What is your gut instinct telling you about your energy? A fundamental reason for your lack of energy could be an unhealthy gut.
MICROBIOME Our gut is the home to 75% of our immune system and 90% of our happy hormone serotonin is produced in your gut, creating the gut brain connection. An unhealthy gut leads to poor nutrient absorption, imbalanced immune response, which leads to a chronic and systemic inflammation in the body. Our gut is the ecosystem for 100 trillion bacteria in our body, together referred as the microbiome. With hundreds of different strains that all impact our body different, some positive and other negative. It’s important that the good and the bad are balanced, when this isn’t the case it leads to all kinds of health conditions.
HOW THIS IMPACTS YOUR ENERGY
1. NUTRIENT ABSORPTION An unbalanced microbiome will not break down nutrition adequately making it not capable of absorbing vital macro and micronutrients that your body needs to reach its full health and energy potential.
2. SEROTONIN The gut is often referred to as the ‘second brain’ as referred above and hosts 90% if the serotonin receptors. An unhealthy gut affects serotonin production making you feel less happy and energetic as you could.
3. SLEEP Your gut even plays a role in the quality of your sleep due to the role of the ‘stress hormone’ cortisol. Ideally, we want a higher cortisol production in the morning, making us awake and alert for the day and declining over the day while the ‘sleep hormone’ melatonin rises at the end of the afternoon till the middle of the night, making us more tired and relaxed. Whenever we feel stressed cortisol levels rise and impact our sleep when this happens later in the day or evening. The tricky part is that cortisol encourages the growth of certain microbes which then thrive in a high-cortisol environment so heightens stress and anxiety more, creating a vicious cycle.
4. INFLAMMATION As mentioned above an unbalanced microbiome could lead to systemic inflammation, meaning that your immune system is under too much stress which in return leads to fatigue. This refers to the term ‘leaky gut, this is a condition where the lining of the gut becomes damaged. The tiny holes in the lining that are designed to enable nutrients to be absorbed into the body become too big where particles then begin to pass through the lining which isn’t intended to. The body detects these particles and will see them as a threat triggering an immune response. Consistent immune response over some time leads to systemic inflammation in the body, food allergies or intolerances that sequentially can manifest in a variety of health complaints.
