New Year, New Gut Health

Happy New Year! We hope you all had a safe and enjoyable holiday season with family and friends. We took some time away from publishing journals to help get gift sets out to you for Christmas and to spend time with our families. So much is happening at the market right now between physical progress on construction, adding new vendors to our list that we will carry when we open our retail location this year, and restocking our most loved products that we sold out of for Christmas this year. We will start sharing these updates through our email subscription list through newsletters so if you haven’t subscribed to our email list now would be a great time to do so! We wanted to start back with a topic that not only is important to us, but feels very relevant this time of year. Today we are talking about all things gut health!

There is no possible way to cover the entire spectrum of gut health and its importance to the human body in one small journal. The goal of this is to give some practical ways to improve gut health and to show all of the other areas of overall health that are impacted as a result of poor gut health that you may not think of. In addition, we will use the next few journals on this topic.

Most of us have our health as a priority somewhere in our laundry list of 2025 New Year’s Resolutions. While the specific health goals may look different from person to person I rarely meet someone who has no interest in improving their health. Consequently, after the cascade of holiday events many of us feel puffy, lethargic, sluggish, and even just overall weighed down. Often this is a direct relation to our eating habits and how those have impacted our gut health over these past few months from excess sugar, processed foods, artificial dyes, and takeout (holidays were a busy season). This does not mean that you have to feel this way forever or that this cascade of gut health cannot heal under the right conditions.

Often we tend to think that the only symptom of a poorly functioning gut is traditional digestion issues, but this is only the tip of the iceberg. According to the NIH, your gut health can contribute to increased levels of anxiety and even depression as well as poor skin health, weight management, sleep quality, immunity, and mood stability. This to say if you are noticing any of these things then it could be your body trying to tell you that it is time to address your gut health. In addition, research has started to show that prolonged poor gut health and a poor microbiome is linked to higher percentages of colon cancer diagnosis. Other than supplements (which we will talk about more in depth in the next journal) the biggest thing you can do to improve gut health and microbiome is what foods you eat.

If I were reading this thinking to myself ‘that sounds like me’ what are the first steps I would take to improve gut health through food? I would immediately get rid of any low fat dairy products, highly processed grains, seed oils, and limit takeout. Full fat dairy such as greek yogurt is extremely beneficial to your gut and contains Lactobacillus which is a naturally occurring probiotic and is a great addition to help improve gut health (add in some raw honey and it boosts immune support as well). However, low fat options have reduced levels of probiotics and typically have gone through multiple levels of processing and contain more additives. Seed oils continually inflame the lining of the gut and intestine making balancing the microbiome almost impossible, instead stick to animal fats, avocado oil, coconut oil, olive oil, and full fat butter. These are small swaps that make a big first step! In addition, try to remember all of this is about consistency and not about perfection. There are still ways to improve gut health and enjoying a night out to eat or enjoying pizza.

We will dive deeper into gut health over the next few journals as we discuss supplements and fermentation (foods, sourdough, vinegar)!

Research Links:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10384867/

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8777015/

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10620-020-06112-w