Do You Really Need Gut Testing? What to know before you spend the money

We have all heard the phrase, Test - don't guess - right? And although I agree with this phrase, I also think there is a big caveat to this as well. Gut health is the cornerstone of what I do as a Functional Gut Health Nurse, but we also need to look at your foundations First. You would never want to build a house without a foundation first, right? The foundation is what is going to keep your house from collapsing eventually. A strong foundation for a house, means a strong long lasting house that holds up. Well the same is true for your health. The foundations of health include items such as diet, lifestyle, stress, sleep, and detoxification. And here's the secret that you might not have heard from your traditional doctor....they are all connected. They all influence your health or disease in one way or another.

Diet has one of the biggest impacts on our health. If you are eating highly inflammatory foods that do not provide quality nutrients for our body to use for fuel and repair, then we are going to create an internal environment of inflammation all the way down to the cellular level. Inflammation is what leads to further stress on the body. When you think of something being "inflamed", it is red, angry, hot, and in need of additional assistance from the immune system to repair the cells that are damaged or inflamed. Well now if you think of this on a large scale and our body being in a state of inflammation, imagine how much more work our body has to do to repair all of this. To add to this, if our gut is inflamed, it cannot do it's job as effectively so hormones do not get made as well or packaged up to be removed as well. Toxins do not get removed as well. Nutrients do not get absorbed as well. Do you see where I am going here? Every system has a job to do to make the body work efficiently together and if we are impairing them from doing their job because of the poor diet we are eating, then we are setting ourselves up for disease. We can see why diet should play such a bigger role on our health and especially on prevention of disease, but unfortunately it is not looked at as it should. It often gets dismissed. I have witnessed this more times than I can count in my allopathic career as a nurse.

Lifestyle plays an important role as well. This means asking what does your day in and day out look like? Are you exercising? Are you moving your body throughout the day? Are you refraining from smoking and alcohol? Do you have healthy and supportive relationships with loved ones? Are you active in your community? These all play an important role in your health! And this is what I would consider foundational to your health. Some of this can also play into stress that you are experiencing as well.

Stress can be anything that causes extra work on our body. This can range anywhere from job stress, emotional stress, lack of sleep causing stress, poor relationships causing stress, or even infections causing stress on our body. We lead very stressful lives in our modern society. We seem to be adding more and more to our plates and that can cause strain and stress on us. It is not always something that we can get rid of but we can recognize that it is a stressor in our health and find ways to address it. Maybe that means asking for help or taking more off of our to-do list, but the first step is always awareness.

Did you know sleep is foundational in your health? We need 7-9 hours of sleep for our body to restore, repair and detoxify. Did you know we do the majority of our detoxifying during our sleep? This is when our body is turning over the old dead cells into new ones, repairing our cells, and getting rid of things that we do not need. If you wake up in the morning and have a healthy bowel movement within the first 30 minutes of waking you are probably detoxifying pretty well!

If you have mastered the foundations such as diet, lifestyle, stress, sleep, and detoxification and still experiencing digestive symptoms then it's time to test. I want to stress this because true healing happens when you master the foundations and get to the root of your concerns. If we want a tree to produce fruit we first have to look at the roots. If we are not doing the basics such as watering it, giving it sunshine and healthy soil to grow in, then how can we expect it to produce fruit? The same goes for our health as human beings. We have to make sure we are looking at our roots and giving them all that they need to thrive first. If you see a provider that just wants to hand you a prescription for a medication or a handful of supplements to take without addressing these foundations then how are you going to get to the root of your concerns and truly heal?

Testing is a great tool in the toolbox for gut health once we have addressed the foundational work. What kind of testing do we do for digestive concerns? Typically a functional stool test or organic acid test are the best places to start. We can look at functional blood work as well and this can give us some great insights. But, if you are having digestive concerns then we need to look at the gut microbiome and dig deeper for the root causes. The gut microbiome plays a huge role in our overall health that often gets overlooked in the allopathic model. There are trillions of micobiota living in our gut and if things get out of balance we can start exhibiting symptoms. We can have infections or an overgrowth of fungus, bacteria, or parasites. These are all things that will be caught with functional stool testing and can be treated naturally or conventionally. But, in order to treat effectively you are going to need to be supporting your body as best as you can through your diet, lifestyle, sleep, and detoxificaiton. If you are not having regular bowel movements, you are not getting rid of toxins and, therefore, treating your root cause can be more problematic and take longer.

Gut health testing can be very expensive and should be reserved for the right time in the healing and investigating journey. Your health is worth the expense but only if you are doing things in the right order and handled by a practitioner that values healing the root cause. I am a Functional Gut Health Nurse with over 15 years of nursing experience. I love helping my clients build foundations and dig deeper to discover their unique root causes to their health concerns. If you have been living with digestive concerns and in need of someone to help guide you, I offer 1:1 consultations and will hold your hand every step of the way in the healing process. If you are just curious if a functional gut health nurse is the right person for you I also offer free discovery calls! Click HERE to book now.

Until next time, I am rooting for your healing - one bite at a time,

-Stephanie aka Food First Nurse