Everyone Deserves a Break!

The Gut’s Need for Rest

Just like humans, machines, animals, our tiny little Gut too deserves a break for health, resilience, and maintenance.

While we have always been advised that with a few lifestyle and dietary changes, you can protect your gut microbiome, boost your immunity, and improve your mood, a 24 to 36 hours complete shutdown (read fasting), twice a month can act as a catalyst to improve gut health.

Difficulties and discomfort related to the gut are very common. But even so, because of embarrassment and stigma, many of us don’t talk about them, even with our closest friends and family.

What is a healthy gut?

Defining good gut health is challenging: it means something different for researchers, doctors, and the community. However, most medical experts would agree that a healthy gut is one not affected by gut diseases or troubling gut symptoms but one that has a healthy microbiome.

It can help to know something about the properties that make up a healthy gut. A healthy gut has a mucus-lined barrier that is ordinarily very effective at preventing gut contents, such as its microbes, undigested food particles, and toxins, from escaping into the bloodstream.

However, various factors, from poor diet to medical conditions to infections, can cause a disruption of your gut barrier, which allows bacteria or small food particles to escape into your bloodstream, where they are recognized as foreign invaders, triggering the immune system to respond.

A healthy gut has important functions, such as digestion, synthesis, and absorption of nutrients that are essential for the body.

What to do?

As mentioned in our very ancient scriptures like that of Jainism, fasting at regular intervals helps gut health by altering the gut microbiome, reducing inflammation, and improving gut motility.

This is in addition to lifestyle and diet changes that one has to incorporate to improve gut health. One should think of fasting as a Power Play in a cricket match!