1066: The Gut-Hormone Connection: What Your Symptoms Are Actually Trying to Tell You With Ninu Lammens

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Katie:  Hello and welcome to the Wellness Mama podcast. I’m Katie from wellnessmama.com, and this is round two with Ninu Lammens, who I loved our first episode together about why we can still feel stuck or say, hear that our labs are normal even if things are still going on and how to identify what those things are.

And in this episode we go deep on the gut and hormone connection and what your symptoms are actually trying to tell you. And she provides really helpful insight into what’s happening when we have weight loss resistance. We talk about insulin. We talk about how if the gut is compromised, the immune system is activated and why she sees leaky gut in every case of autoimmunity, as well as how to support our body on a foundational level to help our gut heal to help our hormones come back into range naturally, and how one woman even saw a fifty-five pound weight loss in six months naturally from doing these steps.

So let’s join her now. Welcome back. Thanks for being here again.

Ninu: Thank you so much for having me. I’m excited.

Katie: Well, if you guys missed it, I will link to our first conversation in the show notes. We really got to get into some deep conversation about safety signals versus stress signals, how to support the body, how many women are under-eating even if we think we’re getting enough calories, and you gave us some really valuable tools that we can use to signal more safety to our body and start to move toward healing.

And at the end, you really started to go into a concept I’m excited to elaborate on in this episode, which is the gut and hormone connection. I know people have probably heard a lot about the gut and the microbiome and understand that it’s important, but I have not heard as much conversation around how this impacts hormones.

And with hormones being such a massive topic for women right now, I would love to really elaborate and go deep into the topic of gut health and hormones and how they’re connected. So I know it’s broad, but can you walk us through the gut hormone connection?

Ninu: Yeah, for sure. So we already kind of spoke about cortisol in the first talk we had, and how the cortisol’s gonna break down the gut lining, right?

So that’s gonna make your trillions of bacteria that are in your microbiome are by virtue of the damage to the gut lining, the milieu of bacteria, the ecosystem that lives there, if the wall is inflamed, then you’re gonna see worsened microbiome health, which is that bacteria that can either be actually creating anti-inflammatory compounds for you like butyrate, or inflammatory compounds like endotoxins.

So we have this choice in terms of how we live our life if we’re feeding the healthy microbes in the gut or the dysbiotic opportunistic microbes. Now, of that subset of bacteria that are in your intestines, that number in the trillions with a T, there is a subset called the estrobolome. The estrobolome are bacteria that are actually responsible for removing and getting estrogen that has been used and processed by the liver and dumped to the colon, getting rid of it.

Now, if you have dysbiosis in the gut, so you have a lot of in- inflammatory bacteria and overgrowth of bad bacteria, you can actually produce too much of that enzyme by those bacteria called beta-glucuronidase that actually will send your estrogen that was ready for removal, ready to be eliminated from the body, back to your liver, and now your liver has to process yesterday’s estrogen and today’s estrogen.

And then we end up seeing PMS, heavy painful periods, irritability, headaches, cycle problems, even endometriosis. A lot of hormone dysfunction that can stem from when your gut health is poor because you need to be able to eliminate those hormones on a daily basis, and firstly process them in the liver with all the right nutrients and the blood sugar stability, the protein, the B vitamins, and then you need to eliminate them physically through a healthy intestinal function, and that means, ladies, going one to three times every single day.

So eliminating fully one to three times every single day. So when I worked as a nurse in the conventional system, we used to say… I even worked in a GI clinic like 20 years ago, and we used to say, “What’s normal for you is normal.” So when we’d say, “Okay, how many bowel movements do you have a week?” And they would say, “Three.”

And we’d say, “Is that different for you, or is it your normal?” “Oh, that’s my normal.” “Okay, check. You’re good. That’s just how your body was built.” But the truth is, now that I know decades later- And doing this deeper work on integrative health is that we all have a microbiome. We all have organs. They actually function the same for all of us for the most part, even between men and women.

