How Your Gut Health Affects the Rest of Your Health

You may have been hearing lately about the importance of your gut health and for good reason: the level of health in your gastrointestinal (GI) tract is directly related to your overall health. Your gut is not just that thing that digests food, absorbs nutrients and passes waste; it is a very complex ecosystem comprised of both harmful and beneficial bacteria. When our gut has a predominance of the “good” bacteria, also known as the probiotic bacteria (such as bifidobacteria and lactic acid bacteria), it can ensure optimum health as well as prevent diseases of the gut and other organs in the body.

What do Probiotics Do Exactly?

Those good bacteria do a few different things to make us healthy. Their most basic function is to fight harmful pathogens that enter the body, detoxify them and helping to eliminate them. Probiotics also prevent and overgrowth of harmful bacteria, which can easily take over the ecosystem.

They do this by lowering the PH balance of the environment to a point where harmful bacteria cannot thrive. Lowering the PH balance also helps to prevent the metabolism of cholesterol and bile acids (both cancer-causing agents) thereby preventing cancer in the GI tract and other organs.

Probiotics have also been shown to lower serum cholesterol levels thereby helping to prevent cardiovascular disease.

5 Things You Can do TODAY to Maintain a Healthy Gut

You should treat your gut like it’s your very best friend, and in fact, it may be. The following five steps will help you to maintain optimum GI tract health. While none of these suggestions are an overnight fix if your gut has been unhealthy and unbalanced for a long time, by making these changes you can build and maintain a healthy GI tract for the rest of your life.

Remove the Culprits

You wouldn’t put a brand new roof over a damaged roof, you would remove the damaged roof first. You’ve got to do the same with your GI tract. Good health starts with removing any food items that may be wreaking havoc on your gut. Some common culprits are gluten, yeast (think alcohol and breads), dairy, corn, peanuts and genetically modified anything.

Now, you may not necessarily have an issue with all of these so don’t go throwing out your peanut butter just yet (although do throw everything GMO out immediately). Experiment and see which ones may be causing you some digestive troubles and eliminate those. What we can tell you is that, in general, no processed food is good for our health. Many of these foods along with sugar kill your good bacteria and let the bad stuff thrive. In fact the bad bacteria feasts on sugar. Removing sugar and heavily processed food will only improve your gut’s health.

Replace the Culprits with Healthy Whole Foods

Once you have gotten rid of the toxic processed food and refined sugar, fill your refrigerator and pantry with nutritious whole foods that are going to support your GI health. Make sure to eat plenty of organic fruits and vegetables, especially leafy greens, and healthy fats from flax, chia, raw almonds, walnuts and avocados. These are relatively easy to digest for everyone and will reduce inflammation and support the hormones that assist digestion. Instead of sugar, try coconut nectar, stevia, blackstrap molasses or maple syrup to sweeten your foods and beverages.

Inoculate Good Bacteria

When most people think about getting in those probiotics, they automatically reach for yogurt and kefir. While both of those are perfectly fine sources they aren’t the only option. For those who experience digestive upset with dairy you can get equally active probiotics from plant sources like coconut yogurt, kimchi (which is Korean fermented veggies), sauerkraut, or miso (be sure to choose one without any sugar or yeast).

Catch Those ZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

I know, you’re tired of people always telling you to get more sleep. The thing is, sleep, or rather lack of sleep, has a tremendous adverse effect on your health. Sleep actually has a significant impact on your GI tract. As with other organs and systems in your body, your digestive system requires replenishing and this process can only happen at night when you’re sleeping. Your body will also detoxify and remove waste from the previous day while you are resting. If you often have gas or bloating, or gurgling in your intestines, that’s a pretty good sign that you’re not getting enough sleep. As we mentioned a bit earlier, there are specific hormones that support digestion and sleep is equally important to maintain that hormonal balance. Make sure you get at least 7 hours of sleep per night and if at all possible, 8 or 9.

Keep Calm & Manage Stress

Not only is exercise good to help you relieve tension from the day, but it also helps to “massage” your digestive organs to help things ‘move along’ easier. And exercise, in particular jumping on a regular or mini trampoline, also revitalizes your lymphatic system which plays a major role in detoxifying your body.

Gentler exercises such as yoga and Tai Chi can help you effectively manage stress, which is essential because stress can aggravate our digestive system and throw our hormones and bacteria ratio out of kilter.

Those are some easy and effective ways you can maintain your Gut Health. You can also choose to take probiotic formulas which do a GREAT job at protecting your Gut Health – I would recommend BioTrust, they’ve just released an incredible new probiotic formula [CLICK]