Get the most from your food by keeping your gut healthy

For your body to perform at its best, you must eat the right types of foods and you must be able to properly digest and break down those foods.

We're consistently sharing tips with you on how to choose the right types of foods, but how do you keep your gut healthy enough to fully utilize the nutrients from these foods?

Your digestive system contains billions of healthy bacteria that aid in proper digestion and help to keep bad bacteria under control. Without enough healthy bacteria, food does not fully break down during digestion, so fewer nutrients from that food are absorbed.

In addition, these healthy bacteria eat up toxins in the body that can cause disruptions in our normal internal processes. If these toxins don't get broken down and excreted, the body becomes overly toxic, which can cause stress and disease.

You may be compromising your intestinal health with the following bad habits.

Eating a diet high in sugar and saturated fats can cause an overgrowth in bad bacteria while suppressing good bacteria and causing an overall imbalance. With this type of diet, it is difficult to keep your gut bacteria in check.

Taking prescribed antibiotics for bacterial infections will kill both bad and good bacteria. This means that you may feel better after taking the antibiotics, but a side effect is impaired gut function from a kill-off of the good bacteria that aid in digestion.

Any finally, most people don't realize that most nonorganic meats contain antibiotics because that animal was more than likely treated with antibiotics throughout its life to keep it healthy. When we consume the meat from these animals, we may be compromising our own gut bacteria.

So in addition to avoiding habits that can harm healthy bacteria, there are also ways to repopulate them as well.

Consumption of more soluble and insoluble fiber from fruits and vegetables is one of the simplest ways to promote healthy bacterial growth in the digestive tract.

Supplementing with a probiotic is also a great way to reintroduce healthy bacteria back into the gut.

Eating fermented foods such as a quality yogurt or drinking fermented drinks such as keifer or kombucha is another way to introduce live probiotics. Take a serving before breakfast in the morning on an empty stomach with eight ounces of water.

A full recovery of gut flora could take 30 to 60 days of daily consumption, and then the probiotics can be taken to simply counter the effects of bacteria-killing substances in our environment.

So get the most from the food you're eating by keeping your gut functioning at its best.

For more exercise and nutrition tips, visit our website at PushFitnessTraining.com for links to our blog and social media resources.

• Joshua Steckler is the owner of Push Fitness, a personal training studio located in Schaumburg specializing in weight loss, muscle toning, and nutrition. Contact him at PushFitnessTraining.com.