In this interview, JJ Virgin and a health practitioner discuss how gut problems often manifest beyond classic gastrointestinal complaints. They outline systemic symptoms that can stem from gut dysfunction, including severe brain fog, heightened anxiety and depression, various skin conditions (acne, eczema, psoriasis), thyroid disorders such as hypothyroidism and Hashimoto's, and metabolic effects like weight gain. The conversation emphasizes the importance of recognizing these hidden connections to avoid misdiagnosis. When evaluating a client, the practitioner stresses that the first decisive step—especially for educated, health‑savvy individuals who have already addressed basic diet factors—is functional stool testing (e.g., the GI‑MAP). This comprehensive test identifies microbial imbalances, infections, and maldigestion issues, serving as a game‑changing tool for pinpointing the root causes of chronic gut‑related problems.
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So someone comes in, like, I'd love to just kind of walk through how someone would look at this. Someone's got— and here's the other challenge with GI issues is so often we're not connecting those dots. Like some of the obvious things like gas and bloating or constipation or diarrhea. Oh, but you may not connect the dots between your joint pain or your skin issues. First of all, before we go into like how you would look, look at all of this, What are some of the different things that a gut problem can, can cause beyond the obvious gut symptoms?
Yeah, I mean, you're right on the money there. Essentially everything. Of course I'm biased because this is like what we, what I do and what I've dedicated my life to. But brain fog, right? Really bad brain fog. It can contribute to heightened levels of anxiety or, and depression. We can see a lot of skin issues, so we have like I have someone on my team who specializes in the gut-skin connection because we can get really like direct in that kind of work and we'll see a lot of different gut infections, gut bacterial imbalances present in conditions like acne, eczema, psoriasis, thyroid issues. So like any time someone has hypothyroidism or Hashimoto's, I mean, we have to take a look at the gut because the gut influences the thyroid and then the thyroid influences the gut as well. Sometimes weight gain, you know, I would say like a little less that I, that's not my first go-to, but if that, if the gut is influencing the thyroid, then we'll see the metabolic function, you know, slow down. So there's that. Those are probably some of the most consistent things that we see in conjunction with just the chronic GI issues and the, you know, quote unquote IBS.
So someone coming in and they're, they're wanna go and look and say, okay, what could be going on? What would be the first thing that you would look at? Would it be the, a stool test?
Yeah. So, you know, I would say it kind of depends on where the client is at in their journey. We tend to see a lot of people who have like done a lot of stuff already. So our client is not someone that needs to like eat less processed food, right? Our client is like, they've done all of that. They're pretty advanced, they're well educated, and then they're like, I don't know what's going on. So we non-negotiable, we're running functional stool testing. I see it. It was a complete game changer in my personal journey.
You went love.
We run the GI Map by Diagnostic Solutions Lab. Truthfully, I think there's like ups and like positives and negatives to all of them. I think no test is perfect. I think you really gotta know how to, how to take a look at it and kind of where it falls flat. We've learned over the years 'cause we've been running it for probably 5 or 6 years now. But that's gonna show us tons of different microbial imbalances, bacterial, fungal, parasitic infections, bacterial infections, And also mal digestion pattern. So are you actually digesting your food efficiently? Cuz that alone can cause chronic bloating and GI issues if you just don't have enough stomach acid or you're not producing adequate pancreatic enzymes or anything like that. So the stool test is gonna give us a good kind of like bit of data to work with that can inform what we do next with the client.
