Inflammation is at the root of most health issues.  But what about inflammation & your gut? Did you know your gut plays a huge role in keeping it under control? While some inflammation is essential for healing, too much can lead to long-term problems like joint pain, digestive issues, and even mood disorders.

So, what’s the difference between helpful and harmful inflammation?

Acute vs. Chronic Inflammation & Your Gut

💥 Acute inflammation is your body’s first-aid response—think of a swollen cut or a sore throat. It helps you heal and disappears in a few days.
⚠️ Chronic inflammation, on the other hand, lingers for months (or even years!), triggering symptoms like:
✔️ Ongoing fatigue
✔️ Abdominal pain & bloating
✔️ Skin rashes
✔️ Joint pain & stiffness
✔️ Asthma & autoimmune conditions

The Gut-Inflammation Connection

An unhealthy gut—too many bad bacteria, not enough good ones—can fuel inflammation. This doesn’t just cause digestive issues like IBS, but can also contribute to anxiety, depression, and arthritis.

So, what’s driving this chronic inflammation?
🚨 Hidden food sensitivities
🚨 Stress & high toxin exposure
🚨 Too much processed food, sugar, caffeine & dehydration

The good news? You can fight back with a few simple tweaks!

If you’re worried your diet is impacting your gut health, I’d highly recommend downloading my online course The Ultimate Gut Health Programme to help support both your digestive sysem and hormone health, whilst avoiding triggering symptoms.

It’d be impossible to include all you need to know in one blog, but the programme will have all you need to know to ensure you’re soothing your digestive system, whilst eating delicious and filling foods.

🍷 2. Enjoy Red Wine (In Moderation!)

Yes, really! Red wine contains quercetin and resveratrol—powerful anti-inflammatory compounds. Not a fan of wine? You’ll also find quercetin in green tea, blueberries & kale.

✨ 4. Add More Turmeric

Turmeric is one of the most powerful natural anti-inflammatories! Add it to curries, smoothies, or try turmeric milk. If you struggle with joint pain or chronic inflammation, a supplement may work even better.

The other day, someone asked a great question: Is gut health related to hormone health? The answer is a resounding YES!
Let’s break down why this happens and, more importantly, what you can do today to support both your hormone balance & digestion.

Hormone balance & digestion

It’s surprising how many women experience severe gut issues around their period or notice worsening symptoms during perimenopause.

That’s because both oestrogen and progesterone directly influence gut sensitivity and motility.

But it works both ways—the state of your gut has a massive impact on your hormone levels, too!

Factors like alcohol, medications, food intolerances, and stress can all contribute to gut inflammation. And while you may not feel that inflammation directly, symptoms like PMS or perimenopause could be signaling that something’s off.

(Gut inflammation is linked to a host of other issues throughout the body, but that’s a whole other discussion for another day!)

Mood, Hormones, and the Gut

Hormones don’t just regulate your cycle—they also affect your mood. In fact, 90% of serotonin, your main mood-regulating hormone, is produced in the gut! While its role in the gut differs from its function in the brain, this connection shows just how vital gut health is for emotional well-being.

If you’re worried your diet is impacting your gut health, I’d highly recommend downloading my online course The Ultimate Gut Health Programme to help support both your digestive sysem and hormone health, whilst avoiding triggering symptoms.

It’d be impossible to include all you need to know in one blog, but the programme will have all you need to know to ensure you’re soothing your digestive system, whilst eating delicious and filling foods.

Hormone balance & digestion – the Key Role of Gut Bacteria

Here’s where things get really interesting—your gut bacteria play a crucial role in oestrogen balance.

In an ideal scenario, here’s how oestrogen functions:

• The ovaries produce oestrogen
• It circulates through the body, doing its job
• The liver inactivates it when it’s no longer needed
• It exits the body through digestion

But What Happens When There’s an Imbalance?

If your gut bacteria aren’t in the right balance—meaning too many “bad” bacteria and not enough “good” ones—problems arise.

These harmful bacteria produce an enzyme called beta-glucuronidase, which reactivates oestrogen in the gut instead of allowing it to be eliminated. The result? Excess oestrogen flooding your system—which is exactly what we don’t want.

This oestrogen overload can lead to:

• Heavier periods
• Increased risk of fibroids
• Higher breast cancer risk
• Unpleasant menopause symptoms
• Clearly, a healthy gut = balanced hormones—and balanced hormones support better gut health. It’s all interconnected!
  

✅ Stay hydrated by drinking plenty of filtered water.

