The Importance of Your Microbiome

The importance of gut health

The gut microbiome is a complex community of microorganisms that plays a key role in maintaining balance within the body. Trillions of bacteria, fungi, and other microbes work together in the gut to support digestion, nutrient absorption, and more. Modern lifestyles, dietary choices, and environmental factors can all impact the diversity of these microbes. Supporting your gut health naturally can be an effective way to help maintain this delicate balance, encouraging a thriving microbiome. At Chuckling Goat, our products are crafted with natural ingredients, specifically chosen to support your gut microbiome.

Why are bacteria good for your digestive system?

Bacteria are required to help break down the many different types of fibre. As human beings, we’re great at breaking down starch, which starts to degrade when we chew our food. However, we’re not so good at breaking down plant fibres.

The complex and branched sugars found in fruits and vegetables pose a challenge for the human body, and to digest them, we have to turn to our buddies the gut bugs. If your system gets depleted in certain strains of bacteria, it will struggle to break down certain types of fibre.

Gut bugs eat the dietary fibre which is left over after the digestive process has been completed. This fibre forms a filter to capture toxins which the body is trying to remove from your system. Recommendations are to eat 30 grams of fibre per day, which should result in three bowel movements daily. A microbiome test can tell you which foods you need to eat in order to boost certain populations of gut bugs inside your system that may be lacking.

Healthy bacteria found in your gut

The bacteria inside your gut helps your gut stay healthy. These gut bugs interact with both the epithelial cells lining the gut and cells of the immune system to help balance the immune responses and protect your gut from unwanted inflammation.

How do gut bacteria work?

Here’s how your gut bacteria work: say that a disease-causing microbe, like salmonella, gets into your system. The big boss cells in your immune system, called ‘antigen-presenting cells’ give the instruction to your T-cells to mount an appropriate inflammatory response to fight the Salmonella.

But, there’s a problem. An inflammatory immune response, especially in the intestine, can be damaging to the healthy tissue. So your good gut bugs have to step in to help ‘tune down’ the inflammatory response, limiting the damage it can do to the gut.

In a perfect world, the result is a balanced response which can fight off infections like salmonella but is still regulated to prevent damage to the healthy intestinal tissue. It’s a delicate balance!

However, if your gut has been damaged by sugar, stress, antibiotics or environmental toxins – your gut bugs will be compromised. So there will be no balance, no intervention, no reduction in inflammation, and you will see the results in side effects including pain, bloating, IBS, diarrhoea or constipation, as your compromised gut struggles to function.