Have you ever thought about how chronic inflammation and gut health are connected? Never? Just me, huh? Well, I might be the weirdo here, but I can tell you, that connection is important and it might secretly be ruinning your life.
Sorry for being dramatic! But it’s true. Your gut microbiome affects more systems inside your body than you can imagine. It actually affects all of them and your gut health and the inflammatory state of the body are tightly connected.
The health of your gut isn’t just related to gut inflammation it is also connected to systemic inflammation (aka full body inflammation). The type of chronic, low-grade inflammation that research links to autoimmune, cardiovascular, metabolic and neurodegenerative disease, as well as cancer.
Why Is Gut Health Important?
The reason gut health is THAT important lies in the gut’s very basic function. Quite like the skin, it represents a barrier between the cells that make up our body and our outside world.
The basic function of your gut is to extract the beneficial nutrients from the food we eat and let them into the body. From there these nutrients are transported via the bloodstream and used for energy, cell repair and growth. No nutrients, no life basically.
The other part your gut is responsible for is getting rid of what we can’t use and pathogens.
From that basic function, it’s easy to see why the condition of your digestive system can affect all systems of your body – nervous, cardiovascular, skeletal, immune…everything. Because it basically supplies what’s needed to build and renew them.
The Role Of Your Gut Flora
The gut bacteria have a huge role in all of this. The good ones can:
- strengthen the gut barrier and thus protect us from pathogens
- help with digestion and to extract nutrients from food
- improve immune function
If your gut is colonized by good bacteria like Lactobacillus and Bifidobacterium the gut barrier is basically impermeable for pathogens.
However, if the bad bacteria dominate, your intestinal permeability can increase leading to something called leaky gut. In this case, the intestinal wall, the gut barrier, becomes easier to overcome for pathogens. It basically has bigger holes in it and becomes leaky, letting in not only nutrients we need, but also toxins (like endotoxin or lipopolysaccharide) and even bacteria into the bloodstream.
How A Leaky Gut Leads To Chronic Inflammation
So when you have a leaky or unhealthy gut and pathogens enter into your circulation, your immune system can recognize them and will naturally start fighting them. Because, that’s its job. But in that fight, it also attacks the body itself leading to autoimmune and inflammatory diseases like Crohn’s disease, Celiac and even type 1 diabetes.
That’s how inflammation and the immune system work. It removes the pathogen, damages some of our own tissues in the fight and then recovers what’s been damaged. The job is done!
However, when the irritants or pathogens keep on coming in, there’s no time to completely recover the tissues and the immune system is active nonstop. Thus inflammation stays unresolved. Or what we call chronic or systemic inflammation. Constantly lingering and chipping away at our health.
Steps To Improve Gut Health & Reduce Inflammation
Now even if your gut microbiome isn’t what you need it to be right now, the good news is that you can do something about it. And I don’t mean transplanting someone else’s gut bacteria into your own gut. I know how that sounds. It gives me chills too.
But, we need to look at the gut microbiome like a garden. That’s why it’s also referred to as the gut flora. You basically reap what you sow. Just like in a garden, if you leave it without care – weeds will take over eventually. But when you start being more intentional, you plant what you would like to have in that garden. And with care, sunshine and water – the fruits of your labor will come.
It’s the same with the gut microbiome. If you start taking care of it, you can change it for the better. Here are some habits that can transform the health of your gut and thus your metabolic and brain health.
- Exercise
- Intermittent fasting
- Eat more low-glycemic vegetables as well as other unprocessed low GI plants (nuts, seeds, beans)
- Enjoy probiotic foods like sauerkraut, kimchi or yogurt
- Chew more
- Sleep 7-8 hours
- Spend enough time with loved ones, in nature or doing your favorite hobby (to reduce stress)
Along with that avoid to the best of your abilities these 6 S-es:
- sugar
- spirits (alcohol)
- smoking
- screens
- sitting
- stress
These habits might seem very “duh” to you, because they’re in basically every article about improving your health through lifestyle. But that’s because they work. And if we keep hearing about them, but do nothing to implement them, we can’t complain when they “don’t work”. They don’t work, when we don’t practice them or don’t practice them long enough. So make a plan and start implementing these habits in your daily life.
What To Eat For Gut Health
Now, let’s get more specific about what to eat for gut health. I have a list with gut healthy foods right here, but these are some of the major groups you want to include:
Prebiotics and high-fiber foods.
Above all good gut bacteria like Lactobacillus and Bifidobacterium love fermentable slowly digestable carbohydrates aka prebiotics (such as inulin). These slowly digestible carbohydrates are fermented by certain types of gut bacteria and thus can stimulate the growth and activity of these specific microorganisms.
We encounter some of the most important prebiotics – human milk glycans, right after we’re born and this really helps to shape and enrich the gut microbiome of a newborn baby. Some great examples from this group include Jerusalem artichokes, apples, asparagus, barley, onion, leeks and even broccoli.
Probiotic Foods
These foods are fermented foods. This means that they are sources of bacteria that can be beneficial for your gut. When you eat them, you enrich your gut flora with different strains. Some examples here include sauerkraut, kimchi, kombucha, yogurt and kefir.
Polyphenol Rich Foods
Now this group of healthy foods actually includes some of the prebiotics too – thus we see how important it is to have these in our diet (they made it twice on the list!).
Polyphenol-rich foods are a great source of antioxidants, anti-inflammatory and antibacterial molecules. Some examples include berries, plums, broccoli, spinach, seeds, nuts, dark chocolate and tea. Due to their healing and selective antimicrobial properties, these foods can prevent the growth of bad bacteria and raise the levels of good bacteria.
More About Gut Health and Inflammation
In conclusion, I want to say that what is good for your gut will be good for every single part of your body. So whatever you want to heal, don’t ignore your gastrointestinal health. It can actually help resolve more than you expect, it’s not just about bloating. So take the steps I mentioned above to restore your gut microbiome and reduce inflammation in the process.
