What can improve gut health for metabolic health?
This is a question that many people are asking as the link between gut health and overall well-being becomes more evident.
The gut microbiome, or the community of microorganisms living in our digestive tract, plays a crucial role in maintaining good metabolic health.
In fact, recent research has shown that having a healthy gut microbiome can prevent conditions such as obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease.
So why is improving the gut microbiome important for metabolic health? Let’s take a closer look at what the gut microbiome does and how it affects our overall health.
Firstly, it’s important to understand that our digestive tract is home to trillions of microorganisms, including bacteria, fungi, viruses and other microbes. These tiny organisms play various roles in our body, from aiding in digestion and absorption of nutrients to supporting immune function and protecting against harmful pathogens.
The composition of the gut microbiome is unique to each individual and can be influenced by various factors such as diet, genetics, medications, and lifestyle choices.
When this community is balanced, with a diverse and abundant population of beneficial microbes, it supports good health. However, when there is an imbalance or disruption in the gut microbiome, it can lead to several health issues.
If you want to lose weight, reduce bloating, belching and fluctuance, improve your skin health for overall health and wellness, and enjoy the benefits of better metabolic functioning, you must pay attention to your gut health.
Your gut microbiome is deeply intertwined with many areas of your metabolic health, such as balancing blood sugars and liver function and gut microbiome.
How can I improve my gut health quickly?
Learning the importance of improving your pH balance in your gut health is one of the best things you can do to slow the effects of ageing and enhance health longevity.
It is essential for your digestion to absorb nutrients: The bacteria in your microbiome will break down food into energy and nutrients that your body can utilize.
These bacteria will also help neutralize toxins, stimulate the immune system, produce vitamins, create hormones, and manufacture neurotransmitters.
As a result, you will benefit from increased energy levels, improved immunity, decreased inflammation, and better mental clarity.
It’s important to remember that everyone’s body and microbiome are different, so your individual needs may vary.
However, making small lifestyle changes to support your gut microbiota’s health can significantly impact your overall metabolic health and skin health.
Creating a healthy environment in your gut encourages the growth of beneficial bacteria that can help fight off harmful bacteria and prevent disease.
This helps ensure you get all the nutrients you need from your food, which can help with metabolism, weight maintenance and skin health as you age.
Why is my Gut Health Important?
- What is Dysbiosis
- Contributory factors to dysbiosis
- Effects of inflammation
- Most Common Food Intolerances
- Impact of gut pH levels
In this article, you will learn the role and importance of your gut microbiome in absorbing nutrients and how this influences your metabolic health.
We discuss the effects of inflammation, food intolerances, and gut pH levels on your gut microbiome diversity.
I’m Jen Adams; my purpose is to help those who don’t lose weight by dieting, fasting and exercising to discover what they can do to move away from being frustrated, depressed and tired to feeling confident and in control about what to eat and when so they can achieve and maintain their ideal weight.
You will better understand why improving your gut microbiome is crucial for overall metabolic functions.
Why is it Important to Improve Gut Health for Metabolic Health
What is Gut Dysbiosis?
Dysbiosis is an imbalance in the natural balance of gut bacteria in your gut microbiome in your digestive tract.
Any overgrowth or decrease in certain types of beneficial bacteria creates endotoxins, also called LPS, which are the components of the outer membrane of gram-negative bacteria and are released into the circulation upon disruption of the human gut microbiome.
Endotoxins, the most significant bacteria in human blood, are commonly found everywhere in our environment and are widely responsible for irritable bowel syndrome and inflammatory bowel disease.
Where there is dysbiosis, there is inflammation, and the integrity of your gut barrier will be compromised.
Allowing endotoxins, created by the gut microbiome, to pass directly through the gut epithelium into your blood and attach to the cell receptors to disrupt your glucose metabolism.
The higher the endotoxin level, the higher the insulin resistance and the LDL cholesterol required to detoxify them from the liver.
Therefore, elevated levels of these endotoxins can lead to liver inflammation and contribute to inflammatory diseases and metabolic disorders such as diabetes, obesity, and insulin resistance.
Contributory Factors To Dysbiosis
Several factors contribute to dysbiosis and ultimately impact your metabolic health.
These include:
- Diet: A diet high in processed foods, refined sugars, and unhealthy fats, a lack of dietary fiber can disrupt the balance of intestinal bacteria in your gut.
- Lifestyle habits: Lack of exercise, poor sleep patterns, and chronic stress can also contribute to dysbiosis.
- Medications: Antibiotics, birth control pills, and nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs can all disrupt the balance of gastrointestinal health.
- Environmental toxins: Exposure to pesticides, heavy metals, and other environmental toxins can impact the health of your intestinal microbiota and gut bacteria.
Why your Gut Microbiome is SO Important
The gut microbiome is the most complex system in the body.
Dysbiosis and inflammation create a leaky gut, also known as intestinal permeability and is the cause of poor gut health.
Intestinal permeability is a compromised gut lining, the epithelial cells allow endotoxins and other harmful substances to pass directly into your bloodstream.
Once any foreign object, such as an endotoxin or food particles, is present in the blood, the immune system will be on high alert to attack to protect the body, causing inflammation and potentially leading to autoimmune diseases.
This is due to the immune system attacking anything in the blood that looks familiar that has come from the intestinal tract.
This is a natural immune response in the human body; however, once the dysbiosis has progressed to a leaky gut, the gut microbiome pH level becomes imbalanced, commonly too acidic.
When your gut pH level is too acidic, bacterial fermentation occurs and impact the bacterial diversity and health benefit from essential nutrients and vitamins such as folate, iron, B vitamins, dietary fiber and short chain fatty acids.
This lack of essential nutrients can lead to further issues with metabolic health, such as anaemia, chronic pain, weight gain and diet induced obesity due to nutrient deficiencies.
In addition, the low levels of butyrate producing bacteria in your gut bacteria can irritate and increase the risk of developing gastrointestinal disorders such as inflammatory bowel diseases and autoimmune diseases such as Crohn’s disease.
Effects of Inflammation on Gut Health
Inflammation is a natural response of the immune system to protect your body from foreign invaders such as bacteria, parasites and viruses.
However, this natural inflammatory response can harm your gut health when it persists after the initial invasion. Chronic inflammation can lead to damage and dysfunction of the intestinal lining, causing leaky gut syndrome.
Leaky gut syndrome is a condition where the gaps between cells in the intestinal lining widen, allowing undigested food particles, toxins and bacteria to leak into the bloodstream. This can trigger an immune response, leading to further inflammation and potential autoimmune diseases.
Moreover, chronic inflammation can also disrupt the balance of good and bad bacteria in your gut microbiome. This imbalance can result in dysbiosis, a condition where harmful bacteria outnumber beneficial bacteria. Dysbiosis has been linked to various health issues such as irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), ulcerative colitis, and even mental health disorders like depression and anxiety.
When dysbiosis and leaky gut are present, the endotoxins and other harmful substances will continue to enter the bloodstream, triggering an inflammatory response.
This can lead to a constant state of inflammation, known as chronic inflammation, which can contribute to developing diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis, osteoporosis, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and obesity.
One of the leading causes of inflammation in the digestive system is increased sensitivity of stomach acid and digestive enzyme levels in the small intestine, caused by a disturbance in the pH levels of the overall gut flora.
Please read the article: Why am I so bloated and have acid reflux
Development of Food intolerances
Your gut microbiome develops food intolerances as it demands a certain pH balance to create the various digestive enzymes to metabolize the food.
When the pH in the gut microbiome is imbalanced, the food consumed will ferment higher up in the human gastrointestinal tract, initially causing bloating and then flatulence, and then later creating harmful bacteria during glucose metabolism.
The best example is lactose in dairy foods, such as cow’s and cow’s milk products.
When we consume cow’s milk, the gut microbiome requires a pH level of 6.0 to produce lactase, to be converted to glucose by the liver for energy.
Without the lactase, the gut immune system will react to the sugar in cow milk as deemed a foreign object and be on high alert to attack.
The lack of lactase will cause bloating and gas as the stomach tries to ferment the cow’s milk in the upper gut.
As a result, this can damage the gut lining, which allows the endotoxins and other harmful substances to enter the bloodstream, resulting in inflammation and food intolerance.
