The sun is finally starting to shine through (here in Michigan), and summer is finally here! The lack of vitamin D during the colder months may have reduced your ambitions to stay on your workout program and shot your ability to reduce your food cravings. Well now is the time to get back after it before summer comes. In order to shed body fat while maintaining and even build muscle, you need to have a […]
How to Improve Gut Health
Having issues with your digestive system or notice that you are getting sick more often, maybe it is a good time to take a closer look at your gut health. Our gut plays a pretty big role in helping us to digest food, absorb nutrients, metabolize drugs and help aid in regulating our immune response.
Our guts are also highly sensitive to not only the things we ingest but whether we are exercising or even if we are under a lot of stress. Some possible reasons for poor gut health are antibiotics, stress, poor diet, over-consumption of animal proteins and poor gut motility. Keeping our guts healthy and happy will help you to feel better and help keep digestive ailments at bay.
Our guts are filled with billions upon billions of bacteria and it is important to keep a good balance of these helpful or beneficial bacteria to keep our digestive systems working well. Good gut bacteria also have a large influence on our metabolism and body composition.
Consuming probiotics or good bacteria helps to keep an abundance of good bacteria in our gut and pushes out harmful bacteria. Some probiotic rich foods are yogurt, kefir, fermented sauerkraut, fermented pickles, and kimchi. It is also important to consume prebiotics because these are essentially food for probiotics to keep them alive. Some prebiotic-rich foods are oats, quinoa, bananas, berries, and garlic to list a few. Healthy individuals should aim to get about 1-2 servings of probiotic-rich foods and 2-3 servings of prebiotic-rich foods each day.
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