They’re largely similar. So we know that optimal gut health and gut function is to eliminate the waste our body collected every single day. But most women are chronically constipated, so they… I had a client a few weeks ago, she had gone once a week for 10 years. 10 years. And she’d went to the medical system and done all the tests and took the mag citrate.

She eliminated the foods, drank more water, got her steps, did all those things. Working inside my program, within 10 days she was pooping every single day, and she has never looked back. And sorry, I’m a nurse, so I talk about poop and things. But she was eliminating every single day, and she hasn’t looked back.

And so when that happens, she’s gonna remove the old estrogen. She’s got less PMS, easier cycles. She always struggled with acne. Well, now all that bacteria is being eliminated, so it’s not gonna damage the gut lining and leak and show up in her skin. And she actually has a history of anxiety, and her mood is largely regulated.

She actually said she’s the chill person in the office now, and it’s, like, really strange because she was always the one on edge and, you know, over- over worried and really kind of like a recluse in her home office. And she’s just really come out of her shell, and that was literally from optimizing her gut, which is quite remarkable.

Katie: That’s amazing. Yeah. It does seem like so much flows from gut health and that, honestly, if we make that a priority along with the safety signals you talked about in our other episode, like you said, the body knows how to heal. It’s brilliantly designed, and it knows what to do. But if it’s having to put out fires all day long because of our gut health, it can’t focus on those other things.

And I feel like this is really also important to tie in, like, with the inflammation and the cortisol piece. I see those terms being very trendy on social media right now and people taking things to just, like, target their cortisol, for instance, versus looking at underlying reasons of, like, this isn’t a mistake.

Why is your cortisol high to begin with? And I know a lot of women also, due to high cortisol and a host of other things, have less than ideal of a lot of different hormones, whether it’s estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, et cetera. So, can we dive a little deeper into how we can specifically support the gut in reversing these things so the body can do what it already innately knows how to do and get cortisol in the right range, get our sex hormones in the right range?

Ninu: Yeah. Well, our cortisol does follow a diurnal rhythm, so it should be high in the morning and low at night. I just had a client yesterday who said she was taking something to lower cortisol in the morning. And I said… And this was our first meeting, and I said, “Do you know that you have high cortisol in the morning?”

And she’s like, “Well, not really, but I thought we’re supposed to lower cortisol.” And I said, “The issue is that some women are sitting at rock bottom for cortisol.” So they wake up sluggish, they don’t really get a peak of energy, they’re sluggish all afternoon, and then they’re really tired at night. So that’s the true burnout picture, and we see that type of thing on a Dutch test, so we can measure urinary cortisol.

So if someone’s flat-lined and they think because they follow influencers that say, “Everyone has high cortisol, it’s high cortisol,” and they take cortisol-lowering supplements, they might actually feel worse because they’re lowering the hormone that is actually meant to get you out of bed or the proverbial cave, have you go and get food, accomplish things, do the tasks, live your life.

You need cortisol to do it. It’s a life-saving hormone. So we need our cortisol to be high in the morning, like doubling two hours after waking, but that doubling signal comes from, da, da, da, getting outside in morning light. So just like you’ve been, you know, feeling like you’ve been preaching, Katie, is that getting outside, out of the cave and into the light is the signal that, “Hey, I’m alive. I got out of the cave/the dark bedroom, even if I work from home, and I took my physical eyeballs and body outside for a period of time.” Then your body says, “Okay, I recognize this light. It is morning light. This person needs digestion, brain function, hormones.” Like they… It puts all the systems in go. It pulls the levers and says, “Let’s do the thing today.”

But in not doing that will potentially keep your cortisol lower than optimal and your energy therefore lower than optimal. So on the cortisol piece, that’s one important thing to know is that you do want higher cortisol in the morning, and then you subsequently want it to drop at night. Now, at night when women are constantly on screens, like this is just very common, so I’m speaking from the women I work with.

