How Your Gut Health Effects Your Immunity and Weight Loss
You have more control over your chocolate cravings, moods and immunity than you think.
Nurturing a healthy flora is essential.
Why is it so crucial to take good care of your gut?
The specific bacteria that live in your gut, or your digestive tract, influence pretty much everything in your body, including your moods, cravings, metabolism, immunity, fat storage and probably even more that we do not yet know about. Lean people have a richer, more diverse gut colony than those who are overweight.
How your gut microbiome works:
Your gut takes the food you eating breaks it down so it can be absorbed into your bloodstream and sent out to your organs and muscles. Similar to composting it requires a rich array of active bacteria and healthy flora to fully break it down and create fertile ground.
Active bacteria are essential to good digestion and good digestion is the foundation of good health. Get the most nutrition out of every morsel you eat.
Your intestines contain more than 100 trillion microorganisms (10x more than any other cell in your body). If you have too many of one type and not enough of another, your bacteria can get out of kilter. This can have an extremely detrimental affect on your health and effect you ability to lose weight.
How your gut microbiome can manipulate your food cravings and weight loss?
These microbes can actually alter the neurotransmitters in your brain, which in turn can manipulate your food cravings and influence your food choices.
When you’re tired, struggling with stress and battling to resist the call of a chocolate or cake, it is not a lack of the self-control. It’s your gut flora sending some seriously strong messages to your brain. Your gut talks to your brain on speed dial via the vagus nerve, which connects with your digestive tract to the tenth cranial nerve in your brain.
There are studies that show that your gut microbes manipulate your eating behaviour by tinkering with the taste receptors in your gut.
It shows how eating chocolate promotes the growth of the bacteria that flourish in chocolate, thus altering the gut microbiota composition and creating additional chocolate cravings.
So if you’re struggling to give up cake, crisps or chocolate, this might explain why but once you do, your cravings will subside as the chocolate-crisps-cake-loving bacteria die off without the fuel to promote their growth.
How your gut microbiome can manipulate your immunity and mental wellbeing?
Your gut bacteria also assists in the production of hormones, regulation of immunity and even the manipulation of your mental wellbeing. On the flip side, research shows that mood significantly improves when healthy levels of these bacteria are restored. In a survey of 700 college students, those who ate the most food with live cultures, such as yogurts, pickles, kimchi, and sauerkraut enjoyed lower levels of anxiety than this who ate least.
Easy ways to manipulate your gut microbiome
Enrich your diet with a variety of probiotics and prebiotics. Probiotics are bacteria that live in your gut. Prebiotics are the substances that these bacteria eat. Food sources are the best way to get both as the diversity in supplements is not as smart as nature.
Eat a balanced diet rich in variety: FIBRE is the most essential dietary component for all beneficial bacteria. – at least 25 grams a day (mostly from vegetables & legumes)
Daily diet rich in probiotics: fermented foods such as kimchi, kefir, yogurt, miso paste, sauerkraut. These establish a healthy colony of bacteria in your gut & the messages go to your brain to say everything is ok and to stop craving sugar.
Prebiotic foods: now you have to feed those beneficial microorganisms to fertilise (you can’t plant a garden and not water or feed it and expect it to grow). Include prebiotic foods such as artichokes, onions, garlic, leeks, oatmeal, pulses, bananas (barely ripe).
Benefits of Probiotics:
Improved Energy: good digestion allows you to optimally absorb all the vitamins and minerals you need to exercise and recover.
Increased Immunity: they can help to fight bad bacteria and fend off and reduce the duration of upper respiratory infections and gastrointestinal upsets such as diarrhoea.
Lowers Inflammation: they can lower the levels of inflammation in the body. This helps to prevent numerous diseases including chronic diseases such as cancer, heart disease, diabetes as well as inflammation-based-conditions such a rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis and IBS.
Improved wellbeing: they have been linked to general health benefits such as lowering cholesterol and blood pressure; healthier blood sugar, body weight and body composition. They also improves mood mental wellbeing.
Beware of the gut bombs:
A healthy, balanced diet rich in probiotics is the key to developing a thriving, diverse gut colony but you cannot expect your happy, healthy gut to withstand the negative gut bombs that you may add in your system such as:
Artificial Sweeteners: they alter gut bacteria in ways that promotes weight gain.
Research shows that artificial sweeteners alter your gut bacteria in ways that produce glucose intolerance. This usually occurs when your body can’t cope with heavy sugar loads and it sets the stage for obesity and metabolic disease such as diabetes. The development of glucose intolerance may be partially why people who drink lots of diet drinks are actually more like to be overweight despite taking in less sugar and calories.
Processed Foods: refined carbohydrates cause an explosion in your gut of the ‘bacteria Firmicutes’. This type of bacteria promotes fat storage and leads to weight gain.
Antibiotics: only take them when absolutely necessary. They wipe out the good with the bad bacteria.
Anti-inflammatories: these can lead to the erosion of the protective mucosa of the gut, which in turn leads to ‘leaky gut’, where the gut wall becomes too permeable, allowing toxins from your gut to spill into your bloodstream and wreak havoc in the form of inflammation, GI distress, autoimmune disorders and poor athletic performance.
Oral Contraceptives: research is emerging that shows that birth control pills can interact with your gut flora in ways that can increase the risk for autoimmune disorders.