Tag Archives: healthy gut

Questions & Answers

Healthy Gut Indicators

How can you tell if you have a healthy gut?

It’s an interesting question that I’ve been asked many times before. Firstly, what is health? Is health purely the absence of symptoms? What does it mean to have excellent gut health?

Having good gut health stems contributes to having good health overall. More and more research is validating the work I’ve been doing for decades.

Most all aspects of your wellbeing are controlled, and have their origins in, gut function. It’s not accurate to say that a person with anxiety has a healthy gut. In most of the cases I’ve seen, people with major anxiety have problems with their gut. Does anxiety cause gut problems or vice versa? It’s hard to know.

Take a good look at your fingernails right now. Can you see any fine lines in them? Do they flake or crack or break easily? What’s your hair like? Has it got a nice shine to it? Does it fall out or break easily? What about your skin? Have you got nice clear skin? Have you got eczema? Have you got psoriasis or acne? Do you have pockmarks all over your skin or other issues with your skin? I find that the people with the healthiest guts have the nicest looking skin.

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What about your joints? Do they click or creek when you move them? Can you feel grinding movements when you rotate your neck? All of these symptoms are are signs of toxicities and mineral deficiencies.

When you have deficiencies, a myriad of symptoms can pop up. The gut is the seat of health providing you’re eating good food, and your digestion works well. If you have healthy gut flora, you are going to be able to digest and absorb the nutrients in your diet. Your cells can utilize the nutrients and help keep you symptom-free.

Provided your food choices are healthy, and you haven’t been pummeling yourself with antibiotics or pharmaceutical medications, you’re going to have a healthy gut. Remember, though, that your lifestyle, not just your diet, influences the state of your gut.

Eating under stress is not good. A horrible relationship, an awful job, or living through a local crisis, will put a huge strain on your gut.

If you’ve got a very happy, balanced, healthy lifestyle, with good family and good friends, the gut should function very well. There should be minimal sound coming from your GI tract. You may get a little bit of rumbling here or there or a little bit of gas, but that’s normal. But huge amounts of gas and bloating is concerning.

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Questions & Answers

Bringing Your Beneficial Bacteria Back

When you kill good bacteria in your gut, are they gone forever? Is it just a matter of popping a probiotic, and they’ll come back again?

Firstly, even when you take antibiotics, the beneficial bacteria aren’t entirely wiped out. The levels go down to a tiny number, but they still hang in there. I’ve never had a client experience a complete eradication of all their beneficial bacteria. The trick is to get them back to a high level.

Keeping marine fish has taught me something. I love to keep coral fish, corals, and tropical stuff in my talk. What I’ve learned is just how important it is to keep the parameters at the right level all the time. If I have a colony of coral that’s looking sickly, it’s probably my fault. I’ve either got something wrong with the water or put too much food in there.

When I get all the parameters in the tank correct – the pH, the temperature, the salt content, and the trace elements – the coral looks fantastic.

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The gut is the same way. When the parameters of your diet and lifestyle are in working order, your gut will thrive. You need to eat the right foods, chew properly, include resistant starch in your diet, and manage the stress in your life.

If your parameters are out of balance, your gut flora will suffer. If you add insult to injury by adding antibiotics to the mix the beneficial bacteria in your GI tract pay the price. I have seen a few patients who never bounce back from antibiotic use, but most patients recover. The recovery can range from reasonable to full.

The extent of your recovery depends on what you’re eating and how you’re living. You don’t have to eat clean all the time, or eat keto, or have a specific dietary regime to get the microbiome back in balance. What suits one person may not suit you at all. Your gut health plan needs to be customized to your unique biology and psychology.

Take a holistic approach to gut recovery. Supplements are important in some stages of recovery, but diet, stress, sleep, and lifestyle matter too.

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https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29854813/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28487606/

Questions & Answers

8 Things You Shouldn’t Do If You Want A Healthy Gut

What are the things that can cause harm to your gut health?

1. Having too restricted a diet is going to impact your gut microbial growth negatively. From what I’ve read, people in western countries, only consume between 12 and 15 types of vegetables and four or five different types of animals. If you look at indigenous people in Africa, who don’t suffer from the chronic diseases seen in the developed world, they eat a far more diverse range of plants and have a much wider range of bacteria in their gut with all the associated benefits.

2. Lack of prebiotic in the diet is another common problems. Most people don’t include high-quality, sour yogurt, kefir, sauerkraut, kimchi, or kombucha in their diet. Fifty or sixty years ago, cultured and fermented foods were commonplace. Now it’s become something special rather than routine.

3. Drinking too much alcohol with a detrimental impact on the gut is a common habit. Studies have shown, for example, that when you consume spirits like gin or vodka, you dramatically reduce the population of beneficial bacteria. If you can stick with small quantities of red wine with a high polyphenol content, you can increase the beneficial bacteria content of your gut.

4. Antibiotics are very challenging for the gut flora. Some clients I had would go on antibiotics twice a year for infections that could have been fixed by natural methods. You don’t’ have to automatically jump to ciprofloxacin as soon as someone has a mild sore throat or a little skin rash. Herbs have been used for hundreds, if not thousands, of years for these sorts of reasons. See a naturopath or a functional medicine doctor if you want a second opinion about antibiotic use. Antibiotics are one of the key factors that undermine gut function.

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5. Lack of activity can be a detriment to your gut flora. Exercise is very beneficial for your microbiome. I read a study of professional rugby players that demonstrated they had much higher levels of good bacteria compared to less active men of the same weight and age.