You know, everyone’s scrolling their phones, and they’re watching a movie with their partner and watching shows because that’s how they connect, and they’re doing that till 10:00 or 11:00. So all that exposure was daytime. So forget about the fact that it was even a screen. Your brain is thinking, “It’s daytime, it’s daytime, it’s daytime.”

And melatonin cannot be produced in the presence of light. So our body is so brilliantly designed that melatonin’s like, “I’m gonna come out and play and help you with antioxidant function, sleepiness, and high-quality sleep, but I’m gonna wait till the end of the night because that’s when you sleep.” But if you delay that by having artificial light exposure, you’re not gonna get the melatonin levels up.

Therefore, when you do turn the light off, you’re gonna end up feeling wired. You’re gonna be like, “Well, I might as well just turn it back on and watch another show. Well, I might as well scroll a little bit more because I’m not tired anyways.” And you’re not tired because of the screen, so it’s a vicious cycle that women get themselves into.

So really dialing the bookends of the day, the morning, the evening, super-duper important starting points. Now when it comes to– You mentioned… So when it comes to what can we look at to really unravel where we’re at with this, with our hormones, you can of course test your hormones, right? There’s that kind of testing available with the Dutch test.

But is it the first place? Not in the way that I operate. I really feel like the inputs that impact your hormones, I like to say your hormones are at the end of the rainbow. They are the pot of gold. So the body’s goal is to have the pot of gold balanced hormones. Now, the road to get balanced hormones is dependent on the input you give it.

So blood sugar stability, nourishment from food, light exposure, movement, avoiding toxins or things in our environment that disrupt hormone function. If all of those things are dialed in and cortisol’s kept in check in a reasonable fashion and the nervous system’s addressed, then the pot of gold is there at the end, and that is the balanced hormones.

Optimal progesterone to ovulate every month, regulated healthy estrogen to keep your s- actually your skin healthy, your breast tissue healthy, your period flows. It’s not painful or needing heat packs or Advil or a day off work. Like that’s, that’s tolerated by women, but it is absolutely not optimal and healthy, and you don’t have to live like that.

But the pot of gold at the end, how much gold’s gonna be in it is really dependent on how you walk that rainbow. And too many times women are looking at just the hormones, but they’re missing how we got there. And so we need to look upstream and go, “Okay, well, what actually makes my hormones balanced?” And do those things on a consistent basis.

So pooping every day, hydrating well, making sure you have adequate minerals, dialing in your mornings, your evenings, getting sunlight. And then lastly, looking at that microbiome. If your gut is dysbiotic, you’ve had… You know, you don’t poop every day, you have bouts of loose stools or you have reflux or heartburn or indigestion or a big list of things you can’t eat without symptoms, that’s a sign that your microbiome is off and therefore that bacteria that help remove estrogen, they’re probably off too, and that’s why you’ll have hormonal symptoms that are driven by the gut.

So testing and addressing your gut microbiome is also, is actually a pivotal thing that I do with every woman I work with. We always look at their gut microbiome. Even if they, their primary concern is eczema or anxiety or infertility, we actually work on their gut.

Katie: That makes so much sense. And I bet you see all kinds of things resolve simply by that focus on gut health because it’s so connected to everything. And I think, like the light cues you mentioned, the, all the inputs that come from time in natural light. I think I’ve said before if I was ever got, if I ever got some kind of extreme diagnosis, one of my first steps would be to be in nature nearly 100% of the time because it’s that pivotal.

And I’d also like to kind of tie this into the topic of weight loss resistance because I know we’re hearing a lot about that. A lot of people are resorting to peptides for that, and I have my own opinions on that kind of thing. But I would love to hear how this and the gut aspect especially ties into weight loss resistance because that’s something I’ve experienced in the past and I know many women are dealing with in the modern world when there are these very shiny and new potential options that I do think could have some potential downsides. But I would love to hear kind of on the weight loss resistance side how that ties in.

Ninu: Yeah. Love that. So the most alarming thing that I think that every single human in North America should be concerned about is insulin resistance. Insulin resistance underpins almost the top, all of the top five killers of women and men.