It sounds like the perfect solution – getting a sweet hit without all the problems associated with eating sugar – BUT might sweeteners be too good to be true? The short answer, sadly, is yes.

In this article I’ll look at which artificial sweeteners may be detrimental to your health, and where they may be lurking. Which ones are healthier, and what the best options are.

The problems with artificial sweeteners

Sweeteners may actually cause you to become addicted to overly sweet foods. How? By training your taste buds to want increasingly sweeter and sweeter foods.

When you eat sweet-tasting food your brain thinks it’s getting some sugar, and your body prepares itself as though sugar is going to land in your digestive system. The problem is the sugar never appears. Your body still produces insulin from your pancreas, and it is this insulin release which will cause you to gain weight. At this point your body is in a total spin, expecting sugar which never arrives!

Which leads to the next problem: Because your brain thinks it’s getting sweet food, and that sweet food never arrives, you may end up craving very sweet, high carb food to make up the deficit. This may also add to the sugar addiction problem.

After you’ve consumed the sweeteners, the insulin you produce will drive down your blood sugar levels and undoubtedly cause anxiety.

So all this confusion in the body may well be why the intake of artificial sweeteners is strongly associated with –

• Obesity and weight gain
• Type 2 diabetes
• Metabolic syndrome

Frequent consumption of sweet-tasting foods, with no calorific content really does interfere with your overall metabolic function.

If you’re worried your diet is impacting your gut health, I’d highly recommend downloading my online course The Ultimate Gut Health Programme to help support both your digestive sysem and hormone health, whilst avoiding triggering symptoms.

It’d be impossible to include all you need to know in one blog, but the programme will have all you need to know to ensure you’re soothing your digestive system, whilst eating delicious and filling foods.

Then there are the side effects of artificial sweeteners –

If you have trouble with your digestive system, there’s double trouble as sweeteners tend to increase inflammation throughout the gut. These problems are apparent in those suffering with IBS and IBD.

If you’ve received an IBS diagnosis and are unsure what to do next, have a look here.

A further study found that consuming artificial sweeteners on a daily basis actually caused the build up of arterial plaque, increasing the risk of cardiovascular disease.

Here are a few of the more common artificial sweeteners that you need to look out for, as they may cause problems for you.

Worse still …

Studies which have looked at the effects of aspartame have found it may impair memory performance. Also, if you’re pregnant or breastfeeding you will definitely want to avoid it as it may cause issues with obesity and metabolic disorders in the child, later in life.

Further problems associated with aspartame include –

• Headaches
• Migraines
• Dizziness
• Mood disorders and other mental health problems
• Nausea and digestive disturbances

Most people are pretty familiar with the benefits of probiotics and how amazing they are for our overall health. Particularly our digestive health. But what about prebiotics, and even postbiotics? What are they for? Read on to discover whether prebiotics, probiotics or postbiotics are best for you.

The difference – prebiotics or probiotics?

Probiotics are beneficial microorganisms that live in our large intestines. They are instrumental in ensuring we have robust immune health, they regulate our mood and of course assist in digesting and absorbing nutrients, not to mention hundreds of other positive actions in the body.

Prebiotics on the other hand are what probiotics need to survive and flourish. They are a type of fibre which travels through the small intestine undigested, which then provides fuel for our probiotics to ferment. As with all high-fibre foods prebiotic fibre passes through the small intestine undigested. It then arrives in the large intestine and provides fuel for the good bacteria to ferment and thrive on.

And postbiotics?

Postbiotics are the bioactive compounds the probiotic bacteria produce when they consume prebiotics.

So you can safely say, as much as you need your probiotics for great health, you also need prebiotics to keep them well fed so they can multiply and flourish, and produce postbiotics.

Given how important they are, prebiotics are still largely underrepresented in the typical Western diet.
Unfortunately this can result in issues such as –

• Indigestion
• Poor immunity
• Weight gain
• Inflammation

Is it best to consume prebiotics or probiotics?

A combination of both is ideal – although if you’re supplementing there is a caveat which I’ll come to in a bit.

Both are vitally important to maintain great health. While your beneficial bacteria provide an array of health benefits, prebiotics ensure they are healthy and plentiful – they really amplify the benefits that probiotics provide.

Postbiotics

In some cases, instead of being labeled ‘postbiotics,’ they may have another name such as sodium butyrate or calcium butyrate.

Because postbiotics are made via fermentation by healthy bacteria in your gut, you can naturally increase your production of postbiotics by eating prebiotic and probiotic rich foods.

If you’re worried your diet is impacting your gut health, I’d highly recommend downloading my online course The Ultimate Gut Health Programme to help support both your digestive sysem and hormone health, whilst avoiding triggering symptoms.

