Welcome back to another episode of health hacks. I am Melissa Deally, and I am continuing to share with you throughout this month tips to being able to optimize your health through simple lifestyle changes. And today, I want to talk to you about optimizing gut health. Hippocrates said, way back when that all disease starts in the gut. I like to say all health starts in the gut, and yet we're not really talked about or taught much about that. And the reality is is, when we optimize our gut health, everything else is has the chance to be optimized as well. Now, did you know that 70% of your immune system is housed in your gut, so if your gut health isn't in good shape, then your immune system is going to be weakened. Did you also know that if you don't get enough sleep every night, the average adult needs between seven to nine hours of sleep, that you're actually killing off good bacteria in your gut, and our microbiome is such a delicate balance of microbes that as we kill off those good bacteria, we have an overgrowth of bad bacteria, and that's when we can have something like SIBO start to take hold in our gut, small intestine, intestinal bacterial overgrowth. We start to have yeast overgrowth. Did you know that stress negatively impacts the health of your gut? It too kills off good bacteria in our gut and causes that imbalance, antibiotics, birth control, a number of you know, highly processed foods and sugar, all of those are damaging to this fine balance of our gut as we go through life, if our gut becomes more unhealthy, that can trigger more food intolerances, it can trigger hormonal imbalances, because everything is all interconnected, and so what we want to do is really focus on, how do we optimize the health of our gut? And we can do that through making better food choices, going shopping at the perimeter of the grocery store, eating more fiber, getting more whole foods, enjoying fermented foods like sauerkraut, kimchi and yogurt that help feed those microbes and their prebiotics and giving those microbes food in order To help them thrive in a nice balance within your gut. If you have to take antibiotics, take probiotics during that time as well. Don't take them together. They'll cancel each other out. You want to take them at least an hour apart, if not more. You also want to think about removing inflammatory foods from your diet, which are the gluten dairy products, processed sugars, processed foods, because that inflammation is also negatively impacting the health of of your gut. Look at your sleep. Are you getting quality sleep? Are you getting enough sleep? What can you shift in order to ensure that you are getting good quality sleep? Does it mean getting off screens earlier in the night, making sure you're wearing blue light blocking glasses. You can go back and go to my podcast at your guide to health journey com, and go into the topics there. And I've got many podcasts and health hack episodes on the topics of sleep. You can find them and listen to them and see the little tweaks that you can make that aren't difficult, that you just don't know what you don't know, and when you learn it from those episodes, you can start to make some small changes in your life. What's your stress level like? Are you eating in a stressed out state? And that is therefore negatively affecting your digestive system? Because when we're in our fight or flight system, our digestive system isn't even turned on. Our body isn't able to produce the stomach acid and the enzymes needed to break down the food, and therefore it takes longer for that food to be moving through our body. It can ferment along the way and cause issues within our gut. So addressing the stress in your life, taking time for yourself, getting outside, even if it's just for five minutes, to be in fresh air and breathe it in and take some deep breaths rather than just breathing quickly in our rush, rush rush state, there's many small steps that you can take to start to shift lifestyle habits that are going to positively impact the health of your gut. So check out these episodes and give yourself the gift of health for life and it all starts by focusing on your gut health.