Introduction: What is Digestive Health and Why it Matters?

Your digestive system is responsible for breaking down food and absorbing nutrients. It also helps remove waste from the body. Food moves through your digestive system in a series of steps. When food reaches your stomach, the enzymes and stomach acid break it down into smaller particles before it moves on to the small intestine. Here, bile from the liver helps digest fats, while enzymes from the pancreas help digest carbohydrates. In addition, hormones from your brain tell your intestines when they should release water and salt.

After you eat a meal, it can take about 12 hours for food to fully move through your digestive system. This might seem like a long time, but without this process running smoothly at each step of the way you would not be able to absorb all the nutrients that you need.

The digestive system is one of the most important systems in the body because it involves so many functions essential for survival. It transforms food into energy, removes toxins from our bodies, and plays a critical role in regulating our immune systems response to bacteria, viruses, and pathogens.

As a result of this complex and critical role, gut damage can have a major impact on your overall health, and healing gut damage is an important first step to optimizing your health.

Symptoms of Poor Digestive Health

Digestive issues can be caused by a variety of factors, including dietary imbalances, medications, pre-existing conditions, and stress.

The symptoms can be both wide-ranging, such as fatigue, headache, hormonal imbalances, or skin problems, and local, such abdominal pain, bloating, or constipation.

Tips for Happy and Healthy Gut

As the body’s main immune regulating system, the gut contains around 100 trillion microbes and 10 times more cells than the rest of the human body. The gut microbiome can be thought of as a layer inside your body, a layer whose composition is shaped by what you consume and how effectively you nourish your body.  

Here are some general tips that will help you on your way to a happy and healthy gut. 

1. Eat a balanced diet with plenty of whole foods, vegetables, and quality protein sources.  If you are getting bloating, indigestion and pain after eating, you may have some food intolerances.
   
2. Minimize consumption of high glycemic carbohydrates, such as sugar and refined grains.
3. Exercise regularly to maintain your weight and boost your mood.
4. Keep hydrated by drinking plenty of water each day.
5. Lower stress by engaging in practices such as meditation or yoga.
   
6. Consume probiotics - these are live bacteria that are good for your gut bacteria.

Conclusion & Wrap Up

Good digestion is the essential foundation for good health. The food that we eat plays an essential role in determining the composition of the microbes in our digestive tracts, and our individual microbiomes are critical to our digestive and immune system health. By following these simple tips and eliminating dietary triggers like high glycemic carbohydrates, you can go a long way to securing digestive system health. And by working with a professional, you can take your health to the next level by diagnosing the dietary triggers specific to you, and developing individual meal plans and supplement programs that will optimize your digestive system health.