other pieces of information that can be even more helpful and help me then create a protocol that's gonna really help this client resolve the SIBO in other imbalances versus if I just ran a lactolose breath test. Yes, we can definitively rule SIBO in or rule it out, but we don't necessarily know if that person's got weak digestion based on that test. We don't necessarily know if they've got leaky gut. We definitely don't know if they've got other things going on in the gut. So it's a little bit more limited in that way. And of course, we can always address the SIBO if we have, you know, a positive result on a lactylose breath test, but what do we do then if it comes back in five months, right? So that would then eventually necessitate more testing, deeper testing to go get that information versus what I'm trying to do is economize the whole data gathering process and you know, right out of the gate, select the tests that are gonna give me the information I feel is critical to really understanding the root causes so we can address everything, including SIBO, if it's there. Um, you know, I wanted to share at this point how important it is to really look at all of those layers contributing. And I've worked with a number of clients, and I'm thinking of even one right off the top of my head that I worked with for a while who um chronically was coming back positive on lactalose breath tests, and it was a very frustrating situation. And um, in her case, she had actually done the herbal approaches. Um, I believe she was resistant every time she tried, meaning she would do a round of herbs, retest her gases would still be high in the lactolose breath test, tried the rifaximin and antibiotic approach. Same deal, right? Went back and retested, still had high gases. And so it actually took us doing additional testing. And the kicker for her was that she was, in fact, struggling with biotoxin illness beneath it all, and that was the deeper layer we needed to go to to get to to really correct the situation. But um, you know, in her in her case, her whole metabolism was really slowed down. Um, she was having trouble even getting, I think, more than 1400 calories in a day, which if you're listening to this and you're not aware, that is definitely not a lot of energy coming in, you know, to fuel your body. Even if you're a petite woman, you know, optimally you want to be eating more than that throughout the day. And um Again, that's just another situation I encounter quite frequently with my gut clients is that they just seem to either feel they can't take in as much food as they used to. Sometimes it's actual like fullness they feel or discomfort or burping or belching or just a general sense of malaise, like they they can't digest it very well. But what can also happen is when the body is chronically underconsuming like that or underfed, metabolism slows down, and then it can feel very normal to eat smaller portions of food. And sometimes I'll have the conversation with my female clients like, hey, you're actually not eating enough food, and they might even be secondarily struggling with excess weight gain on top of that. And it's a very puzzling thing to them because they're like, surely I can't be, you know, not eating enough food because I have all this trouble losing weight, and so I have to explain that, you know. It's part of the reason why your body's holding on to that weight is because it's malnourished and it needs it as an energy reserve because the signal is being sent to the brain that it's not getting enough energy, and without stuffing calories in, what we need to do is slowly increase your ability to uptake nutrition, digest your food properly. Sometimes half that battle is clearing SIBO because, right, that gets in the way of being able to absorb nutrients and get the vitamins and minerals the body needs. But the other side of that is also slowly increasing that uh food intake, right? That caloric intake to give the body more gas to run the metabolism at a faster rate. And that's a delicate process to go through. But I just want to put that out there because um I've seen a lot of people struggling with GI, you know, disorders at the level where it's not only just a chronic symptom struggle, but they've also got weight gain, or in rare cases, it can sometimes be even abnormal weight loss, just depending. And then these deeper levels of toxicity going on, whether it's mold or lime, or it can even be heavy metals or chemical toxins. And so um just know that it is it isn't just always gonna work to throw a bunch of uh pharmaceuticals at the gut, and you know, you're gonna have this SIBO resolved. And sometimes it doesn't even work with herbs, and I've seen that a number of times. So this kind of segues into really speaking to the fact of like, why is it that these things don't work? And I'm already starting to kind of allude to that piece, but just know that SIBO, another classic thing about it is it will often tend to show up in gut environments that are also housing parasites, mycotoxins, which are toxins produced by toxic mold exposure, as well as heavy metals. And then again, all of these things drive autoimmune disease. So often, if you've got that kind of diagnosis, you could be very suspicious of the fact that you could have toxicity going on. And just know that um chemical toxins, mold toxins, heavy metals, they can all hang out and be housed in the gut, um, particularly mold. You think about just how it enters the body. Yes, we can absolutely ingest moldy foods to a certain extent. Is that going to introduce it into our gut? It will, but really what's been shown more so to be true is that people that are spending, you know, a large part of their day today in a moldy home or moldy workplace, meaning a building that's had water damage, whether they're aware of it or not, the amount of mold toxins they're actually breathing in over those hours, and this could be significant if you work from home and you're in your home most of the time, is gonna far outweigh what you could eat in terms of like you know, trace amounts of mold on your food. And everything that comes in through the nose, right? Like the nasal passageways, all of that can pass through and get into the GI system, and vice versa. So, you know, to a certain extent, what we have hanging out in our sinuses in our nose can also trickle down and colonize in the GI system and make it all the way down into the intestines. And so all of the hollow spaces of the body, whether it's sinus cavities, nasal passageways, you know, um intestines, they are great um harbors of these different types of toxins and microbes. And so, however route these things are getting in, um, they could be ingested, they could be getting breathed. Certainly with chemical toxins, we could be at times absorbing them through our skin. So it's very, very important to over time become aware of the products you're using, the things you're cleaning with, right? What you're touching. This is a piece I also go in deep and teach my clients. Sometimes they're not even aware of the certain things I might need to be looking at and addressing to improve on that front. But just know that this stuff can all eventually make its way into the gut, create that inflammation, create that immune response. And now we've got SIBO showing up secondary to that. And so what I've just found in my work with SIBO is that if those things are present, we need to focus on them first and get those things under control, get those toxins cleared, address all of those things in order for the SIBO to actually eradicate, right? For it to finally resolve. And know that when there's multiple co-infections in the gut, whether that's parasites, fungal overgrowth, you name it, it's kind of like a bad neighborhood. And when you get a couple of bad neighbors, it's gonna be so much easier now for other bad guys to show up to. And it's almost kind of like this party that develops. And so, um, you know, all of these different microbes in the gut also seem to have very, you know, interestingly, very interesting ways of communicating through quorum sensing. And it can, it can sometimes make for a little bit of a challenging situation that way because they can work together to evade the immune system and hide behind, you know, protective sticky walls they build called biofilm. And that can make it challenging both from a conventional as well as a functional medicine perspective, because we have to think about the fact that we might need to use uh protocols and methods and tools to help break those protective barriers down and help the immune system detect these bugs and really go after whatever it is, whether it's the parasites or SIBO or fungus. And so just know that the the more disordered the gut gets, sometimes the harder it can be to try to restore order because they they will work together and create this community of microbes to try to withstand the body's defenses. And so it really does need to be, in my experience, a multifaceted approach where we're we're working physically, but you know, always keep in mind that the nervous system is kind of the control computer of the body. Um, we're as much electrical uh beings as we are physical, right? And so, you know, on an energy level, it can be very helpful to use different mental, emotional, spiritual tools to try to work on energetically, you know, strengthening the body so that it's not resonant with having such a disorder in the microbiome in the gut, right? Um, the other thing to really just mention here with all of this, and this this goes for whether it's SIBO or it's parasites or whatnot, fungus as well, is that the body needs to have good working detoxification pathways, good working bile flow, um, just the ability to get the junk out, right? And there's different organs involved in that, the liver being a huge one, kidneys are involved, obviously the gut is involved. We could say the gut is kind of the body's like primary go-to. It's the way we want to get things out predominantly, and pooping the toxins out is the preferred method, but we can for sure obviously get them out via urination, we can get them out via sweating. Um, you know, every time we exhale, there can be metabolites getting excreted that way as well. So we've got these different pathways to discharge toxins and um biochemicals created by, you know, say some of these gut microbes that are inflammatory. But what can often happen in really complexly ill people, um, and often SIBO is a part of this, is they get really bogged down and sometimes they even have genetic potentials that are expressing that make it inherently even harder to get rid of these toxins compared to the average healthy person. So it can become a bit of a complex, challenging situation that way where, you know, we have to really work on actually helping this person easily eliminate toxins, and that can be through working on strengthening the various organs, getting them having regular bowel movements, sometimes helping them get them out through the skin and sweating, right? And then also just making sure that we're evaluating for any major nutrient deficiencies that might be contributing to impaired detoxification because believe it or not, we need to have a certain amount of specific vitamins and minerals to support these detox pathways. So it is an energetically demanding process to be able to eliminate these toxins, and