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Today I’m going to go over a G. I. maps tool test results and help you explain what it means so stay tuned. Hey there if you’re new here my name’s Amanda Malachowski MA certified functional nutrition health coach in
a digestive and allergy detective for tips and tricks on how to resolve your digestive challenges for good please consider subscribing and be sure to hit the bell to be notified when
I post a new every week so you ran a G. I. maps tool test to see what was going on in your belly but now what by the end of today’s have a general idea of how to interpret your G. I’m not still testing and you’ll have an idea of
which things are concerning and should take you to your doctor right away and which things are more to be dealt with on the diet and lifestyle front with someone like me. I like to use the GI map still test with my clients who haven’t made really good progress
by using their basic digestive support so I’d like to help you understand how to use this wonderful tool so let’s get started. All right so the GI map is a stool test by diagnostic solutions laboratory and it’s designed to give you an idea of
what is living in your digestive tract from a single stool sample that you collected home and sent back to the lab and I like this test because it gives you a lot of really great information they can kind of help you guide your approach to how you’re healing your gut. However, no test is perfect and a lot of people sometimes get a little carried away with the results of
this test and what it means we do have to be careful about making leaps of logic or jumping to conclusions that aren’t supported by research so I want to talk a little bit about what some of these things are and how to properly interpret this test and before I go any further I should give a
medical disclaimer nothing I’m about to say in this video should be construed as direct medical advice and if you have any questions whatsoever about what you’re seeing in your test result you should go make an appointment to talk with your doctor or other health care providers
okay so here is a GI maps tool test results and it’s 4 pages full of information about the bacteria and yeasts parasites and even viruses and sometimes the worms that might be living in your digestive tract and I want to mostly discuss the sections about bacteria but I want to touch briefly on the parasites and yeasts first.
On the first page of the find, the results deal with parasites and worms and these organisms are very tricky to find out any kind of stool test the thing that distinguishes the GI map is that it can detect very small quantities of DNA from these organisms and so it might find something that another test
that just involves looking at stool samples and looking for eggs and other various body parts of parasites and may not find the trick is that sometimes the levels of these things you find might represent a residual infection that you’re no longer infected with so the relative abundance of those organisms can matter for
how seriously you want to take these results and then the next section is the fun guy section and the most famous resident of this section is, of course, Candido which is can be a pathogenic yeast and candida also really difficult to find on tests it doesn’t culture very well and so it can be tricky to find out if you actually
have a geese problem if they used it can do to actually shows up on your G. I. map it’s usually a pretty good indicator that there is a yeast overgrowth and then treating this is something you want to discuss with your doctor or other healthcare providers okay now let’s talk a little bit about bacteria
I think this is the part of the test where people often get a little bit misguided they see a bacteria result and they think oh I need antibiotics or need to do an intensive antimicrobial treatment protocol to deal with the bacteria on my test and this isn’t necessarily true so let’s kind of breaking this down and look at
the different bacterial sections the first one is on page one and these are bacteria that are. The genic so these are things like C. def or infectious E. coli varieties that can make you very very sick some of they are very dangerous and pathogenic so this can sometimes give you some insights into that
I’m certain if one of these bacteria on this the first page is elevated above the reference range this is something you definitely want to talk with your doctor about and similarly on the second page of the test is the H. pylori results and so it gives you an idea about whether or not you have H. pylori and also tests for these
very lets a factor so I think it kind of types the different kinds of H. pylori and some of them are much more virulent than others and these more virulent strains can be more likely to cause other kinds of side effects and medical problems a leader on the longer that you have H. pylori so definitely if you have a positive result
on H. pylori this is also definitely something to talk with your doctor about treatment research shows that H. pylori infection is correlated with ulcers and gastritis but long-term infection, especially with the more virulent strains can be a risk factor for cancer. Now the next section is the part that talks about
your beneficial bacteria and it kind of gives you some idea of the relative abundance and ratios of different orders and classes and groupings of beneficial bacteria and a lot of people can get a little bit of a mixed-up about these results and think oh it shows that I have this bad ratio and that means I need to
do something specific about my health and this is really off the mark unfortunately and the reason is that the study of the microbiome and sort of what ordinary and normal is very much in its infancy and we don’t know what these results mean or indicate there’s been no really clear correlation
there’s been some suggestions and studies and things that it looks like are correlated the most famous example is certain ratios of the firm cuties to Bacteroides groups of bacteria are supposed to correlate with obesity and so obese people are supposed to have a different ratio than people who are not obese.
So there is some correlation but the correlation is not causation and we can’t necessarily make these conclusions yet and so basically what this tells me is you have a unique blend of the microbiome in your gut and that’s about all we can say from this unless some of these bacteria are all wildly overgrown in out of range I’m not going to put too much value in this particular section of the test it just might tell me that you have a little bit of imbalance that we maybe need to nudge in the right direction
and that certainly doesn’t require really strong antimicrobial protocols or antibiotics now on the next page we have a bacterial the section that’s a little bit more of a gray area so it’s a section of bacteria that are supposed
to be despite attic bacteria so when they turn up they tend to indicate that there’s some sort of dysbiosis or and they’re known to be autoimmune triggers or other potential triggers of further health problems and so when I see some of these out of balance again.