5 Ways to Improve Gut Health & Reduce Inflammation

Hippocrates—considered the father of modern medicine—said, “All disease begins in the gut.” For thousands of years, few people focused on the gut, but today, science understands that the gut microbiome is crucial to the way our bodies work.

The intestinal tract contains trillions of microbes. In fact, gut bacteria are so plentiful that they outnumber your own cells.

These tiny microorganisms help your body function in many ways. The environment in your gut enables your body to make vitamins, protect against infection, manage your metabolism (the body’s energy use), and communicate with every cell in your body.†

According to Lori Fish Bard, MS, HHC, a clinical nutritionist and board-certified integrative health counselor, “You can think of it as a bacteria community. The community includes good guys, bad guys, and indifferent guys. And in our body, these bacteria rule the school. Ultimately, the health of our microbiome determines our overall health.†”

Scientists have estimated that about 70% of the immune system lives in the gut microbiome1. The function of the immune system is to protect us from invaders—to tell apart the cells of our own body from other cells that don’t belong to us.

“If the immune system thinks the body is being invaded, it will mount an immune response,” Bard says. “In some cases, that immune response happens too often in reaction to foods we eat as well as environmental chemicals known as endotoxins. Inflammation is the manifestation of an immune system that’s out of balance.†”

This ongoing overreaction can affect the balance of bacteria in the gut and even the integrity of the gut lining—that is, how well the gut lining does its job. Endotoxins and undesirable bacteria products eventually may leak through the gut lining and into the bloodstream. The immune system identifies these substances as foreign and mounts an attack, causing chronic inflammation.†