3 Steps to Great Gut Health
I had a follower on Instagram reach out recently asking “how can I get started with gut health?”
This is a loaded question that is too complex to explain on an Instagram post so I thought it would be a great topic for my blog!
Gut health affects everything in the body and is vital to your overall health and well being. If your digestion isn’t working properly, a cascade of negative effects can occur through the rest of the body. Left unresolved or unnoticed, poor gut health can develop over years or decades into more serious health conditions, so it’s crucial to start making positive changes to what you consume today.
To learn more about why gut health is so important, I suggest you start with one of my other blog post: Gut Health 101.
Poor Gut Health Symptoms
First of all you may be wondering “well how do I know if I actually need to work on my gut health?
Symptoms go beyond your typical digestive symptoms so even if you’re not experiencing any bloating or gas, your gut may be struggling! Our bodies are one interconnected unit and symptoms of imbalance in the gut can appear in any body system.
If you have any of these symptoms, it could be a sign that your gut may need a little love!:
Intestinal Symptoms: bloating, gas/burping, nausea, constipation, diarrhea, heartburn, stomach cramping, food intolerances
Neurological Symptoms: brain fog, fatigue, anxiety, depression, headaches/migraines
Hormonal Symptoms: hormone imbalances, PMS, mood swings, low libido
Skin & nails: irritations, acne, rashes, eczema, weak or cracked fingernails
Musculoskeletal: joint pain
Joint pain as a symptom of poor gut health
Understanding the Benefits of an Anti-Inflammatory Diet
One of the easiest and quickest ways to start improving your gut health today is eating an anti-inflammatory diet.
Inflammation is a term that describes what is going on in your immune system. I’m sure you’re familiar with inflammation that occurs as a result of injury. Say you sprain your knee or get a sliver, it would become red, swollen and painful. This is the body’s natural immune response, helping to heal from injury and infection, so a bit of inflammation is natural and a good thing.
The same inflammatory response also occurs systemically within your digestive tract and throughout the body but is often invisible and you may not feel it until the levels are really high and out of control. If this inflammatory response within the digestive tract is chronic, the immune system is constantly stimulated and as you can imagine, anything that’s constantly turned on and continuous, eventually gets overworked.
This overworking of the immune system lowers its function and ability to manage any contact with bacteria, viruses or food you may be sensitive to and increases your risk of developing autoimmune disease.
Inflammation can contribute to poor immune function
The inflammation which starts in your digestive tract can also travel throughout the body and especially to the brain and this is why what you eat is so important.
Inflammation can present anywhere in your body. When inflammation travels to your skin, it can appear as eczema. Some people have a leaky brain barrier, which allows higher levels of inflammation into the brain, impacting how you feel and how your brain functions.
Eating real, whole foods and even foods high in antioxidants (to help balance inflammation), is the best way to reduce diet induced inflammation.
Diving Deeper- Healing Your Gut
Eating an anti-inflammatory diet is a great place to start, however for some people this is not enough to correct the imbalances in their intestines.
Our Western diet filled with high sugar, processed, nutrient poor and low fiber diets all contribute to bacteria and yeast overgrowth in the gut, which can damage the intestinal lining. This combined with a highly toxic environment, possible mold or parasite exposure, lack of enzymes, chronic stress and medication use can all lead to a leaky gut, a condition that results when our digestive lining becoming porous and lets things like food particles, bacteria, viruses and toxins into the body which shouldn’t be there.
I use the 3R approach in my practice to help clients overcome their digestive issues. The 3R approach stands for:
1. Reset- Removing the root of your inflammation
A lot of the information on gut health focuses on how to rebuild and repair the gut but a crucial step that is often missed when you try to DIY is the reset phase.
An good analogy is when you have a sliver in your finger. Your body may heal all around the sliver, but with the sliver still there, there’s going to be inflammation, redness and soreness. It’s not until you remove the sliver, that your body can finally recover fully.
There could be certain foods you’re eating regularly, have yeast overgrowing (or many other possible underlying factors) that act as the sliver and without removing them, all the anti-inflammatory foods and probiotics you’re eating aren’t necessarily getting rid of that root cause.
In order to reset, we work on removing the following inflammatory for a period of time:
Alcohol- all types
Caffeine- coffee, tea, soft drinks, chocolate
Dairy & Gluten- gluten grains (wheat, barley, rye, spelt), yogurt, cheese, butter, milk
Refined Sugar & Artificial Sweetener- sugar, high fructose corn syrup, aspartame etc.
Processed Foods- hot dogs, lunch meat, bacon, bread, cereal etc.
Inflammatory Oils- canola, corn oil, soybean, margarine, sunflower, peanut, baked goods, snack foods
This phase is often combined with supplements to help kill and eliminate any microbes that may be contributing to your symptoms as well.
Common Food Allergens: This includes eggs, nightshade vegetables (potatoes, peppers, eggplant, tomatoes, goji berries), citrus fruits (lemons, limes, grapefruit, oranges of all types), dried spices, sesame, yeast, nuts & peanuts, corn, soy, pork, beef and shellfish.
Removing inflammatory foods as a key step to improving gut health
2. Rebuild- replace nutrient poor, processed foods with real whole, natural foods
This is where the anti-inflammatory diet comes in!
During this phase we focus on including more real whole foods which provide a variety of nutrients, phytonutrients, enzymes, healthy fats, protein, complex carbohydrates and fiber needed for your gut to function properly and optimally.
We also focus on eating habits in this phase since how you eat your food can play an important role in your ability to digest and absorb the nutrients from food. If you don’t chew your food properly or eat while stressed, you may end up with larger food pieces that sit and ferment in your digestive tract, which can contribute to the imbalances we’re trying to fix!
3. Repair- providing your body what it needs to make a full recovery
During this phase we focus on soothing, anti-inflammatory foods and supplements to help the cells in the gut lining grow and repair themselves. These supplements and food help improve motility in the gut, support immune function, and destroy pathogens.
This is also where the prebiotic, fermented foods and probiotics come in! These foods help support growth of the good bacteria needed for immune support, balancing mood, intestinal function and nutrient production and absorption.
It’s important to remember that everyone’s body is unique and that there are sometimes healthy foods that could be contributing to poor gut health for you in particular. For complex imbalances, like yeast , bacteria overgrowth or parasites, it would be best to work with a holistic nutritionist who is experienced in gut health and understands what is going on in your body.
Sprout Your Health offers comprehensive assessments and gut health testing to determine digestive and intestinal imbalances and offers a holistic, natural approach to help you restore and improve your gut health.
Click here to book a free discovery call to learn about which program is best to get your gut health back on track!
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🚨 Before You Go!
Want to get started on improving your gut health right now?! Download a copy of my anti-inflammatory food list-it’s free! You can access it right away by clicking here
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By Krista Znebel, Holistic Nutritionist, R.H.N.©
July 17, 2023