When Good Guts Go Bad Part 2: Repairing your Gut
In our last post When Good Guts go Bad Part 1 we talked about lifestyle factors that damage the gut. Not only can these contribute to or exacerbate a number of digestive problems such as Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS), but it can also set off reactions leading to health complaints such as joint pain, fatigue, depression, allergies, and skin conditions such as eczema that people don’t often associate with poor digestive function.
5 Steps to Restoring your Gut Health
1. Clean
Remove anything in the diet that’s negatively impacting your gut. As we saw in our last article, diets high in sugar and processed foods have been shown to promote the growth of bad bacteria. Replace these irritants with healing and nourishing foods high in fiber, protein, and healthy fats. It may be helpful to try an elimination diet to determine which foods are causing your symptoms. You might also want to work with a healthcare practitioner to identify and treat any underlying infections, yeast or bad bacteria. Adding in Activated Charcoal will help the detoxification process.
2. Prepare
Replace digestive secretions: add back things like digestive enzymes, hydrochloric acid and bile acids that are required for proper digestion and that may be compromised.
3. Plant + Feed
Research has shown that just a single course of antibiotics can have a profound effect on the populations of bacteria in our gut for up to a year. A good quality probiotic in tandem with a prebiotic (like our Gut Garden Resistant Starch) will help to repopulate our gut and crowd out unhealthy microorganisms, while also helping us digest our food.
4. Protect
Help the lining of the GI tract repair itself by supplying key nutrients that can often be in short supply when the gut is compromised, such as zinc, antioxidants (e.g. vitamins A, C, and E), fish oil, and high quality Collagen Peptides.
5. Rebalance
This last step is crucial and is often overlooked. Pay attention to lifestyle choices like sleep, exercise and stress. As we saw on our last post, stress and lack of sleep can have a profound effect on our digestive systems.
GoodGut Program
We've been there, and we know what it's like not to feel your best for weeks, months or even years at a time. We created Gut Garden and the GoodGut Program to take the guesswork out of restoring optimal gut health.