it takes really good nutrient-dense food, it takes the ability to break that food down, and even in the best case scenario, sometimes it takes extra nutrient support to support those detox pathways. And so, again, there are things we can do to quantitatively assess as to whether or not that's working, and then get very exact on what are those nutrients that a person might need, what are those supports a person might need, and also just work a little bit more empirically and try to give them a toolbox to support that process and um get them able to eliminate these microbes and flush them out. Because again, there's no use going in and using antibiotics or herbal products, potentially killing off and hitting a bunch of microbes hard. And now there's all of this inflammatory biochemical stuff getting released in the system and the body can't get it out, and that can tend to actually recycle inside the body and make a person even sicker and more symptomatic. And if you're listening to this and you've had the experience of going on a detox protocol or what I would call a gut bug kill or eradication protocol, maybe something you've even DIY'd and you felt much worse during and after, it could be because you haven't looked at the whole picture and you might have some detoxification issues whereby trying to put that strain of eliminating these bugs is just not working because your body can't effectively handle the detox. So just a little clinical pearl to think about if that's you. Um, you know, I know with um certain people who are especially mold sick, keep in mind that a lot of antibiotics are actually cultured from mold, believe it or not, right? Not all, but many. And so sometimes what can happen when these people get sick from toxic mold exposure is that actually develop more inflammation or we could say sensitivities to various antibiotics if they're prescribed. And it could be really any of them, but um, that could be another just sort of red flag that if you've felt increasingly worse over time and you've noticed that when you get, say, a sinus infection, or maybe you've had certain antibiotics prescribed to try to knock down SIBO or other, you know, bacterial overgrowth in the gut, and you're actually feeling worse or more flared when you take them, it might be because you've had some toxic mold exposure. Because again, this is not something that you know the GI uh conventional GI community really is aware of or looking for, you know, they're not going to that level of trying to connect all those dots holistically. So think about that potentially too as a situation. And I know that was something I experienced when I was mold sick. In fact, rifaximin for whatever reason actually made me feel terrible when I took it, um, to the point where I remember calling the doctor's office and speaking with a nurse and telling her, like, I am actually feeling much more ill on this, and what do I do? I'm halfway through this protocol or this treatment. And she was kind of like flabbergasted. She didn't really know what to say because I think, you know, generally speaking, that's not super common. Normally it's pretty well tolerated. It's active in just the small intestine, which makes it a better antibiotic because it's not necessarily gonna be so destructive on the body's large intestinal environment and and you know, destroying and knocking down the good flora in the large intestine. However, that doesn't mean it's good for everybody. It doesn't mean everybody's gonna automatically tolerate it well. And so I was in that camp and you know, she really just didn't have any answers for me. But this was at a time prior to me knowing I had had a lot of toxic mold exposure. So, you know, retrospectively, when I got to that place on my journey and I understood that and made a lot of sense as to why that might have been a struggle for me, right? Um, so you know, for me personally, when I was struggling with SIBO, I was like the classic super complex case. I did rifaximin, powered through it. Um, I did different antibiotics for it, powered through it, didn't feel well the whole time, but made it through, eventually would go and retest. At the time, I had access to lactolose breath tests as a nutrition therapy practitioner. I could go recheck myself even if my GI doc wasn't willing to do it. But classically, I was always still coming back with elevated gases, and it looked like none of these things were working. I did a number of herbal protocols on myself, didn't work right. The only thing that actually worked for me was um elemental diet, which is not something I've talked in detail about, and I won't go into detail here about that, but it is kind of the last ditch effort that can tend to work for the most stubborn and resistant SIBO cases, but it is pretty challenging because it's a liquid diet and liquid only for two to three weeks, and so um, you know, generally speaking, it it does work for people, but it can also indicate that there is some deeper degree of dysfunction or deeper degree of problem going on if that's the only thing you're left with that's going to work, right? Like just in my experience, um the easier cases of SIBO that don't have a whole lot more going on beneath the surface tend to respond to either rifaximin or to herbs, and they might still come back, but there's a longer relapse period, and generally those people are able to stay pretty balanced a little bit more easily over the long haul than people with really quickly recurrent SIBO that's really intense and causes them a lot of um symptoms and just impairment and their ability to function well in life, and so um just know that it can it can really range. But um, I'd want to share a quick story of a client who I worked with a number of years ago who initially came to me with this presentation of acid reflux. Like that was her main symptom was she had a lot of just like throat discomfort, overt acid reflux that she was feeling, and then also some silent reflux, you know, symptoms where she might have like um trouble like swallowing or you know, throat discomfort or esophageal discomfort, or even feeling like you know, something wasn't quite right in terms of like her esophagus and stomach functioning. And it was problematic enough that you know, she had tried a lot of things. She was put on acid-reducing medications. They only worked to a point, and philosophically, she didn't want to be on a med long term to try to control that. So um she was interested in getting to the root cause and open to taking a functional approach and doing some additional functional testing to get some data points that her doctor wasn't able to get for her. And so eventually, one of the things we decided to assess for was SIBO because she was presenting with some other symptoms downstream, some bloating at times. She she struggled secondarily with some sluggish bowels and constipation. And I sort of suspected that this might be a piece of the puzzle for her. Interestingly, she had also had a diagnosis of Hashimoto's, which is an autoimmune condition of the thyroid where the immune system is actually attacking the thyroid. It tends to drive thyroid function down. So a lot of people with Hashimoto's eventually have to be put on thyroid medication to try to support good thyroid hormone. But again, that's never the end of the road there. Like we want to try to get to the root of well, what is causing the immune system to activate against the thyroid. And so that was another piece of the puzzle for her. And we ran um a few different SIBO lactylose breath tests. And in the beginning, she wanted to take an herbal approach to try to work on it. And so we did a few rounds of herbs to try to actually help eradicate and clear the SIBO, went back and retested, and there was some response, but interestingly, she wasn't having a full response and you know, clearing the overgrowth like you know, optimally we would hope she would be. And so eventually she wanted to try a different strategy to eradicate the SIBO and elected to try something called elemental diet, which involved doing a liquid diet for a few weeks to try to actually starve the bacteria, which did ultimately work for her. But the moral of the story was she went through a lot of different trial and error to try to actually clear the SIBO, was finally able to symptoms improved to a point, but we could never really get her 100% of the way or to a place where she felt she had made enough progress. And it wasn't actually until a while after the fact that she decided she was willing and open to run a functional stool test. It was the GI map we ran on her that we got some deeper data, including um a parasite that can actually, it's linked with it's it can be related to things like Hashimoto's, you know, thyroiditis, right? Where um it can from the gut level create kind of this inflammatory condition where the immune system can um self-attack, right? Attack thyroid. Not only that, but there were some other things we found on her GI map that would explain why she was having this recurrent SIBO issue that wasn't clearing. And a part of her picture, of course, was also weak digestion. And so I want to share this story just to give you context for why, although SIBO is very common and um affects so many of the people in the IBS and IBD realm of you know, the picture here, it can be actually one of the more difficult conditions to fully resolve because there's almost always deeper factors that are related to the SIBO that are also driving the SIBO. And if we can't get clear on those things and resolve those things, it can be really hard to fully resolve the SIBO. And so this was definitely the case for for her. And so um we obviously had to use this additional information we got from the GI Map to change the approach and put a protocol in place to deal with the parasite and the weak digestion and some of those things. And so this is this is definitely um not a process that I think the average person would be able to fully take from A to Z easily because there can be a lot of different components and pieces to this puzzle. But if you're tuning in today and you know you've got SIBO or you suspect you're dealing with SIBO and you're at that point in your journey where you're contemplating, looking into a natural approach to this, or you know, you've maybe tried a drug-based approach and that hasn't worked very well for you. And I've had clients I've worked with who have told me they've tried even prescription uh medications for SIBO, like rifaximin, for example, and had a terrible reaction to it, right? Like that could be a lot of things, but for whatever reason, if you feel like you're at a place where you're considering um a deeper, more comprehensive look at what might be not only driving the SIBO, but what else can be done to help clear the SIBO and keep it from coming back, you're in the right place. And this is the type of work that I do with my clients every single day. So I would guide you to comment info below and I will reach out and we can connect and set up a time for a one-on-one call together. Um, it's an opportunity to sit down with me for free and explore what's been going on with you, what you've tried, and for me to give you some honest feedback and see if this is a situation that I feel I can really help you with. 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 committed in today's episode. See you next time.