How To Improve Your Gut Health Starting Today
More than ever the buzz word ‘healthy gut’ has been making its way around nutrition circles and health guru’s social media accounts. What exactly is a healthy gut? Does it come naturally or through supplementation? Is a healthy gut more than what you eat? Many of these questions are filtering through nutrition influencers to give individuals a guide on how to improve their gut.
What Does A Healthy Gut Look Like?
According to the University of California Health a healthy gut is a balance of bacteria throughout the gastrointestinal tract. What this means is that our organs like the esophagus, stomach and intestines all play a vital part and work together to allow us to digest food without discomfort. An unhealthy gut might look like stomach disturbances such as gas, bloating, constipation, diarrhea, and heartburn. If you’ve experienced any of these this can be signs of your own unhealthy gut. So how can you improve your own gut health?
Improving Your Gut Health
Food is ultimately broken down into your gut which then can enter the bloodstream and finally gives nutrients to your body. When you have an unhealthy gut, you may not get as many nutrients as you need to ward off infectious agents like bacteria, viruses and fungi.
In order to start improving your gut, you can do a few things to kick start a better path to gut health. First, getting more sleep is a must. According to the National Institute of Health, better gut microbiome is associated with better sleep habits. You’ve heard it for years, better sleep equals better health, your gut is no different.
Another way to improve gut health is by moving your body more. A study from the National Institute of Health shows that exercise modifies the gut microbiota with positive results.
Next, managing your stress is a great way to improve your gut health. The body works together and increased stress doesn’t help your gut either.
Finally, your body responds to what you put in it, so of course we’ll get into some good foods to help improve your gut health.
What Foods Can Improve Your Gut Health?
There are trillions of microbes living inside of us, so it’s no wonder that a good, healthy diet can make sure those microbes are working for us in the right ways. These microbes work nonstop to create those feel-good chemicals like serotonin and dopamine naturally. These foods are no brainers, it’s of course eating vegetables like:
Onions
Asparagus
Broccoli
Spinach
Artichokes
These vegetables especially are great for creating a healthy gut. But your gut isn’t just about eating the right foods, it’s about cutting out the foods that aren’t as helpful. What you really want to make sure you are cutting out of your diet are sugars that digest quickly, we call these sugars monosaccharides. These move so quickly through your body your microbes can’t work to break them down. Don’t fret, because there are plenty of sweet foods that are great for your microbiome. Great sweet foods for a healthy gut include:
Apples
Bananas
Honey
Dark Chocolate
Sweet Potatoes
Berries
Make sure you watch out for tricky foods like in smoothies, nut butters, protein bars and salad dressings. These foods are sneaky and you don’t realize the effect they might have on your gut.
Pictured above: Beverage made with Kombucha, containing billions of active probiotics.
Healthy Gut With Probiotics And Prebiotics
Probiotics are cultured in labs and put in foods or in supplements like pills or powders. These probiotics, when we consume them, survive in our guts and can provide benefits to us like the good bacteria we naturally receive. Prebiotics on the other hand can’t be broken down from our digestive system. They survive throughout your digestive system and are finally broken down in the colon and do the good dirty work then. Probiotics and prebiotics are great, but don’t beat out a healthy diet of the right foods. Naturally those foods do the best work when it comes to a healthy gut. With any supplementation, make sure you talk with your provider to determine what works best for you.
Some great probiotic foods include:
Kombucha
Greek Yogurt
Sauerkraut
Kimchi
Miso
Pickles
Getting Your Gut Healthy
There are so many ways to get on track with your gut health. At Performance Plus we emphasize improving health in all areas so you can recover from pain once and for all, holistically without surgery and drugs. The same applies to gut health. Improving your gut health doesn’t take anything fancy, just a healthy diet of the right foods and we’ll encourage you every step of the way.
