Gut Instincts

BLOATED OUT OF PROPORTION

Training hard? Check! Drinking less alcohol? Check! Hydrating more? Check! Eating a well-balanced, highly nutritious diet? Check, check & check! Yet, feeling overly tired, low in energy and suffering with ailments stemming from an out-of-sorts digestive system? This is where a better understanding of food is required to heal the gut and get back on track.

Plug The Leak
Reading up on Zonulin and leaky gut syndrome, it's relatively easy to discover some helpful clues as to why our energy levels are so low and why eyes are dull or skin dry and flakey. Damage to the digestive system can be caused by a multitude of different factors and it can also manifest in all kinds of ways, ranging from the more obvious signs like a bloated stomach, to the not so obvious ones, like experiencing more mood swings, chronic fatigue, lacking in concentration or having sustained bouts of brain fog & headaches. Without taking the necessary steps to address the problem, these early warning signs could evolve into a much more serious condition. Alternatively, assessing and modifying the diet could see these ailments significantly improved in the short term and potentially completely eradicated all together.

All Illness Stems From The Gut. 
We underestimate the role of our digestive system to protect us from illness. Our gut, containing millions of bacteria cultures, actively controls our immune system as well as handling the assimilation of all food sources. The digestive system processes and digests foods with the help of enzymes and healthy gut flora in order to convert the energy sources from our ingested food into a usable type of energy for us to survive.

The wall of the gut acts as a barrier to stop any undigested foods from passing through into the blood stream. The lining has tiny holes in it, allowing only the digested energy-rich molecules to pass through. But damage to the lining, weakened by exposure to bouts of stress, caused by the build up of toxins from making too many poor food choices, or from drugs and elevated cultures of bad bacteria, can all play a role in depleting the defences in our gut lining. Larger holes, letting through undigested food and other undesirable particles, can play havoc with our immune system as our body responds to threats of having these particles present in our bloodstream.

The First Defence
Too many toxins in our diet will, over time, have a detrimental effect on our digestive system. As our immune system begins to identify these foods as a threat, it triggers a response to reject them from our body. Small measures of these foods could register as nothing more than mild discomfort and can quickly disappear if we remove them from our diet. Opting for these foods very infrequently, will cause some digestive irritation from time to time or bring about a temporary sensitivity if taken more consistently. Larger measures of foods, high in toxins, if taken over a consistently longer time frame, can not only develop into actual food intolerances, but potentially evolve into full-blown allergies and lead on to more life threatening reactions to our food.

The first steps are simply to not consume these toxins. Cutting out food sources like cereal grains, sugar, industrial seed oils (used in crisps and other snacks) and removing highly processed meals containing soy products and other recognised antagonists, may be enough to help the symptoms go away on their own. Completely removing known dietary toxins and replacing with more of the foods that have been shown to actively promote a healthier digestive system, will aid in the restoration of our gut wall to prevent chronic illness from occurring further down the line.

Know Your Anti-nutrients
Plant food sources - especially beans and legumes, can be poor food choices as they contain high levels of anti-nutrients which impair the absortion of protein. But, soaking and cooking them can remove a lot of the poorer attributes. Likewise, choosing better sources of protein from meat can be beneficial to our health. Non-organic and value range allocated livestock can be injected with steroids to increase the growth times in  rearing cows for consumption, likewise, diary can contain growth hormone used to produce more milk and chickens boosted with antibiotics to stop infections from occurring in cramped cages. All these drugs can have a very detrimental affect on the digestive system. Grains can be potentially the worse culprits. Over-farmed, GMO modified seeds are said to contain even more of the toxins that cause IBS and Crohnes disease. But also, cheaper value ranges of bread and pasta can contain higher levels of sodium and preservatives plus prepared with industrial oils or sweetened with known to be harmful sweeteners like fructose. Generally, knowing more about what is in every packaged, processed ready-meal, sauce and convenience food product, will help to identify potentially harmful toxins. This knowledge either encourages better spending on fresh products, or teaches us how to prepare foods from scratch ourselves, free from the many additives printed on the labels - or we remove these products from our shelves altogether.

Make The Change
It can be a difficult period adjusting to our new lifestyle and food choices. We can easily revert to our old ways and deceive ourselves about our efforts. So being more mindful about our intake and actually writing down the foods/drinks consumed every day, we can better highlight the problematic foods needed to be removed from the diet. A daily general health, mood, progress diary will also show up any harmful lifestyle choices we are making and help to show a mirror up to ourselves to better monitor our actions in general.

A weakened digestive system can struggle to digest food including those that are high in toxins, highly processed or from fast food meals rushed down our throats on the go. So, merely taking the time to properly chew food away from a desk or potentially stressful situations could improve our digestion. Our primal fight or flight centre is actually located around the lumber region behind the stomach. so, when the sympathetic nervous system is triggered, hormones are released that prepare us for a fight/flight situation. The blood flow is diverted away from the digestive system, blood vessels are restricted and we cease to secrete saliva. This is why we need to be in a relaxed state to eat and also why our digestion may be affected if we are constantly on the go. That's why it's even more important to mindfully focus on assimilating the food with our saliva and chewing a significant number of times, so it's not seen as something alien to our digestive system when entering the stomach.

So focusing on the intake of food, the tastes and textures, grinding down into smaller pieces, rather than mindlessly gulping down each mouthful without properly breaking it down first, can in itself, be a major part of the cure.

Top-Up Tonic

Look at taking a tonic of vitamins to help with replacing any deficiencies caused by a weakened gut. Vitamin C and B complex are a good start. Certain foods and alcoholic beverages, can inflame the gut, causing irritability in the bowel and the yeast in our gut can inhibit the absorption of B vitamins, so drinking less will definitely help. 

Arguably, the nutrients in our foods today, are greatly compromised through over-farming and other attempts to sustain the growing population (exposure to pesticides/herbicides etc.), so a good multivitamin coupled with a course of probiotics, could work wonders and further aid in the process of healing our gut. 

For a complete approach to healing the digestive system, follow the '4-R' programme or check out one of these other helpful blogs.