Cancer, heart disease, stroke, diabetes or complications of diabetes or autoimmunity mixed with any number of those things. They’re all driven by metabolic imbalances. And the metabolic imbalance starts in your teens. It can start in your 20s. It can be the person who’s skinny but they get hypoglycemic.

It’s the person who has highs, lows. They get sleepy after eating. They have… They’re pretty thin everywhere but they have belly fat or visceral fat. They have normal labs except now they’re told they have a bit of fatty liver, but they don’t drink, therefore they’re like, “I’m, I think I’m fine. My doctor’s gonna keep an eye on it.”

Or it’s the person who has PCOS or, which is really insulin resistance or diabetes of the ovaries. So there’s so many manifestations today of the symptoms that are showing up for insulin resistance that are driving, I always say you’re driving down the road to chronic illness if you’re living with those things and ignoring them.

And I hate to be harsh but I am like so passionate about women and human beings really taking control of their health because this doesn’t mean you have to stay on that path. It’s like you are driving down the road on a long road trip and you’re headed to a destination that you don’t know you’re headed there.

You, you’ve taken the wrong turn maybe many times because there’s so much confusion about health out there. But that road that the majority of the population statistically is on is going to lead to heart disease, cancer, stroke, and diabetes or complications of it. So in order to get off that road, insulin needs to be a word you understand and a key focus in how you live your life.

The medical system will look at your hemoglobin A1C as a measure of how much sugar is stuck to your blood cells over the last few months, so glycation of cells or fasting glucose. The issue is, is insulin can change 10 years sooner, but we’re not checking insulin. So you’re, you can, you can very much have normal fasting glucose and hemoglobin A1C and still have insulin resistance.

So it’s very important to either pay out of pocket for that. It’s a test that I think everyone should do to be able to see where they’re really at, how much insulin is really floating around in their bloodstream, and if, especially if weight’s an issue. But regardless, it’s, if you’re really interested in your health, like most of your population, Katie, that is a huge factor that you can get on early before you even think you have an issue.

Now in terms of the gut microbiome, it’s so interesting because there are subsets of bacteria in your gut that actually help your insulin sensitivity. So when you have a dysbiotic gut, so say you’ve decimated your healthy population in your gut with antibiotics, and maybe you had to go on them because there’s a lot of different reasons.

Some people get dental surgery, and their dental surgeon says they have to take it prophylactically. C-section, you know, maybe your water broke early like mine, and then you had to have it because there’s a risk of infection. Maybe you couldn’t get rid of a sinus infection, and you suffered for seven weeks, and you just did it, or you get chronic UTIs, which is linked to the gut as well.

So any number of reasons that you might have taken antibiotics or been eating even foods that decimate your healthy bacteria, you can lose some of those bacteria that actually help you with insulin sensitivity, which is quite wild. So there’s even populations in the bacteria that they’ve measured in athletes and in obese individuals, and the athletes have healthier, robust levels of bacteria than the obese population.

So we know that the obese population might be like, “I hardly eat a thing. I’m, you know, doing everything I can.” And it’s not necessarily you and the actions you’re taking today and the choices you’re putting in your mouth. It’s literally your microbiome is not– it’s extracting more calories from your food than you want it to.

So I think that’s why in the women I work with over six months, some have even lost 55 pounds in six months, like without really changing exercise and not calorie or macro counting. But it’s because we work on all those other factors that reduce inflammation, stabilize blood sugar, regulate the ecosystem in the gut of the microbiome, and really teach you how to operate in your life like a healthy human would, you know, ancestrally aligned, not necessarily with all the food ancestrally aligned entirely for women, but definitely the lifestyle.

Katie: That’s startling. Like, that much… Probably the body just felt safe enough to finally let go of the extra weight in that case, and that’s amazing. And I love the focus on these tests that are not commonly offered in the traditional medical setting. Are there any other either tests or biometrics that we can measure at home that you find especially insightful or that women can keep track of to kind of keep a pulse on how they’re doing?

