Your gut flora are the microorganisms that line your digestive tract, help digest your food and play a role in everything from your immune system to your weight.
Antibiotics, sugar and even stress can throw your gut flora out of balance and do a number on your digestive health.
Small steps, like taking specific strains of probiotics, eating prebiotic foods and cutting back on sugar, can help restore healthy gut flora as soon as possible.
You have a gut feeling that your digestion is out of whack. Maybe you have to take a course of antibiotics, you feel gassy after eating or you’ve been extra stressed and turning to rich foods and comforting sweets (hey, you’re human). Now you’re wondering how to restore healthy gut flora. Good news: You can take steps to support digestive health and balance your gut microbiome. Keep reading to find out how.
WHAT IS GUT FLORA?
You have a world of microorganisms living in your digestive system. This collection of microorganisms is your gut flora, also known as the gut microbiota—a complex ecosystem that consists of approximately 300 to 500 bacterial species. That’s nearly 10 times the number of cells in the human body.
Our knowledge of the interaction between gut health and overall health is still in its early stages. We do know that colonies of beneficial bacteria help you digest and absorb your food, fight off germs that make you sick and even make a large portion of your serotonin, which helps keep your moods level.
Science is continuing to discover ways that gut bacteria are directly linked to your health. We know that it’s normal to have balanced populations of beneficial gut bacteria and “bad” bacteria, and a healthy gut is able to keep the bad guys in check. But researchers are just now beginning to understand what happens when other factors—like antibiotics, diet and stress—tilt the scales in the wrong direction.
HOW DIFFERENT LIFESTYLE FACTORS AFFECT GUT FLORA
Here’s one of the hallmarks of a healthy gut: a thriving population of beneficial microbes, and a diverse mix of them. These good guys support overall human health, but they also prevent the bad microbes from taking over—aka the harmful bacteria that can contribute to inflammation and changes to your weight.
What does that mean for you? Be mindful when you’re dealing with factors that can impact your healthy bacteria. Some factors, like age and getting sick, aren’t in our control. But you can take positive steps with other factors, like what you eat after taking antibiotics, the amount of sugar in your diet and how you manage stress. Below, we’ll expand on a few of these, plus general tips to restore gut flora. As always, maintain open communication with your healthcare provider.
ANTIBIOTICS ATTACK ALL GUT BACTERIA (EVEN THE GOOD ONES)
Antibiotics target all bacteria—the good ones and the bad. You can take certain actions to replace the good bacteria while you’re on antibiotics, and help nurture them back into balance after the course is over.
Back in the day, doctors used to think that a healthy body was a sterile body, and that our immune systems were constantly fighting the microbes we came in contact with. Once antibiotics were invented, millions of lives were saved as people were protected from bacterial infections.
Now, the medical community understands that there’s a whole world of beneficial organisms living within your intestines, and as long as we keep them balanced, we’ll stay healthy. Unfortunately, this means that antibiotics are one of the biggest threats to gut health.
Antibiotics kill off the bacteria responsible for infection, but they also kill the friendly gut bacteria and microbial diversity you want to nurture. In the best case, you might have gas and diarrhea for a few days. In the worst case, it can get so bad that the balance of your microbiome shifts, and you can end up with problems like malapsorption, changes to your digestion, candida (yeast) overgrowth and even changes to your mental health.
There’s certainly a time and a place for antibiotics. For aggressive infections, surgery and other instances, you have to have them, and we’re lucky to have access to medicine. It’s also best to have a few preventive measures in your back pocket to keep your gut strong while you’re on antibiotics. That way, you can get back in balance faster when you’re finished.
DIET, STRESS AND POOR SLEEP IMPACT YOUR DIGESTIVE HEALTH
You are what you eat—at least when it comes to your gut flora. Alcohol and highly processed foods can all negatively impact gut health, but we’re going to focus on one of the biggest players: sugar.
A diet high in sugar can feed the bad bacteria in your gut, creating an optimal environment for the not-so-good microbes to thrive. That’s because high sugar intake seems to change the balance of bacteria in your gut, increasing populations of microbes that contribute to inflammation and gut permeability (or “leaky gut”).
Switching to artificial sweeteners isn’t any better—rodent studies indicate that saccharin, sucralose and aspartame cause shifts in gut microbiota and contribute to intestinal dysbiosis, or an imbalance of micro-organisms.
What about stress and sleep? Here’s the long and short of it:
- Stress and gut health: Mental stress—that’s anything from work to the news to family life—can interfere with the communication between your gut and your brain, aka the gut-brain axis. This missed connection contributes to symptoms like nausea, bloating and even the health of your gut bacteria.
- Sleep and gut health: Losing sleep (or chronic low-quality sleep) can negatively change the ratio of bacteria in your gut, increasing the risk of insulin resistance, increased gut permeability and even sugar cravings.
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