That gut pH imbalance will also create the wrong type of bacteria that thrive in an acidic environment, and they will ferment the lactose-producing gas and then acid.
This is when you experience bloating first and then flatulence later.
If your body can not metabolize or convert the lactose into glucose due to a lack of digestion, is will attempt to destroy the lactose itself.
As a result, the gut immune system will create innate T-cells in the gut lining, ready to pass the lactose straight out of the gut, into the blood to destroy it.
The inflammatory and immune response works together to create dysbiosis in the gut microbiome. It creates an auto-immune response to any food similar to lactose, creating food intolerance and allergies.
Read this article: Why am I allergic to everything?
Your immune system does not know the difference between a small amount or an entire portion.
So, even the most minor portion of cow’s milk will trigger a complete immune response.
Remember, nutrition is science, not maths.
Any chronic disease begins with a leaky gut.
The pH levels in the gut microbiome vary depending on the function initially; it needs to be acidic to break things down and then varying alkaline levels to absorb nutrients, create enzymes and eliminate waste into the large intestine to colonize and thrive in a natural or base level.
The gut microbiome generates energy from bacteria, supports the liver function in detoxification and provides the first line of defence from immunity.
Therefore, if you want to lose weight and improve the quality of your skin, you need to balance the pH in your gut microbiome.
The reason why it is important to improve gut microbiome is that the pH levels throughout your gut are essential to reducing the dysbiosis in your gut microbiome and the risk of triggering autoimmune inflammatory responses in the gut lining.
This will enhance the absorption of the raw ingredients in your food and improve your metabolic health.
If you have dry skin, asthma, bloating, and flatulence, you have dysbiosis in your gut microbiome.
Interestingly, you can still have dysbiosis despite enjoying a healthy diet and eating only organic home-cooked food.
In Summary: Why Improve Gut Health…
• Maintaining a healthy gut pH balance is one of the best ways to improve metabolic health.
• Dysbiosis, caused by an imbalance in the natural balance of bacteria in your gut microbiome, leads to inflammation and endotoxins that disrupt blood sugar regulation.
• Contributory factors include diet, lifestyle habits, medications and environmental toxins.
• A leaky gut compromises the integrity of your digestive system and causes inflammation to trigger autoimmune diseases.
• Food intolerances develop when a lack of essential nutrients is absorbed due to pH imbalance in the gut microbiome.
• Inflammation can lead to chronic metabolic illnesses such as obesity, diabetes and heart disease.
• Balancing the pH of your gut can reduce inflammation and support energy production, liver function and immune defence.
In conclusion
To answer the question of why it is important to optimize gut health to improve metabolic health is to understand that if you have any bloating, belching or fluctuance, you have gut dysbiosis.
Dysbiosis can be caused by factors such as poor food and lifestyle choices, which play an integral role.
When the microbiome is imbalanced, it can cause your gut lining to become leaky, leading to food intolerances and inflammation that sets off autoimmune diseases.
Balancing the pH of your gut through diet and lifestyle changes can help reduce inflammation, support energy delivery into cells and liver function, and boost immune defence – all of which are important for metabolic health.
Now that we have discussed the importance of gut health for metabolic health, it’s time to put our knowledge into action.
Educating yourself about what goes into your body is an important step towards making better food choices.
Learn the basics about nutrition – CLICK HERE
Take the Healthy Eating Quiz to discover your knowledge of nutrition – CLICK HERE
What’s next? What is your metabolic health age – use the online Metabolic Age Calculator and answer a few simple health and lifestyle questions. It takes a few minutes, but it could help you change how you manage your energy levels forever.
If your Metabolic Health Age is equivalent to or lower than your actual age, then that is great news! This means your blood sugar levels, triglycerides, high-density lipoprotein, (HDL) cholesterol, blood pressure and waist circumference are potentially all within an ideal range.
However if your Metabolic Health Age is more than 10 years of your actual age, and you are struggling with low energy and fatigue you could be prone to some or all of these conditions as these are all markers that directly relate to your risk of insulin resistance, fatty liver, dysbiosis, high cholesterol and blood pressure.
TAKE METABOLIC AGE TEST – CLICK HERE