The six main contributors that may be responsible for the decline in your gut health.
When it comes to our health, sometimes the hardest part can be recognizing and pinpointing that there is an issue in our body, especially when it comes to your gut health. Poor gut health is something that can be tricky to spot, especially if your symptoms seem to have no immediate connection to your gut - to the naked eye. While bloating, poor digestion, stomach pain, gas, and irregular bowel movements are easier symptoms to link to our gut health, things such as energy levels, mood, poor sleep, skin breakouts, and brain fog are a little more challenging. But once the pieces of the puzzle start to come together and you can narrow down what is causing your symptoms, it becomes easier to trace certain symptoms back to your gut.
That is one of the hardest parts - figuring out your gut is the culprit - but once identifying your symptoms are a result of poor gut health, there’s another piece of the puzzle you need to figure out: what caused your unhealthy gut in the first place?
While identifying your gut health as poor is a crucial first step to your healing journey, the second step involves retracing the road you walked down for your gut health to decline. If you don’t take the time to identify and treat the root cause, whatever measures you take to heal your gut will ultimately fail, as you will be essentially applying a band-aid to the issue, rather than treating the wound underneath.
Our poor gut health can come from a variety of contributing factors, however there are six main contributors that are the most common. So, to help you begin to understand and maybe identify what caused your unhealthy gut, we’re going to unpack those six main contributors that may be responsible for your poor gut health, and hopefully give you some clarity in how to move forward with your gut health journey.
#1. Antibiotics
While antibiotics can be a very useful medical treatment for bacterial infections, they are also extremely disruptive to our gut microbiome and are one of the most common causes of poor gut health. This is due to the fact that they do not discriminate between the “good” and “bad” species of bacteria in our gut, and so while they do work to eliminate the bad bacteria, they also are simultaneously harming the healthy bacteria that our gut needs to thrive. As a result, the environment of our gut microbiome shifts and can quickly decline. The longer you are on antibiotics, the more likely it is for this shift to occur.
#2. Lack of Sleep
When our bodies lack the proper amount of sleep nightly, our gut microbes are directly impacted and our digestive system can become compromised. Even with two days of sleep deprivation, our gut microbiome can change negatively. This comes from the connection that lack of sleep has with imbalancing our hormones and leading to increased stress (more on that later), which creates a perfect environment in our gut for bad bacteria to grow. Over time, this can escalate into leaky gut and other stomach issues.
#3. Chronic Stress
As we mentioned above, stress creates an ideal atmosphere for bad microbes to flourish, due to our body’s strong brain to gut connection. When our brain is stressed, our body releases hormones, as well as sends signals to the gut, which impacts the gut’s equalizer, allowing bad bacteria to grow and surpass the good bacteria. The increase in bad bacteria leads to an unhealthy gut environment, which can continue to worsen with chronic stress and develop into GI symptoms.
#4: Environmental factors
The environment that you surround yourself with plays a major role in our gut health. Factors such as air pollution, cleaning products, nutrition, exercise, and lifestyle can positively or negatively impact your gut health. When we are exposed to toxins, chemicals, pollution, processed foods, and not properly taking care of our bodies, our gut microbiome can become altered and inflamed. The longer your body is exposed to these negative environmental factors, the more your gut health will decline.
#5: Lack of exercise
Moving our body is important not just for gut health, but for our overall well-being. When we are too sedentary, the muscles in our gut lose strength and coordination, which slows down our digestive tract and decreases digestion. This can decrease daily bowel movements as well, preventing our body from properly eliminating waste. As a result, our gut microbiome becomes less functional and diversified from the lack of properly digested food, and can lead to GI disorders.
#6: Diet and processed foods
The food we eat either has the potential to increase or decrease our gut health. When we consume a large amount of processed and sugary foods in our daily diet, we are actively feeding the bad bacteria in our gut and shoving out the good bacteria. When the good bacteria is eliminated, our immune function decreases and the integrity of the gut barrier becomes impacted. As the bad bacteria then continues to grow, our sugars cravings will only increase, leading to higher sugar consumption and greater damage to our gut microbiome.
That wraps up all six of the main contributors to poor gut health, but again, while these are the top common causes of poor gut health, there are many other contributing factors that may play a role. Our list above is a great place to start, but it’s extremely important for you to take a look at your whole lifestyle too and identify any additional factors that may be responsible for the decline in your gut health. From there, it’s about working to fix that underlying root cause, or causes, at the source.
In addition to this, try implementing rituals such as daily movement, high water intake, healthy whole food diet, quality sleep, de-stressing activities, minimal toxins, and gut support supplements into your daily routine to support your gut healing journey. With time, your gut will begin to repopulate with good bacteria and begin functioning as a healthy gut should, especially once you eliminate the root cause. Remember, real change and real healing takes time, but your gut will thank you later!
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