When people hear about bacteria, they always assume it is harmful bacteria. However, your gut contains around 40 trillion bacteria, key for improving your health.
The gut microbial diversity can do a lot for your digestive tract on overall. However, you might experience a few health conditions if you do not care for your gut properly. That is why we recommend you learn more about restoring gut health to improve your health even better.
How To Restore Gut Health at Home
How to improve gut health? It does not always have to be hard: you need the right food, supplements, workout, and some more, depending on your wish and capacity. That is what we look at below to help you restore gut balance.
Consume A Variety of Foods
For your gut flora to be in the best condition, you also need the right foods. One of the recommendations for restoring gut health is that you aim for different types of foods to expand the nutrient intake, like fermented foods – a type of food that many may not feel interested in.
Some of the notable fermented foods you can try including kombucha, kefir, kimchi, and yogurt.
The more you diversify your food, the more diverse the gut microbiome and a healthy gut too. So, ensure your diet includes a wide range of foods that would help improve your damaged gut health.
Eat Plenty of Plant-Based & Probiotic Foods
It is crucial to fill the nutrients gap by eating a lot more vegetables, fruit, and legumes.
Foods such as fruits and vegetables contain many nutrients to restore healthy gut flora. They are also high in fiber which is important for stimulating the growth of beneficial bacteria and replenishing good bacteria.
You may want to minimize the sugary foods as they might be so good for your intestinal microbiome. Focus more on fruits such as apples, blueberries, pistachios, and almonds that would improve your intestinal microbiota.
Consider Taking Supplements
A writer from HealthCanal, Lindsey Desoto, RDN, LD explains the necessity of taking probiotic supplements as they are beneficial for boosting the good gut bacteria in the digestive tract. Just make sure you are using the probiotic supplement as recommended. Overusing the supplements does not always mean the best results.
Research shows how taking probiotics and prebiotic bacteria supplements would help improve your gut microbiome. If you can eat more fermented foods, expect to also get a source for the healthy bacteria you need.
Exercise Often
Many discussions on how exercise can help with good bacteria has been ongoing for a while now. The good thing about exercise is that it will always have many health benefits, such as preventing cardiovascular disease, chronic disease, other than just improving the digestive system.
Working out helps in increasing the diversity in the gut microbes. A study in 2014 found that those who were athletes would have a lot more gut flora variety compared to those who do not work out more often.
Reduce Stress Levels
Sometimes, it can be tough to avoid stress triggers, but you should always try to manage stress as part of restoring gut flora.
Animal studies show that stress triggers can disrupt the animal’s overall health, including the intestinal microbiota. This means you also need to manage your stress better to avoid it leading to more damage to gut flora and your mental health too.
Bacterial infections are highly likely if you cannot manage your stress. So, exercise more often, manage stress better, and sleep for enough hours to grow a healthy gut microbiome.
How to Restore Gut Health After Antibiotics
Antibiotics are key in treating various bacterial infections including meningitis, bacterial pneumonia, strep throat, and more. However, they can also affect your gut health. So, you would want to reset the gut health after using antibiotics. It is estimated that it can take up two months to restore your gut health.
Make sure that you take probiotics, prebiotics, fermented foods, and collagen-rich foods to restore your gut health after using antibiotics for long.
How to Restore Gut Health After Colonoscopy
Colonoscopy is quite good to ensure that they check your intestinal health. It is still important that you take good care of your gut health after colonoscopy as it might tamper with your gut microbiota.
You can also consider reintroducing some foods slowly since your colon would be sensitive. We recommend still taking prebiotics and probiotics to help in further restoring your gut health.
Understanding The Importance of Gut Health
What most people do not understand is that their gut health is important even for their overall health. The gut plays a key role in digestion and absorption of the vital nutrients you need to be healthy.
As you can see, if gut health is unbalanced, the human body is bound to experience several health issues. People may also end up with compromised immune systems. A compromised immune system means you are vulnerable to various health conditions, including chronic illnesses.
So, how would you know that your beneficial gut bacteria are out of balance?
Many people might start by experiencing inflammatory bowel disease, chronic fatigue, constipation, joint pain, and more. One thing about improving your gut health is that there can be noticeable changes in your health. This includes relief from irritable bowel syndrome.
Conclusion
Gut microbiota should not be something you ignore. We have already looked at the simple steps you can take to increase healthy bacteria and restore gut flora above. You may notice these are still the usual steps you would take to be healthy on overall. So, other than eliminating bad bacteria and improving the good bacteria, the body would generally improve in terms of overall health. Keep living a healthy lifestyle, and you will not have to worry about having an unhealthy gut.