Ninu: So I… So checking your microbiome, I wish it was something… In Canada, we have, like, free healthcare, but something like that’s, a functional stool test, is not covered. But I really wish that… I think it could change everything if everybody was allowed to do a functional stool test and have it covered in Canada or offered freely in the US as it is.

Not freely like free, but offered and available to you to purchase. So that test can tell us so much about your health. But other things that are really invaluable for women I’ve worked with is hair mineral testing. So this is where you take a sample of hair from the back of the head that is not dyed so it can’t interfere with the results, so you can just wait for your hair to grow out, and they take that hair and they burn it in the lab, and there’s left a little pile of minerals and metals because those things, you know, minerals and atoms in the world can never be truly vanished, right?

They always exist in some form. So they can parse that apart and measure over the length of time that that hair grew out, so a month and a half or two, how many minerals were present in your bloodstream that got pushed out and essentially as waste tissue in your hair. And there’s norms that have been determined for those mineral levels, also for the ratio of minerals.

So your ratio of calcium to magnesium can tell us about your blood sugar. Your ratio of calcium to potassium can tell us about your thyroid. So beyond even looking at your thyroid labs functionally, which is always a good idea, and, like, with in blood work for that case like we talked about, but looking in your hair we can see, like, well, you actually don’t have enough selenium or potassium to even run your thyroid.

Like, to convert your thyroid hormone you need those two minerals, and yet it’s gonna show up normal in your blood work like we talked about because they regulate your heartbeat, right? So they’re not gonna be abnormal or else you’d have a heart problem. So looking at the cellular health through hair is really invaluable.

And the crazy thing is, Katie, through, you know, you’ve been through your own sets of trauma, and most people have, even if it was even like my childhood, more of a childhood of just being like a lone wolf and raised by a single mom, like alcoholic dad. Like, nothing happened to me, but it’s what didn’t happen.

It’s no family dinners. It’s, you know, latchkey kid, you know, making my own dinners, locking the door, make sure there was no strangers because my mom’s not home till 11:00 PM. Like, that’s the life I lived. That’s not safety either. That’s traumatic for a child. And so the interesting thing is on the hair mineral testing is that we can see trauma in it, and it’s wild when I go over this with somebody because they don’t have to tell me.

I’m not a psychologist. I do have a minor in psychology from my degrees, but I’m very interested in that piece. And when I walk through someone’s minerals with them and I say, “You know, this mineral is really elevated, like your calcium’s leaving your bones and teeth. It’s above a certain threshold, which generally means that your body’s trying to buffer stress over a long period of time that’s unresolved,” they just literally melt.

They’re like, “Oh my gosh. I didn’t know that this thing was bothering me. I didn’t know it had an impact on me.” And it’s finally like coming to terms with, “Maybe I do need to see someone,” and not necessarily talk therapy. You know, there’s a million and one ways to release stored trauma, like some of the things in your personal journey you’ve talked about, alongside things like acupuncture, reiki, sound therapy, like EMDR, you know, mushrooms.

Like, there’s so many modalities that can actually help you shed trauma without saying, “When I was 14…” Like, we don’t have to go down that route because most women who have had something happen to them, they have talked to somebody. And using our brain to get ourselves out of a nervous system that’s not feeling safe and thinking our way out of it isn’t necessarily going to get you the results that, on a visceral level, your body needs to experience.

So looking at your minerals in hair can be really eye-opening to really serve as like here’s why you feel that way in your body, like numb to emotions or you have muscle aches and joint pain or severe anxiety and panic. Like, I had a client the other day, she has such severe anxiety she can’t drive a car.

She has to walk to work. She has… She can’t really eat much at work. It’s debilitating for her life. She doesn’t do anything. She is constantly in a state of worry and panic, and we looked at her gut and her hair, and looking in her hair she actually had copper toxicity. So she had such an overload of toxicity of copper, which is very important and we need it, but too much of it and that overstimulates the adrenals and it overstimulates the mind, and you can get really manifestations of a lot of severe mental health issues.

