Welcome back to another episode of health hacks as I review the topics that I talked about throughout 2024 and today, I want to talk about gut health and the fact that it is your body's foundation. Back in the day, it was Hippocrates who said that all disease starts in the gut, and I like to flip that on its head and say all health starts in the gut. It is absolutely central to our overall wellness. There is, of course, the gut brain connection and connected via the vagus nerve, and that impacts our mood. It impacts our ability to function and thrive. And when our brain is off, if we've had a concussion, for instance, it can negatively impact the our health of our gut, and vice versa. If our gut is off, the body isn't necessarily connecting or producing the right amount of neurotransmitters for us to be thriving. We also want to have a lot of diversity in our microbiome, and that is of the the gut flora that is in our gut in order for us to thrive. It's a whole ecosystem within ourselves where there are more microbes within our body than there are human DNA, and they are helping us and working with us symbiotically to break down all of our food and get all of the essential nutrients into the cells in order, excuse me, for us to be able to thrive and have the energy that We want to show up with every single day, our health, the health of our gut, impacts our immune system, because 70% of our immune system is housed in our gut. And so as you can see, it is imperative for us to be focused on the health of our gut. And several ways that we can focus on the health of our gut are by ensuring we are getting good quality sleep every night. Because when we're not getting enough sleep, we're actually breaking down the healthy gut bacteria that we need. We also want to be ensuring that we are using our stress management tools and not living in chronic stress day in and day out, because again, high stress is breaking down our healthy gut bacteria. We can also be looking at incorporating prebiotic rich foods like onions and garlic and probiotic rich foods like yogurt, sauerkraut, miso, Noctua, etc, into our diet in order to be feeding those microbes and encouraging them to be doing their job of keeping us healthy and ensuring that our digestive system is functioning at its very best. So I talked about gut health in detail in a number of episodes, starting at Episode 484 all the way through to 495 if you want to go and check out those episodes again. And also, you can go to the podcast, don't wait for your wake up call podcast. And if you go to it on my website, which is at your guided health journey.com, you can then select the podcast by topics and by themes. And one of the themes there is gut health. So you can also find past episodes that we're discussing gut health, and there are many of them. So if you're looking for resources in regards to gut health, you can turn there. And also, if you're looking for resources in terms of healing your gut, please reach out to me, Melissa, at your guided health journey.com. I've got a couple of lab tests that we can run to determine where the imbalances are in your gut, where the toxicities are, so that I can then guide you in healing your gut and bringing it back into balance. Because we can absolutely do that, and because it's the foundation of your health, you want to do that so that you can enjoy your health for the length of your life and not have your life cut short simply because disease takes hold because of an unhealthy gut.