Restore Your Gut With Prebiotic & Probiotic Food

Your gut is home to 40 trillion micro-chemists (bacteria) hard at work multiplying to help you digest your meals, improve your mood, and protect you from disease. 

Bacteria are an integral part of your immune system, they’re your bodies defenders. They turn your immune system on and off at just the right time. If you’re prone to colds, flu, or you just feel funky more often than you should, you may have the wrong kind of bacteria or not enough living in your gut.

With bacteria and other microbes vastly outnumbering the human cells in our bodies, we’re more bacteria than human, so when your bacteria is unbalanced, we are unable to function properly.

With microbiome and gut health research hitting the mainstream, we’re more aware of how to determine our gut health. What is less obvious is that your microbiome changes frequently and quickly. After a holiday weekend of indulging yourself with too much champagne and sweets, your microbiome might call out for help. Good news is your microbiome heals fast if we provide the right environment for it to do so. Within two to four days of eating healthy, your gut microbiome will change for the better. 

So what are you waiting for? Start making changes in your daily life for a healthy gut. It’s simple with these popular methods for gut health rejuvenation.

Intermittent Fasting

Fasting is the scariest F word for many of us. Just the thought of skimping on a meal makes our tummies grumble … especially for us carb-loving ultra-athletes. Good news: you don’t have to fast for 7 days to see benefits. 

Intermittent fasting is one of the world’s most popular health and fitness trends. It’s an umbrella term for diets that cycle between a period of fasting and non-fasting.

There’s a recent clinical trial that used intermittent fasting where people reduced their caloric intake by 50 percent. The results showed that by reducing their food intake, it reduced multiple health risk factors during the post-fast recovery period, including lowered blood pressure, reduced blood glucose and insulin-like growth factor-1 levels. Intermittent fasting not only reduces health risk factors, it also improves your overall gut health. 

The beneficial bacteria in your gut help with everything from regulating your immune system and optimizing your digestion to balancing your mood and boosting your memory. Without the good guys in your gut, it will be hard to achieve a healthy gut. Luckily, intermittent fasting gives your hard-working gut microbes a break from their digesting duties so they can focus on cleaning house and keeping their population intact.

Fasting also boosts your body’s resistance to bad guy bacteria. When you fast, it starves the bad bacteria in your gut and allows the good bacteria to thrive. The good news is that good gut bacteria works with our cells to reinforce our all-important intestinal barrier.

Intermittent fasting is linked to improved gut health, but like any other health kick or significant change to your diet, it’s not for everyone.

Intermittent fasting affects men and women differently. It’s typically better for women to fast 12-14 hours and men fast for closer to 16 (it’s a hormone thing), but if you’re a woman and fasting for 16 hours works for you, then great!

When intermittent fasting, you have a smaller window to consume a day’s worth of nutrition, so make sure you plan your meals and snacks within your 8-10 hour eating window so you don’t become malnourished.

Prebiotics and Probiotics

Adding prebiotics and probiotics to your diet helps increase good bacteria and restores your gut.

While prebiotics and probiotics sound similar, they play different roles in our gut. Prebiotics are fiber that go through the small intestine undigested and are then fermented once they reach the large colon. The fermentation process feeds beneficial bacteria, helps increase the good bacteria in our gut, and feeds probiotics.

Probiotics are live bacteria and yeasts that help keep your digestive system healthy by boosting the number and variety of ‘good’ gut microbes. Probiotics are also available as a supplement and an added ingredient to products like health drinks. Health professionals often recommend probiotics in supplement form to patients on antibiotics. After antibiotics run their course, they’ve wiped out both beneficial and undesirable bacteria, creating a leaky gut. Probiotics will assist in repopulating the colon with good bacteria to assist in restoring your gut.

Some find taking probiotics can combat gastrointestinal side effects of the medication and reduce the bacterial growth leading to yeast infections.

Everyone is different and it’s necessary to determine which probiotic will be helpful to your own system. Probiotic bacteria are fragile and can easily be killed by stomach acid, time, and heat.

By boosting your total daily foods that are high in prebiotic's, you can feed probiotic and other desirable strains of bacteria in the gut for improved health and well being.

Collagen

Collagen is the most abundant protein in the human body, as it is found in our hair, skin, nails, muscles, tendons, ligaments, teeth, and -- you guessed it -- our gut! Chemically speaking, collagen is a hard, insoluble, and fibrous protein that makes up one-third of the protein in our bodies. They build your connective tissue, help create mucous that line your gut, and regulate your stomach acid. So consuming collagen helps reinforce your gut lining.

This is great news for people concerned about leaky gut syndrome or Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS). When you have a leaky gut or IBS, toxins, food particles, and infections pass through your intestinal wall and into your bloodstream, causing inflammation. By adding collagen to your diet, the amino acids in collagen will seal the leak by healing damaged cells and building new tissue.     

Not only does consuming collagen rebuilds your connective tissue, but it also regulates the secretion of stomach acid. When you’re collagen intake is lacking, your stomach may produce too much acid, which eats away at your good bacteria and leads to IBS. Collagen protein will regulate stomach acid secretion and assist in building your stomach lining.

In addition to aiding in healthy a leaky gut, collagen helps a number of gastrointestinal disorders by assisting with water absorption within the intestines. Collagen is hydrophilic (attracted to water), which aids the digestive process. When collagen is ingested, it surrounds itself with water and stomach acid assisting the breakdown of other proteins and carbohydrates in the intestines. By ingesting water, collagen helps move food through the digestive tract more smoothly.

Smart Snacks 

What feeds the 40 trillion microbes in your gut? Prebiotics and probiotics of course! Think of your gut as a beautiful flower bed. Probiotics are the seeds you sprinkle in your garden. What do you need for those seeds to grow? Water and fertilizer, which in this case are your prebiotics. 

Having snacks that are healthy for your gut and excellent for your taste buds will help you blossom into a beautiful flower (or sturdy tree, or vibrant bush … you get the idea).

Millions of Americans have or once had leaky gut syndrome or IBS, but there are some easy steps you can take to make your gut microbiome healthier -- like stopping by the grocery store to pick up some fruits and vegetables. Fruits and vegetables are packed with nutrients that help give the microorganisms in your gut diversity. 

If fruits and vegetables aren’t quite cutting it in terms of cravings, here are a few other snacks that are good for your gut and yummy too.

• Balanced energy bars, with an emphasis on balanced. This means the nutrition in the bars are formulated to provide balanced nutrition.
• Almonds
• Apple slices with almond butter
• Hard boiled egg
• Low-fat greek yogurt
• Kombucha
• Toasted pumpkin seeds
• Celery and almond butter
• Tumeric muffins
• Crispy seaweed chips

Restore Your Gut Now!

Your microbiome changes frequently and easily, so take charge of that change! Change doesn’t happen overnight, but with little consistent steps, you can see a major transformation in your energy levels, mood and overall health.