The Gut microbiota is a community of trillions of microorganisms, all of which play a key role in Microbiome health or more commonly refered to as gut health.
Good gut health plays a key role in our overall health and wellbeing.
The vast array of organisms in this unique environment play a key role in healthy gut health
Having a Healthy and Efficient Digestive System
Microorganisms influence the absorption of nutrients, produce digestive enzymes, ensure healthy motility and protect the gut wall from infection and inflammation.
How Does Your Immune System Work?
Whether you have a strong or weak immune system, or if you are likely to develop an autoimmune condition, if you have food or environmental allergies.
Therefore, the microbiome health can influence whether you are susceptible to most chronic diseases, from gut-related illnesses such as Chron’s disease and IBS to allergies, including anaphylaxis, diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, and all forms of cancer.
If Your Gut Can Detoxify Toxins Efficiently
–The gut is a key detoxification organ, and many species assist in the removal of toxins, including chemicals, and ensure healthy recycling of hormones.
Maintaining A Healthy Weight or Losing Weight
– Gut Health influences whether you are prone to putting on weight, and many gut flora species can aid in weight loss.
Having a Healthy Mood
– You may have heard the term “the gut is the second brain.” A healthy balanced microbiota directly influences mood, clarity of thought, and depression.
Gut Microbes
When it comes to having a healthy gut biome, it’s all about the number of healthy bacteria and the balance of microbiome bacteria.
The word dysbiosis is used to describe the imbalance of gut flora resulting in detrimental symptoms. This imbalance can be between the so-called bad bacteria or pathogenic bacteria and the healthy bacteria. Still, it can also mean a lack of diversity in the species present in the gut.
This imbalance can result in gut symptoms such as constipation, diarrhoea, pain, reflux, bloating, and inflammation.
How You Can Have a Healthy Gut Biome
Research has found that spending time outside in nature, playing a sport, being physically active, and having pets can positively influence the health of our microbiome.
Microbiome Diet
A diet that includes various healthy non processed foods full of fibre is ideal for supporting a healthy microbiome. The more variety in the diet, the more likelihood of having a diverse microbiome.
Highly processed foods and a high sugar diet feed yeasts and pathogenic bacteria, causing an imbalance of flora and can cause a leaky gut. Leaky gut occurs when the gut wall is damaged, and it allows the movement through the intestinal lining of small food particles and cell wall fragments of bacteria. This process can put you at risk for various health conditions, including autoimmune illnesses, inflammatory illnesses, and allergies.
Enjoying a range of raw and cooked organic plant-based foods can be very beneficial to the gut. It provides all-important fibre and delivers prebiotics into the gut, which is the food source for beneficial bacteria.
Fermented foods can also help improve the diversity of our microflora.These include foods such as Kefir, kombucha and sauerkraut.
Other prebiotic foods include kiwifruit, beetroot, chickpeas, peaches, green peas, and cashew nuts.
It is worth noting that if some of the prebiotic foods cause symptoms of digestive discomfort, wind, and bloating, it may mean you have a condition called SIBO ( small intestinal bacterial overgrowth), and that is worth investigating that further.
Microbiome Health Testing
It has been challenging to understand or know for sure what is happening with your own Microbiome health until recently.
Functional medicine has changed this, and it is now easy to have extensive analyses of your gut bacteria, gut immunity, enzymes, and much more.
Complete Microbiome Mapping and Comprehensive Digestive stool analysis tests are available from Laboratories in Australia and The USA.
You can do these tests from the comfort of your own home.
Click here to learn more about these tests – Microbiome Mapping, or for the Comprehensive Digestive Stool Analysis.
Probiotics for Gut Health
Regular use of a good probiotic can definitely improve your microbiome health. In addition, because many probiotic species are eliminated in the stool, it is good to include them in your diet regularly.
The key message, though, is you need a really good, researched, and live probiotic.
Probiotic strains are many and varied, and it is important to know what strains are beneficial and what may potentially throw the balance of the flora out more.
Some probiotic species are great for reducing inflammation. Some balance the immune system and are great when there are allergies or autoimmunity. Some species are great for weight loss, and some for improving overall immunity.
If you have a great probiotic, you can increase the health of your gut and potentially your whole body.
Many probiotics are on the market, and just because a bottle lists many different strains doesn’t mean it is good. It is most likely that given the foreign environment of many species in a capsule or bottle, they often kill each other off, and you are actually getting no probiotics at all. Additionally, most shelf-stable probiotics are not shelf-stable, and it is likely again you are getting no or very little flora when you buy these.
When it comes to buying probiotics and prebiotic supplements, it’s always ideal to be advised by a practitioner on what is right for you rather than buying hit-and-miss supplements from health shops or online.