Your gut health has a massive impact on your long term physical and even mental health.
Therefore, it’s vital we prioritise our gut health to maximise performance not only in the gym
- Fat loss and building muscle
Gut health is incredibly important for many reasons. The best strength coach ever Charles Poliquin who trained many Olympic champions quoted:
“You aren’t what you eat, you’re what you absorb.”
What he meant was no matter how high the quality of food you’re eating if you have poor gut health it will be wasted as you won’t utilise the nutrients efficiently.
- Mental Health
Our mental health is massively influenced by our gut.
95% of our body’s serotonin is produced in our gut not by our brain like most people think.
Serotonin is a chemical that nerve cells produce and it plays a large roll in in your mood, sleep and regulates anxiety.
Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRI) medication is given to treat depression, trade name is Prozac.
If your gut health is poor this can lead to depression and anxiety.
- Immune Function
70-80% of your immune cells are present in your gut and these interact with your gut microbiome. Your gut microbiome is the array of bacteria in your gut. A healthy gut microbiome includes a wide variety of different beneficial bacteria and is vital for a healthy immune system.
It plays an important role in regulating your immune system so that it responds to injury or infection but doesn’t attack healthy body tissue i.e., an autoimmune response.
- Heart disease and Type 2 Diabetes Risk.
Above we spoke about how your gut is linked to your immune system.
If your immune system is chronically activated this can lead to chronic inflammation.
Chronic inflammation leads to increased risk of type 2 diabetes and heart disease.
Over time eating the wrong types of foods for your body can promote long term inflammation by causing spikes in your blood sugar and unhealthy blood fat levels.
Conclusion
Your gut health has a massive impact on your long term physical and even mental health.
Therefore, it’s vital we prioritise our gut health to maximise performance not only in the gym.
In next week’s article I’ll be showing you how to go about optimising your gut health with the best protocols.
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