How to Improve Gut Health Naturally
Wildbrine’s fermented, probiotic-rich foods deliver lots of pleasure with their scrumptious flavors, but they also improve your gut health naturally, giving you nutrition that goes way beyond the vegetables they’re made of.
What exactly is “gut health” and why is it important? The human body, especially the intestinal tract, is colonized by billions of bacteria and other microbes, collectively called the microbiome. Over the past few decades, scientists have discovered that this microbiome plays a critical role in the training and development of our human immune system. Besides strengthening the immune system to ward off disease, the microbiome also actively regulates our circadian rhythms (our internal clocks), affects our moods, enhances the way our bodies absorb nutrients from our food, and interacts with the brain through our central nervous system, among other important impacts.
The many different probiotic microbes in fermented foods work in our gut to divide our food into its nutritional elements. They also create a wealth of health-promoting, biologically-active molecules called post-biotics that then enter the bloodstream and circulate throughout the body. Right now, scientists are identifying these metabolites and beginning to understand just how they help keep the body’s many systems in balance—a balance that’s the key to good health.
But when the microbiome is off balance because of poor nutrition, the use of antibiotics, or illness, these all-important post-biotics can also be out of whack. Then our immune system and other crucial bodily systems can lose function, which may result in a wide range of health problems. The goal, then, is to improve our gut health naturally. And that’s one big reason why we make probiotic-rich fermented foods, because they are key to achieving the balance that keeps our systems running smoothly.
A Short Course on Improving Gut Health Naturally
We’ve covered these processes in detail here in our Get Wilder blog. Here are six links to articles that explain just how fermented foods contribute to gut health.
What Is the Microbiome? The Part of Us that Isn’t Us
There are a couple of pounds of microorganisms that live within our gut and play a major role in our well-being. When we eat, we’re not just feeding ourselves, but also the microbiome that keeps our bodies running smoothly. So it’s important to know what to feed these guys so they’re happy. When they’re happy, we’re happy.
Why Getting Natural Probiotics from Food Is Better
You can buy freeze-dried probiotic pills, or you can seed your intestinal tract with them by eating fermented foods. Which is better and more efficient? First of all, probiotic-rich real foods like sauerkraut and kimchi give you probiotics that are already alive and working, producing the post-biotics mentioned above, and you get the nutrients and pleasure of those tasty vegetables. This blog post details why fermented foods are the premier natural way to improve your gut health.
Five Benefits of Fermented Foods
Eating naturally-fermented foods brings us a confluence of benefits. These benefits include better gut health, a stronger immune system, better mental health, appropriate weight management, and more energy and vitality. What’s not to like?
Pickling Versus Fermentation: Let’s End the Confusion
There’s a lot of confusion about pickling versus fermentation. Pickled vegetables aren’t fermented, but are submerged in hot vinegary brine, then heat processed for storage. They’re essentially dead. Fermented vegetables like sauerkraut become colonized by lactic acid bacteria that destroy spoilage organisms and are alive with microbes that do us a world of good. This blog post explains why and how.
What Are the Different Types of Probiotics?
Who are some of the major players in the fermentation of our food? Let’s get to know them up close and personal with this quick introduction to nine of the most important bacteria that work wonders to make our fermented foods taste so good and augment our health. These are the good guys.
What Is Bioavailability? How Your Body Gets Its Fuel
Yes, we eat food, but how much of that food is available to us? That depends on the proper functioning of our digestive system and the microbiome at its center. In this post, find out how to increase the availability of the nutrients in your food while you improve your gut health naturally. Our bodies have a range of systems for breaking down our food into its nutritional elements that it then uses to build, run, and regulate itself. The probiotics in fermented foods have a huge role to play in the proper dismantling of food into the elements we can use—that is, it increases the food’s bioavailability.
Steve Bickel
Your Wildbrine Sourkraut is healing my IBS unlike anything I have tried…. Yay!
steve@kelpsavesearth.org
The wild Bunch
So glad to hear this Steve!