Often, gut health is overlooked as a critical factor in overall health. The Covid pandemic has underlined the need for a healthy immune system, and most people don’t understand the relationship between gut health and their immune system. The gut plays an integral part in helping your immune system stay strong. 

Understanding how to improve your gut health with gut probiotics is a simple way to enhance your immune system. 

What Is the Gut and What Does It Do? 

The gut is commonly understood to be the stomach and intestines. It is also called the digestive or gastrointestinal (GI) tract and plays a crucial role in digestion and metabolism. Digestion is how we take in, break down, and absorb nutrients in the food we eat or drink. Metabolism is the process of how we then use these nutrients for energy, growth, and cell repair. 

Besides controlling our digestion and metabolism, the gut is intimately connected to multiple systems within the body, including the immune system and central nervous system. The gut houses over 70-80% of our immune cells and is considered by some to be the body’s largest immune organ. 

Your gut also makes 90-95% of the body’s serotonin, affecting your mood and stress levels, and directly communicates with the brain via a nerve pathway called the vagus nerve or the gut-brain axis. The gut is therefore integral to good physical and cognitive health overall.

What Is the Microbiome?

The gut does not operate in this network of systems alone. Bacteria and other microorganisms in the gut play a pivotal role in the function and regulation of our digestive, metabolic, immune, and central nervous systems. These bacteria are called gut flora or microbiota and are part of the human microbiome, the total of all the microorganisms living within and on the human body. 

Those microbes in our bodies are estimated to outnumber our body cells by up to 10 times. It turns out that our bodies have coevolved with these microbes, and our gut health is best when we are in balance with them. 

What Is Gut Health and Why Is It Important?

Gut health refers to the physical state and function of the gut and the balance of microorganisms in it. 

We have good gut health when our digestive tract functions well and has a healthy balance and diversity of microorganisms. This encourages good digestion, metabolism, immunity, and mood. When we have good gut health, we can enjoy eating, defend ourselves well against harmful pathogens, and replenish our bodies, all of which lead to optimal physical and mental health.

On the other hand, poor gut health can happen when gut microbes are out of balance, and their diversity is reduced through things like a poor diet of highly refined foods, infection, overuse of antibiotics, and exposure to environmental toxins or chemotherapy. This can lead to an imbalance and impoverishment of gut microbes that disrupts the symbiotic balance we’ve co-evolved to need. 

Poor gut health or dysbiosis may be linked to a myriad of diseases like:

• COVID
• Obesity
• Digestive problems like abdominal pain, constipation, diarrhea, bloating, acid reflux, heartburn, and nausea/vomiting
• Food allergies/intolerances
• Leaky gut
• Inflammation of the brain, which can lead to cognitive decline, dementia, stroke, Alzheimer’s, and Parkinson’s disease
• Depression and anxiety
• Diabetes
• Liver disease
• Cancer
• Cardiovascular disease
• Asthma
• Autoimmune diseases like inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) (including Crohn’s and ulcerative colitis), celiac disease, and rheumatoid arthritis (RA)

In short, poor gut health is associated with a wide array of chronic degenerative diseases of the brain and body that may be linked to premature aging and cognitive decline.

What Does the Gut Have to Do With the Immune System?

As stated earlier, the gut contains 70-80% of our immune cells and is one of the largest immune organs in the body. It is a significant pathway for how we come into contact with our surroundings through the air we breathe or the foods we eat. It functions as an essential barrier to protect against pathogens like disease-causing bacteria, viruses, and parasites. 

When they are in balance, the gut microbes work in alliance with the immune system by teaching it to distinguish between what is safe and unsafe, which helps keep the body healthy in a protective way. 

Gut microbes have been shown to activate and regulate critical components of the immune system throughout the body, even as far as the lungs. But this protective mechanism can go awry if gut balance is off, reducing immunity and contributing to disease.

Gut Health, COVID, and Fermented Foods

When our gut health is balanced and functioning well, so does our immune system. This increases our resistance to infection and disease. Conversely, poor gut health increases our vulnerability to illness and disease. 

Researchers are even uncovering the link between the gut and lungs, where oral ingestion of probiotics may help reduce disease incidence, severity, and duration in the lungs. And in the age of COVID, we need all the defenses against infection that we can get.

Additional research now indicates that gut imbalance is associated with more severe cases of COVID, especially those complicated by a secondary infection like pneumonia. It may also influence your susceptibility to long COVID symptoms. 

While the research isn’t yet clear about whether gut imbalance causes or is caused by COVID, scientists are finding more evidence of how gut health, immunity, and COVID are inextricably intertwined.

This is why there is a greater emphasis on the importance of a diet rich in plant-based fiber and fermented foods to maintain a healthy gut balance. Fermented foods are high in probiotics or beneficial microbes, and fiber is their preferred food source on which they thrive as they travel through the gut. 

Researchers at Stanford School of Medicine have found that a diet high in fermented foods may strengthen gut health and diversity and can lower inflammation in as little as ten weeks. They discovered that fermented foods had a more positive impact on gut health faster than a diet high in fiber did alone.

What Can I Do?

The simple answer is to add fermented food to your diet. Fermented foods can be an easy way to alter your gut health and immunity for the better. Simply drinking milk kefir or water kefir sodas which are rich in probiotics, or eating other fermented foods like pickles, sauerkraut, or kimchi may help you achieve better gut health. Fermented teas like Kombucha and Jun Tea are rich in organic acids, which may also help with gut motility and health. 

The key is to add fermented foods to your diet regularly. Simply eating them once or twice won’t have as much impact; they should become a regular part of your diet. It’s important to note that there are other ways of improving gut health, but adding fermented foods may be one of the easiest ways to help you achieve your goal. 

Improve your gut health and immunity by improving your diet with fermented foods. Your gut will thank you, and so will your immune system.