Good Gut Health
When our digestive system is healthy, apart from the odd rumble we have very little awareness but when it is unhealthy it can certainly make a big noise, literally!
Unfortunately an unhappy gut may not give you such obvious or direct symptoms but emerge in other seemingly irrelevant areas, making it hard to relate what the problem is.
This is because your overall health is dependent on the health and efficiency of your digestive system. The digestive system is usually the first to be affected by negative lifestyle factors such as poor diet, stress or ill health but often the last to show it.
How healthy your digestive system is not only dictates how well it can do its own job, it determines the health of the whole body. Your digestive system not only provides nutrients and energy supplies to every cell in the body. It also acts as a protection barrier, rejecting toxic elements, potential pathogens, unwanted or excessive food components and then becomes a really efficient waste disposal system, cleaning out your system of toxic residues and waste. So negative symptoms from an imbalance, stress, illness or nutritional deficiency can emerge elsewhere as it struggles to meet the demands elsewhere.
Most of the time we are completely unaware of the amount of effort involved in maintaining a healthy system until we get a stomach ache or bloating. Then we have no choice but to regulate our diet and watch what we eat. But we find it much harder to associate other health problems such as poor skin, fatigue or a headache with an overworked, unhealthy or inefficient digestive problem, making us less likely to adjust our diet or lifestyle accordingly. As with everything in the body, it's all interrelated and the digestive system is the lynch-pin to overall good health.
Is Your gut Stuck in a Negative Health Cycle?
Like everything else in the body your digestive system needs the right food, resources, environment and assistance from other systems to function effectively. Unfortunately a typical modern lifestyle of stress, poor diet and little activity can put a real strain on your inner workings. Even though your gut is extremely resilient, it can only cope with so much negativity for so long. Just like you, without appropriate nutrients, energy, rest and positive stimulation your gut will be less able to cope with everyday jobs. Mistakes and accidents become more likely and some tasks even end up not being done at all. Once there is an imbalance, a deficiency could starts to occur between the amount of available resources and the growing list of jobs to do, triggering off further problems as health problems start to emerge. If these issues are not rectified, secondary problems such as food craving and comfort eating could be generated as you feel constantly fed up and fatigued, making it harder for you to take healthy steps and adding further gut strain. The good news is, the more you understand your gut and give it the things it firstly needs to stay health and secondly, enables it to carry out its role as a provider, protector and disposer to the rest of the body, the better your overall health will be. Basically if you look after your gut it will help take care of everything else.
Fortunately when it comes to our digestive system, we can be very proactive in its health and well-being. Basically there are two main aspects, putting the right things in and keeping it moving at the right speed. For most this can be done without too much effort, just a few small changes to your diet and lifestyle. But with a little bit of gut care and understanding the rewards can be so much greater.
Check out our "Steps to Take for Good Gut Health".
For more in depth digestive health click take a look at our other "Good Gut Health Pages".
We hope you like these for starters but as will all our health pages they will be continually updated and added to as and when more information becomes available.