The gut is a complex part of the human body. Learning how to improve gut health has many benefits for an individual’s overall health. A healthy gut can positively impact a strong immune system, heart health, brain health, improved mood, a healthy sleep routine, and effective digestion. There are many ways to help improve gut health including researching the subject, taking probiotics, and maintaining a healthy exercise routine.
Books on How to Improve Gut Health
Below are several recommendations for books on how to improve gut health. These books discuss general gut health in both adults and children, how to control weight, mood, and your immune system.
- Follow Your Gut
- Eat Dirt: Why Leaky Gut May Be The Root Cause Of Your Health Problems
- The Dirt Cure: Growing Healthy Kids With Food Straight From Soil
- The Microbiome Solution
- The Good Gut: Taking Control of Your Weight, Your Mood & Your Long-Term Health
- Thin From Within: The Go With Your Gut Way to Lose Weight
- The Body Ecology Diet: Recovering Your Health & Rebuilding Your Immunity
Best Probiotics for Gut Health
Spore-based probiotics are among the most effective strains nature has to offer. Spore-based probiotics naturally survive the harsh digestive environment to actually get to the site of action alive and they have been shown to be able to increase the growth of your natural good bacteria. By doing this they can make dramatic changes in how your gut functions, including, resolving leaky gut.
ProBioGen’s Smart Spore strains have a clinically proven 99% survival rate in the gut and help improve gut health, which is 100x better than leading brands and yogurt, which use inferior strains that just don’t make it past the harsh stomach acid. Concentration of spore strains in the gut is relatively low, which is why they are much more effective than other popular strains that already exist in huge numbers. All of ProBioGen’s formulas feature DNA verified spore strains, including bacillus subtilis HU58™, a spore-forming probiotic with the ability to identify and support the decrease of harmful bacteria.
READ MORE: 3 Benefits of Probiotics for Your Baby
Gut Health and Weight Loss
You cannot effectively lose weight and keep it off without addressing the role of the microbiome. In fact, studies on twins (where one twin is obese and the other is not) have shown that the most influential factor in effectively losing weight is the gut microbiome. In many people, simple caloric restriction and activity will not result in measurable weight loss and that is because they have a certain confirmation of bacteria in the gut that can extract more calories from the food they eat. In addition, we have pro-lean bacteria that control satiety, fat burn, insulin response, and adiposity. Successful weight loss will require a microbiome reprogramming.
READ MORE: 5 Ways to Lose Weight During Summer
How to Restore Gut Health
This requires the right probiotic that can get to the site of action alive and influence a fluctuation in your endogenous population, the best of these types of probiotics are spore-based probiotics. Gut healing will also require diversification of one’s diet and a reduction of non-organic foods to minimize pesticide and herbicide exposure. Lastly, intermittent fasting can be a very powerful added tool to help restore the gut.
Gut Health and the Overall Immune System Link
Approximately 70-80% of your immune tissue is located within your digestive system. The gut is often the first entry point for exposure to pathogens (bad bacteria and viruses that can cause disease); therefore, your gut immune system needs to be thriving and healthy in order to avoid illness.
Signals run along axes from the gut to other parts of our bodies via neurons, hormones, and perhaps most importantly, via the immune system. We call these “axis” and they help describe the connection between gut bacteria and disease elsewhere in the body. The most studied axis is the gut-brain connection. The gut is able to alter the brain chemistry via neuronal pathways and through messengers of the immune system, called cytokines. These messengers depend on the state of the gut microbiota.
READ MORE: The Silent Struggle: Life With a Spouse Suffering From Crohn’s Autoimmune Disease
The essential task of the immune system is to maintain a balance between reaction and tolerance. Since balance of bacteria in our gut influences the balance of our immune system, an unbalanced bacterial flora with too many pathogens can shift the immune system to an increased inflammatory state with a “leaky gut.” This inflammatory state then affects other body systems and increases the risk for disease.
You will want to both improve gut health and your immune system to react to the pathogens that can make you sick, while letting the beneficial bacteria living in your gut go about their business. The regulatory component of your immune system (the Treg cells that stop unwanted immune response like allergies) are controlled in large part by the gut microbiome and the gut associated immune system. Having a diverse microbiome and alleviating leaky gut are foundational to supporting a healthy immune system and in turn, all-around wellbeing.
WANT TO READ MORE?
For more information on immune system health, check out This Immune System Makeover.
About the Author: Kiran Krishnan is a Research Microbiologist and has been involved in the dietary supplement and nutrition market for the past 17 years. He comes from a strict research background, having spent several years with hands-on R&D in the fields of molecular medicine and microbiology at the University of Iowa. Today, Kiran is the Chief Scientific Officer at Physician’s Exclusive, LLC. and Microbiome Labs. He has developed over 50 private label nutritional products for small to large brands in the global market. He has spoken at hundreds of industry conferences and global events, served as a trusted microbiome expert on national television and radio, and is currently involved in 9 novel human critical trials on probiotics.