6. Smoking can harm the GI tract, particularly if you’re a heavy smoker. Not only are smokers more prone to strokes and heart attacks, they also have higher inca1dence of inflammatory bowel disease. For example, the risk of Crohn’s disease is twice as high in smokers as in non-smokers.

7. Sleep deprivation can damage gut health. When someone has a healthy circadian rhythm, they have a far better balance of microbes and range of beneficial bacteria in their gut. Good sleep patterns are correlated wth good microbiome patterns. Disturbed sleep can interfere with hormonal levels and thereby impact the appetite and immune systems, including the immune system in the gut.

8. Too much stress can be very damaging to the gut. It can also interfere with appetite regulation and lead to snacking on junk food, which in turn changes the microbiome for the worse. People with low-stress lifestyles tend to have much better gut health.

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Questions & Answers

Regaining Your Gut Health After a Colonoscopy

How do you restore your gut function, especially your colonic function, after having a colonoscopy?

Colonoscopies have come a long way. They’re nothing like there were back in the ’70s and ’80s. They’ve become a lot less invasive, much more technologically advanced, and they use much smaller equipment.

Still, I recommend that you take it nice and easy after a colonoscopy. Try not to have a lot of food. Have smaller portions and don’t eat high fiber fruits or vegetables that could irritate the gut. An essential step is to completely avoid alcohol for at least two weeks after the colonoscopy.

Light soups like chicken broth and steamed vegetables would be good options after a colonoscopy. Nice, soft, white fish filets are also suitable. Steamed fish and chicken breast are quite tender and easy on your gut. Some fruit is okay but not too much and avoid fruit that is particularly high in sugar.

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I’m not keen on the fruit juices and gelatin desserts that some medical websites recommend. I don’t think that amount of sugar is what your gut needs. I suggest keeping sugar to minimal levels when trying to get your gut back to a good state after a colonoscopy.

I’ve read that eating brown rice after a colonoscopy is not recommended. I tend to disagree. If you cook the rice and make it very soft, it’s a perfectly good food to eat after a colonoscopy. I also recommended having a bit of sour Greek yogurt daily, and kefir might be helpful as well.
Probiotics after a colonoscopy can help with your recovery.

In general, rest up and take it easy for a bit after you’ve had the procedure. If you want to know what shape the gut is in after the colonoscopy, wait a month and get a comprehensive stool analysis. That will let you know the levels of your gut bacteria and where you’ve got the right species in the right amounts.

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Questions & Answers

Antibiotics In Children: My Perspective

It’s important to build up children’s immunity and gut health from an early age. I’d also like to share my thoughts on using antibiotics in children.

I have four children, but they are adults now. I never gave antibiotics to them when they were children. But, don’t feel bad if you’ve used antibiotics for your children. It’s your choice. I was in the enviable position where antibiotics were not necessary. My wife and I both agreed that we had our children’s immunity and health well under control.

We used supplements and homeopathic medication for our children. I was concerned about the risk of damaging my children’s guts by using antibiotics. I had seen that happen to so many of my clients.

There’s so much carnage out there due to antibiotics. Antibiotics are necessary. I’m not, again, saying that people shouldn’t take them. They’re absolutely vital, and they save a lot of lives, but they’re still dramatically still over-prescribed. Too many children receive antibiotics for trivial and small complaints.

I’ve seen this routinely in my clinic, not just here in New Zealand, but I’ve seen it on patients from all around the world. I’ve dealt with children from 40 to 50 countries, and the overuse of antibiotics is a common theme.

Do children recover from the side effects of antibiotics? Yes, in most cases, they do. But in cases where there is course after course of antibiotics in childhood, adult health status is definitely negatively impacted.

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I believe that in years to come, the overuse of antibiotics will be seen as one of the biggest blunders in medical history. Not just for humans, but for animals as well.

How do you build up a child’s health to reduce the chances they will need antibiotics? Firstly, educate yourself. Do some reading about how to help your child’s immune system. One of the habits that bother me the most is when parents repeatedly wipe their children’s hands with antiseptic wipes. Research has shown that when children are exposed to a variety of bacteria, they develop a robust immune system.

Diet also plays a vital role in establishing a strong immune system. The diet has to be good. But it’s not just the nutritional diet; it’s also the emotional diet. A loving environment makes a big difference to the immune system.

It’s easy to feed a child the right kind of food. Start them young eating raw stuff, steamed stuff, cooked stuff, but all kinds of vegetables. That’s a key thing to do.

Next, get your child to take a daily multivitamin to fill any nutritional gaps. There could be a zinc deficiency, a manganese deficiency, or a molybdenum deficiency. Small trace elements easily lacking from the diet can affect the growth and development of the child.

I also suggest that children take an omega-3 fish oil supplement. 250 mg a day should be enough for a 5-year old. For a bigger child, 500 to 1000 milligrams per day is not a problem. Omega-3 fatty acids are good for the immune system and the brain.

If you want a child’s immune system to be great, reduce the instance of allergies, and increase a child’s ability to push away infectious disease, I recommend a probiotic. Studies have found a remarkable resilience to allergies in children taking probiotics versus children taking a placebo.

I recommend children, every child now under seven, to take a probiotic, at least a couple of times per year. In some cases, they can benefit from taking the probiotics for two to three months a year.

Remember that “green” time is also important. Children spend too much time in front of the television. Getting outdoors daily is essential for overall health.

You can use tea tree oil on a cut instead of antibiotic creams.

If you follow these general guidelines, customized to the needs of your child, you’re laying down the foundation they need to grow into a strong, healthy, adult.

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