The microbiome has the power to impact almost every area of your health, from your immunity and your stress response to sleep, mood, behavior, metabolism, weight and much more. When your microbiome is out of balance, your immune system struggles. As a result, you’re more likely to suffer from frequent colds, allergies, joint pains, brain fog, acne and skin issues, and, potentially, even more, serious disorders. 

What are the Most Obvious Signs of an Imbalance?

Frequent gas, bloating, loose stools and/or constipation are the most common signs. If you suffer from any of these, your body is telling you something is out of what. What you likely need is to work on balancing your microbiome. Protecting your microbiome – and restoring its balance if disrupted – is one of the most important things you can do to sustain health.

Maybe You Have Heard of Leaky Gut. 

If you’re plagued by one or more of the symptoms mentioned, it’s often an indication of an imbalanced microbiome. It’s also likely some of the foods you’re eating may be compromising the integrity of your gut wall. When that happens, incompletely digested food particles and microscopic irritants can escape through tiny holes in the delicate, one-cell-thick lining of your gut or slip between those cells. From there, they pass into the bloodstream, triggering an immune response and causing the inflammation that is making you feel lousy now, and potentially very sick later in life. 

But How Does the Gut Lining Become so Permeable?

Unfortunately, there are a lot of ways to undermine the integrity of the gut lining. 

• Not eating enough fiber, which starves the good bacteria responsible for repairing and maintaining the gut wall lining. 
• Eating too much sugar, which feeds bad bacteria growth. 
• Overdoing it on foods loaded with gluten, the protein found in many grains.
• Alcohol overuse
• Certain medications

What’s the Right Way to Deal with Gut Imbalances? 

Everyone is different and therefore their treatment most likely will be different as well. However, we typically need to start with creating balance by removing something that is harming you and restoring something that’s lacking. 

Start with this: Clean up Your Diet

A lot of progress can be made by pulling out all foods that feed yeast or bad bacteria in the gut. Here are the top food categories

• sugar
• gluten
• all factory-farmed meats/processed foods

Focus instead on 

• consuming clean, real and nutrient-dense foods, shop the perimeter of your grocery store. Try to buy only non-packaged foods.
• enhance your good bacteria with a daily probiotic
• add a serving of probiotic-rich foods like fermented organic veggies
• take an antimicrobial supplementthat helps fend off harmful bacteria 

Read more about resetting your gut in the article: Top tips to reset your digestion

With reporting from Chalkboard Magazine.