It’d be impossible to include all you need to know in one blog, but the programme will have all you need to know to ensure you’re soothing your digestive system, whilst eating delicious and filling foods.

Use liberal amounts of garlic for flavour and chicory in salads.

If you increase your intake of prebiotic foods you can look forward to amazing benefits such as –

• Less indigestion and bloating
• Improved digestion
• Better immune function
• Balanced hormones
• Greater resilience to stress
• You’ll be less likely to gain weight

Beware: If you’re experiencing ongoing digestive problems

However, as I keep mentioning there is something you need to be aware of. If you have ongoing gut problems which you can’t get to the bottom of I’d always recommend testing first.

Why test?

Because if you begin to experiment with either prebiotic or probiotic supplements you may make your symptoms worse. In these types of situations you need to establish what the root cause of your problem is. For example, you may already have established that you need to avoid foods high in prebiotic fibre such as garlic or onions, as they may make your bloating worse.

For example you may have –

• An imbalance of gut flora
• Microbes in the wrong place (SIBO)
• Inflammation, parasites or an infection
  Food intolerances could be playing a part.

Testing will allow us to design the correct supplement programme for your needs.

So, it’s vital at the outset to establish what’s causing your problem before taking any probiotics or prebiotics.

This doesn’t apply if your gut is already functioning OK, you can take a probiotic and prebiotic to keep things ticking over nicely, or for extra reassurance whilst travelling, for example.

Strangely enough, it’s not so much the food we’re eating which might be damaging our health, but our eating habits. But is snacking bad for our gut health? Snacking is one of those habits which might not, it seems, be especially great for us.  Read on to discover why, and how you can stop snacking if you’re currently a grazer.

I wouldn’t mind betting that this will leave you scratching your head. It’s confusing isn’t it? We’ve been advised in recent years that ‘little and often’ is the way to go with eating. That ‘five small meals’ are better for us than ‘two or three large ones’ each day.

Recently we’d been advised that if we ate less, but more regularly, it would help to balance our metabolism. Not only that but it would stabilise our energy and stop us getting ‘hangry’. It seemed a much more sensible approach, so what’s the problem then?

Is Snacking Bad for You? A brief history.

Before we get to the problem with our digestion, it helps to first look at this from a historical perspective. Until recently snacking wasn’t a thing – people had three square meals each day and that was it. Fast forward to the 1980s and the snack, processed and fast-food culture started to get a stranglehold. At this point we start to see the appearance of microwave ready meals, low-fat products and increasing numbers of highly processed foods.

Along with it, the snack market starts to explode.

And it’s not just salty and sugary snacks I’m talking about. There are plenty of healthy snack bars on the market too. It’s not to say that these products don’t have a place, they absolutely do – it’s great to have something to grab to tide you over every now and again. But it really shouldn’t be a regular thing.

Is snacking bad for you?  The problem with your gut.

When we snack we’re constantly filling our digestive systems with food and not allowing time for it to rest, heal and have a spring clean. The process of digestion is very complex, with lots of intricate signalling going on. If we’re continually eating we’re in danger of these signalling processes being messed up.

The migrating motor complex (MMC)

You can think of your migrating motor complex as your digestive system’s housekeeping process. It’s the reaction that kicks in about 3-4 hours after you’ve finished digesting, and is a series of muscle contractions that sweeps through your gut, giving it a good clear out. This series of peristaltic contractions clears out any undigested food that remains in the digestive tract, preventing it from sitting around for too long. If food stays in the gut it can start to ferment and cause bloating, gas, constipation and dysbiosis.

It’s not just snacking that can cause the MMC to not kick in – stress and anxiety can have the same effect. You can read more on that here.

If you’re worried your diet is impacting your gut health, I’d highly recommend downloading my online course The Ultimate Gut Health Programme to help support both your digestive sysem and hormone health, whilst avoiding triggering symptoms.

It’d be impossible to include all you need to know in one blog, but the programme will have all you need to know to ensure you’re soothing your digestive system, whilst eating delicious and filling foods.

Stick to three main meals each day, and only snack if you have to.  These days I only snack if I know I’m not going to be able to eat a proper meal for a long time.  You definitely don’t need to be eating anything more frequently than every four hours – this allows your MMC to kick in.  

Also, don’t tempt yourself by having salty or sugary snacks lying around the house.  If you have to go to the shop to get snacks it can act as a great deterrent!  Keep healthy snacks on hand in case you do get ravenous – carrot and cucumber sticks with hummus, for example.