And she couldn’t believe that we found that in there. So I said, “What a gift to be able to have this data to say, ‘Oh my gosh, we can do something.’ You don’t have to suffer your whole life.” Like, it, it’s just, it makes me so sad, and I’m such an advocate for, like, getting to the bottom of the symptoms because we don’t have to normalize living with things, and that’s just how life is, and it’s aging and whatever because it’s really not.

Our body is always trying to get us on, back into true homeostasis every second of every day.

Katie: I love that, and I feel like I could talk to you all day and keep learning about this. And I think you’ve given so many really impactful tips already. I would say, like, as we start to wrap up, if someone is realizing that they are resonating with some of these things you’ve talked about and that likely their gut health is not where they would like it to be, where would you give them as a starting point?

And I’ll of course include… I know you have many resources online for this as well. But where would be a starting point if someone wants to just start making those changes?

Ninu: Ooh, that is such a big question. You know, starting with breaking down your day. So just break down your day. What is the first part of your day you can change?

Can you change how you’re waking up? Can you change the first thing you put in your body? Can you change the last thing that you see before bed? Like, start tiny, tiny, tiny because this health journey, if you want to be really in optimal health and preventing a lot of things or reversing them, it’s really gonna come down to micro inputs over time.

So people are majoring in the… They’re majoring in… They’re thinking that the fancy shiny things, “I just need to be on peptides. I just need Ozempic. I just need this bloat supplement. I just need this other thing,” but they’re not doing the foundational work. And the foundations are what’s gonna inform the nervous system, the adrenals, the insulin sensitivity, and really help you start to be in a parasympathetic nervous system state so you can heal.

So you need to really evaluate and shift your diet, lifestyle, movement, light, sleep, all those lifestyle factors that seem soft. And then of course there’s layers for functional testing and personalized supplement plans and all kinds of really great tools. But all, everyone I work with, we have to do that other stuff.

The other things are not just filler. They are actually creating the environment where the body can heal, and then we can remove the things that are harming it or replace what’s missing, and it works a million times better when you do it that way.

Katie: I love that. Like, going back to that point you made of, like, the body is beautifully, wonderfully, incredibly made and knows how to heal.

And so those symptoms are gifts, and they’re messengers. And they’re telling us what the body needs that we’re not giving it in support. And I feel like all of your tips have been so incredibly helpful today, and I hope people will find you online and stay in touch with you. Where can people find you, and where do you recommend that they jump in if they wanna work with you or just keep learning from you?

Ninu: I do offer free 30-minute, like, clarity calls, so just to let me hear a little bit about your story, what you’ve tried, you know, how this is impacting you, and to discover whether working together might be a good idea. I do work with women inside a larger program over six months. So it’s a six-month period where we’re looking at shifting those foundations and making changes that you can sustain for life.

It’s not an on the wagon, off the wagon kind of thing. And then also looking at testing some of those important pieces in the body which we didn’t talk about, like omega-3 fatty acids as well as the gut and the stool, and then hair. So we look at the data and create personalized plans for people inside the program so that they get the foundations, the education, the strategy in the right order, but also get to turn over the rocks of discovering what is impacting the gut, the metabolism, the hormones, energy, fatigue, thyroid.

And through that it ends up being like a total body reset. So that program is how I work with 95 or 98% of most women, but I do also offer one-off hair mineral testing or hormone testing too.

Katie: Amazing. Well, I will put all of those links in the show notes. It has been such a joy to have this conversation. I love the work that you do, and I’m so glad we finally got to connect. Thank you so much for being here.

Ninu: Amazing. Thanks, Katie. It’s been a really great honor. I’ve been watching your… and listening to your podcast in my ears for as long as you’ve probably been doing it, so it’s so full circle to be here with you, and thank you for spreading such great messages and having amazing guests that can share their value.

Katie: Thank you, and thanks as always to all of you for listening, for sharing your most valuable resources, your time, your energy, your attention with us today. I know we’re both so grateful that you did, and I hope that you will join me again on the next episode of the Wellness Mama podcast.