You’re stressed out. You’ve got things to do, people to see, and places to go--and it’s all got to be done TODAY. It’s gut check time.
No, literally—it’s time to check your gut health. In recent years, we have learned that a healthy gut and digestive system is essential to good health. A healthy gut and can be linked to how we handle emotional stress and resist chronic illnesses such as cancer and diabetes. Proper nutrition and exercise are key influencers in keeping your gut healthy. Before we get into that, here’s a simple explanation of what happens after you swallow that bite of food and why you should care about it.
We all know the basics—the digestive system transports food from your mouth to your stomach, converts it into absorbable nutrients and stored energy, and shuttles waste back out of your body. Simple, right?
We now know that the GI tract is full of trillions of bacteria that not only help us process food, but that also help our bodies maintain overall well-being. The key to many health issues may lie in your gut--more formally known as the microbiome, which is the bacteria and other microorganisms in the stomach and intestines. Studies have found that certain environments, foods and behaviors can influence gut health.
Eating unprocessed foods that don’t increase your body’s inflammatory response is a way to help improve your gut health, but exercise can be another effective way to improve gut health.
In the article “Exercise Modifies the Gut Microbiota with Positive Health Effects,” (see citation below) The authors found that exercise had positive effects on several aspects of gut health. The key highlights of this scholarly article are listed below. I will provide the scientific explanation first, then the “everyman’s” explanation afterward.
Key points of exercise and gut health:
Low intensity exercise can influence the gastro-intestinal tract (GIT), reducing the transient stool time and thus the contact time between the pathogens and the gastrointestinal mucus layer
This means that light exercise (walking the dog, light weight training, gentle yoga) helps move the poop faster through the intestines, therefore the bad stuff in that poop has less time in contact with the protective mucus layer. As a consequence, it seems that exercise has protective effects, reducing the risk of colon cancer, diverticulosis, and inflammatory bowel disease.
Exercise enriched the diversity of gut microflora and positively correlated with protein intake and creatine kinase levels. In particular, there was a greater diversity among the Firmicutes phylum (such as Faecalibacterium prausnitzii) that helped to maintain a healthier intestinal environment. These results indicated that both diet and exercise determined the microbial biodiversity of the gut.
This means that exercise increases the levels and varieties of good bacteria in the gut. Faecalibacterium prausnitzii is one of the most prominent and important bacteria in our gut, and exercise can increase this bacteria.
Research conducted on athletes shows that they have lower inflammatory and improved metabolic markers relative to controls (sedentary individuals), and the exercise is associated with reduced morbidity due to lower chronic inflammation, it is possible to hypothesize that age-appropriate exercise and diet could help to decrease inflammation and age-related pathologies.
This means that light to moderate exercise can decrease inflammation, which in-turn increases the likelihood you’ll live longer.
The Logan institute and Hoffacker Health and Fitness have you covered when it comes to improving your gut health. Dr. Logan has a series of tests that can test how your body reacts to and processes the food you eat, and can make suggestions on how to create a diet that significantly lessens your body’s inflammation. Daniel, the Hoffacker Health and Fitness Master Trainer on-site at the Logan Institute can lead you through an exercise program that is perfectly tailored just for you to optimize your body’s movement, mobility, and gut health.
** Monda V, Villano I, Messina A, Valenzano A, Esposito T, Moscatelli F, Viggiano A, Cibelli G, Chieffi S, Monda M, Messina G. Exercise Modifies the Gut Microbiota with Positive Health Effects. Oxid Med Cell Longev. 2017;2017:3831972. doi: 10.1155/2017/3831972. Epub 2017 Mar 5. PMID: 28357027; PMCID: PMC5357536.
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