Practitioner Corner: Restoring Gut Balance for Optimal Health

Background of these articles: Health and Wellness Coaches are springing up all over the place.  And rightly so.  As a society, we need to learn to eat, live, move, and breathe in ways that support vibrant health, rather than drain it.

Welcome to “Dr Ritamarie’s Practitioner Corner” where each week, we’ll feature an article, a tip, a resource, or research specifically for health coaches and nutritionally oriented health practitioners looking to improve clinical skills and combine functional medicine with the ancient healing wisdom of plants, movement, and mindfulness.

Some weeks the resource will be geared towards improving clinical skills, while other weeks, the focus will be on improving your ability to reach more clients and have a more far reaching impact on world health and thus world peace.

If you are a holistic practitioner or are looking forward to learning how to be a health coach, you are in the right place.

Without further adieu, enjoy this week’s Practitioner Corner article.

Restoring Balance to the Gut for Optimal Health

As holistic health practitioners, our goal is to educate our patients and clients to take care of themselves before disease like leaky gut sets in, not after.

As you probably already know, the gut plays a key role optimizing health, and one of the most important considerations is the quality of gut flora.

Normal flora gets disrupted by steroids, birth control pills, and antibiotics — both ingested and in animal foods. The good bugs in the gut are important for synthesizing vitamins, providing protection from disease, and optimizing digestion.

When normal flora becomes disrupted, it sets the stage for the overgrowth of yeasts, fungi, bacteria, and viruses that can create digestive havoc and lead to nutrient deficiencies and serious disease. Studies increasingly suggest that each person’s unique gut flora composition, balance, and activity influence immune function and overall health.

From time to time, I am invited to free webinars that explore topics of importance in functional medicine and lab assessment.

Today I would like to share the link to an online event that Genova Diagnostics recently hosted about gut flora and factors that impact its activity and composition, including genetic background, age, diet, and health status.

On the webinar they talked about:

• The gut microbiome’s role in health, disease and its relationship to the aging process
• How factors such as diet, stress, antibiotics and other medications affect the gut microbiome
• Diagnostic methods available for providing personalized evaluation of gut health and the gut microbiome throughout an individual’s lifespan

Click HERE to register for Genova Diagnostic’s no cost events for health coaches interested in gut health, and many other relevant topics for practitioners. You can get access to future events as well as this past webinar replay.

What is your most pressing question about healing leaky gut syndrome, building the immune system, and creating healthy gut flora?  Comment below!

With love and appreciation,

Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo