Just as the leaves shed their winter layers, your entire digestive tract sheds its lining every 3-4 days, making way for fresh cells to surface. Due to the gut’s cleansing function, it’s essential to focus some of that spring cleaning energy on ensuring you’re proving your gut health exactly what it needs, so it can ensure you have exactly what you need this Spring.
The main purposes of our digestive systems are to ingest food and break it down with enzymes, to move food around our body and digest it further to facilitate absorption, and to enable the secretion of waste. This goes beyond just foods you’re eating, but gut-friendly habits too!
The following simple practices will help boost your gut health this spring.
Spring Cleaning For Your Gut Health
1. Eat seasonally
As the seasons change, we also see a shift in seasonal foods. From warm porridge to refreshing smoothies, ensure you’re eating a wide variety of plant foods, replenish with dietary fiber.
Some top foods that are a good refresher for the gut are colorful vegetables and fruits, whole grains, starchy veggies, and healthy sources of fats!
2. Drink water with pink salt
By now, we know that we should be drinking more water to keep ourselves healthy. For this spring though, take it up a notch by adding pink Himalayan salt to your water.
Drinking a mixture of real sea salt and water causes the body to push waste through the GI tract, release toxins and improve digestion. The salt helps your body soak up the water, and allows it to be used more efficiently while also replenishing your body with trace minerals that are essential for a spring fresh feeling.
3. Move for your microbiome
Spring is here and it is time for some more movement to get that energy up, but also to enrich those gut bugs! Studies have found that exercise promotes the growth of bacteria that produce the fatty acid, butyrate.
Butyrate can promote repair of the gut lining and reduce inflammation, which can spruce up your energy and keep you feeling light and energized this season.
4. Hum to help your gut
Humming helps to stimulate your vagus nerve, which runs from your brain to your gut. It is the longest of all the cranial nerves and plays a crucial role in nerve supply to your heart, lungs, and digestive tract.
Due to the gut-brain connection, when you hum or sing, you naturally activate the vagus nerve which stimulates digestion.
5. Get out in nature to boost your microbial diversity
People seem to know instinctively that spending time in nature is a good thing, especially in the warmer months. This benefits your gut health because it helps to diversify your microbiome.
Getting into nature naturally increases your microbial diversity, because being outside gives you exposure to all sorts of microbes that can benefit your microbiome.
6. Sleep
Intestinal health has a close connection with healthy brain function. While you’re sleeping, the body goes into a “clean sweep” thanks to the liver and gut working together to naturally detoxify the body.
On top of this, sleep deprivation can put our appetite out of balance because it decreases the level of a hormone called leptin, which is responsible for our feelings of satiety. While also increasing the level of ghrelin, a hormone in charge of hunger.
These imbalances can lead to consequences for the well-being of our gut and its ecosystem. Therefore, clean sweep sleep is extremely important.
Ensuring you’re getting quality sleep allows the body to detox any excess toxins, so you can wake up feeling refreshed and ready for the day ahead.
Living healthy is all about your habits
If we want to live a healthy life this spring, it goes beyond just the food that you’re putting into your body. It's about the healthy habits that you practice. Simple daily practices help keep your gut at optimal functioning power.
This article has been republished with permission from PurelyB.
Disclaimer: You are not allowed to share this article on any other website or on Facebook without providing proper credit and the original article link on theAsianparent Malaysia website
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