Probiotics and Your Digestive System – The Keys to Good Health
Fixing a health concern, or just trying to feel better, almost always has the same solution: eating better. Yes, getting more sleep and removing stress will also help, but nothing will make as big of an impact to your health as making improvements in what goes in your mouth.
What makes your diet so important is that your health has everything to do with what’s going on in your digestive system. If you want to fix your health, you have to fix your gut.
In this post I want to spend some time on a few facets of what your gut does with that bite of food. It largely depends on the gut “flora,” the balance between the good bacteria that you need and the bad bacteria that can reek havoc on your body if it becomes dominant. In my next post I’ll talk about how you can control what’s going on inside you and make sure you have enough of the good guys and as little of the bad as possible.
Typically we don’t give our digestive systems much attention unless something’s going wrong, like that spicy Indian food from last night not sitting quite right. But stop for a moment to think about what our guts do for us. It takes whatever we put in our mouths and somehow pulls nutrients out of it and turns them into the fuel to run the most complicated collection of matter ever seen on Earth. It can even use that food to make vitamins that weren’t there to begin with. It’s crazy when you realize what it’s up to all day.
It gets crazier. Your gut is home to over 80% of your immune system. Think about it. Foreign invaders have no easier access to get inside you than through your pie hole. The immune system has to be smart and perceptive enough to let the good stuff go by and know when to go on attack. It primarily gets its clues from the information you tell it through the food you eat. Send your body the wrong information (poor diet) often and long enough and you just confuse the poor thing.
A confused immune system will go on the attack too often. Tissues like your intestinal lining get irritated and inflamed (the body’s tactic in fighting infection). With an improper flora balance, food leaks through the lining without getting fully digested (a condition known as ‘leaky gut’), things that shouldn’t get into your blood stream do, and now you get the whole body’s immune system fired up.
An irritated immune system and how your gut is handling your food can manifest in headaches, acne, allergies, or other less severe issues that are just annoying Best GPS Tracker For Trailers With Real Time Tracking . If you’re one of the unlucky ones, it can turn against you and destroy things it shouldn’t (joints, nerves, skin, etc., etc.), and now you can officially be diagnosed with an auto-immune disease. But in almost all cases the root cause can be found in issues within the gut – inflammation caused by an unhealthy gut flora balance.
On top of the food we eat, our gut also has to deal the rest of our modern living. Stress, environmental chemicals, and medications all have the ability to throw off our digestive system. All of these factors can kill off the good bacteria in our gut and create an environment where the unfriendly bacteria and yeast can thrive.
With that kind of workload, our intestines can only take so much abuse. Try it on your car. It can handle bad fuel and oil for a time, but after a while there are going to be some buildups and breakdowns that demand repair. Same thing with your digestion. It’s an incredible system that can do amazing things dealing with what we ingest. But for most people, if it’s on non-stop active duty, eventually problems come up that force us to the doctor.
Often we can’t figure out why things are going wrong because there’s no clear cause and effect, a day on the calendar that you can point to and say, “Ah, I broke my body right there.” It’s a matter of your body simply doing the best it could for as long as it could, but the years of overwork finally made it cry uncle and beg for mercy. Typically we address it by taking a pill for the symptoms that have shown up, we irritate the system even more, more symptoms come, more pills prescribed, and by this point we’ve got the body so confused it doesn’t know what to do. It needs a timeout and a reset.
The frustrating part for me is that I have no idea if my body will ever break like that. I could be one of those lucky people who get to eat whatever they want for 90 years, still jump out of airplanes at their 85th birthday, have a brain that’s sharper than ever, than die peacefully in their sleep with a smile on their face.
Fixing a health concern, or just trying to feel better, almost always has the same solution: eating better. Yes, getting more sleep and removing stress will also help, but nothing will make as big of an impact to your health as making improvements in what goes in your mouth. What makes your diet so important…