Your gut health affects your entire body, including your immune system, brain, mental, and skin health, energy levels, and overall wellness. If you have gut inflammation and your gut health is compromised, you will start experiencing both gut health and non-gut health symptoms and health issues.
Gut inflammation can compromise your entire health.
What Is Gut Inflammation?
There are two types of inflammation:
Acute inflammation – is a healthy and normal response from your body to any injury, allergen, infection, or illness. If you fall off your bike and scrape your knee, your body will start to generate inflammation. You will notice some redness, swelling, bruising, or pain. If you catch a respiratory infection or have seasonal allergies, seasonal al, your body will try to fight it with acute inflammation. You may experience some congestion, a sore throat, sneezing, irritation, red eyes, or watery eyes.
Acute infection is normal. As you recover, acute inflammation will subside and disappear. Acute inflammation will only last a day, a few days, or a few weeks, depending on the cause and severity. It will not result in ongoing, long-term problems.
Chronic inflammation – on the other hand is long-term, long-grade inflammation without a single specific triggering event or clear cause. Poor dietary and lifestyle choices, environmental factors, chronic stress, poor sleep, and other factors can result in chronic inflammation.
Chronic inflammation means that your body is experiencing triggers all the time and reacting with inflammation on a constant basis. The problem is that chronic inflammation will lead to chronic symptoms and chronic health issues. In fact, chronic inflammation is one of the root causes of most major chronic diseases. When we are talking about gut inflammation, we are talking about chronic inflammation affecting your gut. It means that your intestines become inflamed and are chronically inflamed. Chronic gut inflammation is also characterized by gut microbiome imbalance and an array of chronic gut health symptoms. Since your gut is connected to your entire body, chronic gut inflammation also increases the risk of chronic symptoms and health issues in other parts of your body.
Healthy Gut versus Leaky Gut
A healthy gut works like a cheese cloth, allowing only nutrients through, but keeping larger food particles and pathogen bacteria, yeast and parasites out. In a leaky gut, the tight junctions, are loosened so undigested food particles and pathogen can get through and activate the immune system, causing inflammation and food sensitivities.
Gut Inflammation Symptoms
Symptoms of gut inflammation may include but not limited to the following:
Abdominal pain or cramping, bloating, gas, diarrhea, feeling of incomplete bowel movements, blood in stool, loss of appetite, unintentional weight loss, weight gain, sugar cravings, low energy, fatigue
Gut inflammation may also result in non-gut-related symptoms, skin issues, mouth sores, painful joints, allergies, redness or pain in the eyes, mental health issues, night sweats, menstrual changes, kidney stones, fever.