In our continuing series on gut flora, one of the questions we must ask ourselves is whether we are damaging our gut flora.
Did you know that your gut flora can impact your brain health? Do you find yourself battling depression or anxiety? Do you have trouble concentrating on tasks? It could be a gut flora imbalance. The gut-brain axis is real. Our gut is called our second brain for a good reason. Our gut health can affect our cognitive ability, memory, moods, and more.
Your Diet Impacts Your Gut
So what kills or damages our gut flora? In one word – diet. Remember the old saying, “You are what you eat?”
The American diet is loaded with processed foods that contain gut inflammation-producing ingredients and very little fiber. In addition, these processed foods have a host of chemicals that can kill our good bacteria while feeding the harmful bacteria and funguses. For example, a study in February 2022 showed that artificial sweeteners like Splenda, also known as sucralose, kill your gut flora.
Some medications, like antibiotics, also kill all the gut flora, good and bad. And don’t forget all the food preservatives, pesticides, fungicides, herbicides, food colorings, unhealthy fats like soybean and corn oil and hydrogenated fats, GMO foods, gluten, water with chlorine, and mercury-containing vaccines and foods.
Taking in Junk Leads to Bad Gut
The result of all of that is a microbiome that’s in horrible health. Our gut flora is imbalanced. The technical term for the imbalance of our body bacteria and microbiome is dysbiosis. Our digestive system has many parts, and most of those imbalances occur in the small and large intestines.
Your microbiome, the types and amount of bacteria living in your gut, are critical to your overall health and very critical to the health of your digestive system! The wrong foods produce the wrong bacteria that cause gut and whole-body inflammation.
Improving your gut health is the first step to improving your overall health. To see how Vive Shake can help improve your gut flora, contact us today at info@viveshake.com or 877-878-3009. Next time, we’ll talk about the benefits of fiber on our gut flora.