Tips on a healthy Gut and Immune System!
This is one of our favorite topics here at CJ Chiropractic and a lot of our early success in Colorado Springs was caring for patients who had gut struggles and therefore immune system challenges (if they thought they had a sluggish immune system or not). This continues to be a primary health struggle that we help patients with today or something that just happens to improve when we are working on other areas of our patient’s health. Gut health can usually indicate the health of a person. It can affect mental health, teeth and gum health, heart health, and is directly linked to Allergies and immune system function. The gut is one of the biggest immune system organs in our body. It not only kills unwanted visitors with acid in our stomach but then it has to deal with immune system cells lining the intestinal wall and an army of good bacteria that kind of like living there! The best immune system defense is to kill any baddies before it even gets inside of our body. It’s an incredible system that protects us from the outside world and aids in nourishing our bodies.
For these reasons we wanted to give you our top tips to ensure that you have a healthy gut and immune system!
1. Eat whole foods at least 75-80% of the time!
Food is the best medicine when it comes to the gut! There is some incredible supplements and detoxification regimens out there now-a-days but nothing can really beat a delicious organic cob salad with cage free eggs! Eating whole foods does two things: less toxins that where used on your food and the food itself is more nutrient dense and typically has other benefits like containing fiber and other phytonutrients that decrease inflammation. This has the net effect of not bogging down your system by decreasing your toxic load and feeding those good bacteria. Food is by far the biggest and most impactful thing you can do! It is also the most affordable option to help your health because, you’re going to eat anyway, just move your food spending to more healthier options.
Now, I did give you a little wiggle room for the occasional ice cream or pizza “treat yourself” day. But that is the name of the game, is those meals/treats should be occasional. Let those treat your soul/sanity but let real food feed your body and mind. From experience this split of healthy eating and treating yourself occasionally produces the longest lasting results and is sustainable. And sustainable change is what we are all about here at CJ Chiropractic.
2. Movement/Exercise
Have you ever had a workout of your life! You feel spent in the best way possible and then in about 20 minutes time, its time to take a trip to the bathroom. Movement is the number one nutrient of the body! It stimulates our mind, helps our metabolism at the cellular level, and it promotes motility in our colon. Having a good digestive system depends on getting the stuff that we don’t want to absorb and use as nutrients in our body is to get it out! If unwanted waste doesn’t move, then it can wreak havoc on our digestive system and therefore our immune system. This waste if not pooped out in a timely manner is toxic to the body. It will increase inflammation in the area, can cause leaky gut, and our body has to gear up its immune system response to deal with this type of stress. Movement helps because our body engages in the sympathetic nervous system (energy, fight/flight) during exercise; then when we are done we get a shift in the parasympathetic nervous system (which is the rest, digest/poop, social emotional side). This increase in parasympathetic tone stimulates the smooth muscle in our colon to contract and push things along!
Cardio is one of the best exercises for this but you can do yoga, Pilates, cross-fit, swimming, rock climbing, hiking, or weight training. Any exercise that gets the body moving dynamically, raises your heart rate up a bit, and uses multiple muscle groups. Bicep curls are cool but this alone doesn’t count for this purpose. 😊
3. Chiropractic!
Yes, shameless plug here! We mentioned before that we help people with immune system function and digestive system health. How? By balancing their nervous systems! There are many inputs from the central nervous system to the enteric nervous system (your gut has a whole nervous system!). The health of the gut can dramatically have central nervous system affects mentioned at the beginning of this blog, but the central nervous system can affect the gut in dramatic ways as well. It really is a relationship between the two. You’ve ever been super stressed and got a stomachache? You experienced a decrease in activity in what is called the Vagus nerve. The Vagus nerve has many functions as it is the main messenger nerve for the parasympathetic nervous system (rest, digest, social emotional system). Increase in Vagus nerve activity increases gastric motility, decreased inflammation, and a sharper immune system response indicated by decrease in cases of cancer and other mortality with high Vagus nerve activity.
This study on mice sings this beautifully. One group had their Vagus nerve cut, one group was left alone, and one group had their Vagus nerve stimulated. The Vagus Nerve stimulation group had decreased cases of cancer, ulcerative colitis, Crohn’s, irritable bowel syndrome, and death. The group that had their Vagus nerve cut had the opposite effect. RIP little mice….
We hope you found our 3rd blog interesting and helpful! Check your pantry, get moving, and seek out a good chiropractor to improve your gut and immune system health today! Also, we are aware that probiotics/pre-biotics, parasite cleanses, and detoxes are important in cases as well and can help guide those decisions as well!
Reach our Colorado Springs, CO chiropractic office to get more information, we would love for CJ Chiropractic to be apart of your health journey!
