We all experience gut troubles from time to time, and that’s perfectly normal. It can stem from all manner of things, such as a stomach bug, unsuitable foods, overeating (here’s looking at you, Christmas!), or even just excessive stress.
If indigestion – whether manifested as flatulence, bloating, heartburn, or fatigue after eating – is a constant problem for you, however, that’s a sign of an unhealthy gut. None of these issues should be your daily companion.
To get your digestion back on track, you should start by figuring out the cause of your gut problems.
Why do you need to know what’s causing your indigestion in order to get your gut back to health?
At first, indigestion can seem relatively harmless, but constant and prolonged problems can lead to serious chronic diseases that are significantly more difficult to treat. For this reason, it’s important to track down the root cause right away.
Your health largely hinges around your gut bacteria, which supply the body with various beneficial compounds.
Digestive problems are usually the first sign of an imbalance of the community of bacteria inhabiting your gut, or the gut microbiome. If your microbiome is out of balance, that is to say, the proportion between good bacteria and harmful bacteria in your gut is off, your body cannot function in the way that it needs to.
The condition of your microbiome greatly both reflects and affects your overall health. In addition to digestive problems, a disturbed gut microbiome can lead to a situation where you are:
- not getting sufficient vitamins and minerals from food;
- constantly fatigued and lacking energy (which can be a result of your body not receiving enough nutrients from food);
- constantly forgetting things;
- experiencing frequent drops in mood;
- constantly plagued by colds;
- afflicted by skin problems (rashes, acne);
- experiencing sleep disturbances;
- being unable to tolerate certain foods.
Your gut is like the control centre for your health
The gut is the place where it is determined which part of the food you’ve eaten is absorbed into the bloodstream and distributed throughout the body. A healthy gut enables the body to absorb the necessary nutrients (e.g., carbohydrates, proteins, fats, vitamins, minerals), while keeping toxins from breaking out of the gut so that they can be excreted from the body.
If your gut bacterial community is out of balance, however, your gut will become compromised and can start to ‘leak’. This refers to a situation where toxins and other compounds that are harmful to the body are able to pass through the intestinal wall. When this happens, your immune system is activated to destroy the harmful compounds, which results in inflammation in the body.
In the case of protracted digestive problems, this can lead to the onset of serious inflammatory diseases. Thus it is vital to identify the root cause of your indigestion as early as possible, and to nurse your gut back to health before serious diseases can take hold.
How to find the root cause to get your digestion back to normal?
For the road back to normal digestive health, it is important to know that every person’s microbiome is as distinct as a fingerprint. No one diet is suitable for everyone. This means that instead of trying to make sense of all of the contradictory recommendations in the media, you should consider, above all, your personal health indicators, your own well-being, and common sense.
In order to get to know the particularities of your microbiome and find out what’s really going on in your gut, you can take a microbiome test.
A microbiome test will give you an in-depth picture of the state of your gut bacteria. It will tell you what is working well and what needs attention. In addition, it will allow you to learn about which foods your little friends down in the gut need most, as well as what kind of lifestyle can help keep them in balance and maintain a healthy gut.
Knowing what your body needs will fully equip you to take the right steps to get your digestion back on track.
Learn more about the microbiome test here.
Health starts from the inside!
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