Beyond oxygenating your body, your breath also regulates your nervous system which signals your body to carry out the biochemical functions required for you to have a healthy gut
The influx of physical and emotional stress in today’s world can overwhelm our nervous systems and disrupt gut function, which can impair any other bodily system (hormonal, immune, detoxification, nervous, cardiovascular)
Our normalization of these radical imbalances jeopardizes the sustainability of our society
Regulating your nervous system promotes gut health and overall resiliency in an ever changing world
Five main components of your gut that you want to keep happy
1. Nutrients are necessary to fuel the biochemical reactions that enable your body to function.
In order for it to count though, your body must be able to digest your food in order to extract these nutrient building blocks
Chewing increases saliva production and digestive enzymes in the mouth. This begins the process of nitric oxide synthesis and breaks food down into manageable pieces so
digestive enzymes/secretions downstream are more efficient.Stomach acid is a digestive secretion that also acts as your first line of defense for pathogens such as parasites, bacteria, and viruses. Bile (from your gall bladder) not only digests dietary fat, but also provides antimicrobial defense as well as facilitates the elimination of cholesterol and toxins. One of the easiest thing you can do for your health is optimize digestive enzyme secretions
The act of sitting down and consciously chewing your food signals to your parasympathetic NS to activate digestion, releasing enzymes in order to extract nutrients from your hard-earned food. Rushing through a meal signals your sympathetic NS to keep you in the rat race that traps you in fatigue and distraction…not worth it.
You can take a supplement to optimize digestion, or the free and sustainable way is to chew your food till it’s mush in your mouth and take full breaths in between bites
Learn More
2. You gut lining is the delicate barrier between what’s in your intestines and the rest of your body
Now it’s time to absorb the nutrients into your bloodstream so they can go on to fuel your cells. This membrane barrier selectively allows small nutrient molecules (amino acids, fatty acids, vitamins, minerals) to pass through your gut lining while retaining other things to the gut that are not supposed to enter circulation (food not fully broken down, byproducts from gut microbes, toxins)
Many things can cause inflammation and damage to the gut lining (stress, maldigested food, medications, toxins, etc) and decrease your ability to absorb nutrients. The increase in gut lining permeability (aka leaky gut) can also inappropriately allow the wrong things out of the gut and into circulation
Healing the gut lining is one of the steps many people overlook, yet it is critical to ensure nutrients get where they need to go and to protect the systemic body from things meant to stay in the gut
3. Your gut lining houses 2/3 of you immune system
It makes sense that your gut would be backed up by an army of immune cells since it’s a common entry way for pathogens. So when undigested food is able to pass by your inflamed and poorly barricaded gut lining, your immune system (which is only trained to tolerate nutrients, not whole food particles) sounds the alarm
An alarmed immune system creates inflammation in the gut which you may experience as bloating, gas, or misdiagnose as fat. This inflammation can also be felt in the rest of the body which you may experience as arthritis, brain fog, skin stuff, anxiety.
This is one way poor gut health can lead to inflammatory ailments elsewhere in the body
4. You have at least as many microbes in your gut as you do cells in your body
These critters are important enough to have coevolved with humans for over a billion years.
Each microbe (there are trillions) has its own DNA, and they can change the expression of your human DNA.
Our gut microbes produce things like vitamins (vitamin K, some B vita’s), neurotransmitters (some of your serotonin, dopamine, GABA), and short-chain fatty acids which have anti-inflammatory effects
The microbes in your gut train your immune system…teaching it what to attack and what to tolerate
5. Your vagus nerve carries messages between your gut and your brain
Millions of neurons immersed in your gut create your enteric nervous system (the NS of your gut) and communicates with your brain via the vagus nerve (the gut-brain axis). The vagus nerve can sense metabolites produced by the bacteria living in your gut, transmit this information to your brain, and then generate an appropriate response that affects your mood, stress levels, immune function, and digestive health. This is how gut health can influence mental health just like stress (as mentioned multiple times above) can affect your gut
Functional medicine is rooted in the science of epigenetics!
The environment in which we experience life (internal and external) overtly affects our genetic expression. This means that even in light of a genetic predisposition, we can influence whether genes are activated or deactivated. The factors that influence our environment are more encompassing than you might think, and include everything from the food we eat to the thoughts we think.
Learn More
What messages is your environment sending to your body?
