Sometimes, the various pain and discomfort you feel in your body can be narrowed down to one larger, underlying source... Especially if you feel like your gut health has taken a downward turn.
The culprit? Inflammation.
Your gut health and inflammation are closely connected and exist in delicate balance – and either can knock the other off course. That leads to a dangerous cycle that worsens your gastrointestinal (GI) health and can damage your overall health too.
That’s why it’s so important for your body to keep inflammation under control… without erasing it completely. It’s also why you want to make sure your body has ample supplies of its natural inflammation multi-tasker: Immunoglobulin G.
Inflammation: Good and Bad
You may think of inflammation as a bad thing, but it’s one of your immune system's most important tools. Inflammation is crucial for wound healing and helps defend against infection. In fact, antibodies – also called immunoglobulins – often count on inflammation to neutralize pathogens.
Problems come up when the inflammation switch gets stuck in the on position, and it doesn't shut down once the immediate need has passed. This overactive inflammation can cause all sorts of damage to cells and organs. It’s an underlying cause of many diseases… and it can take a terrible toll on your gut health.
That’s where a special antibody called IgG (immunoglobulin G) comes into play. IgG acts like an inflammation multi-tasker: it helps increase or decrease inflammation depending on the situation.
When your immune system senses an injury or infectious microbe, IgG goes right to the scene. There, IgG activates your body’s defenses, including inflammation, to tackle the threat.
On the flip side, IgG can also act like an inflammation wrangler, helping to reduce unnecessary inflammation. That includes wrangling the inflammation that negatively impacts your gut microbiome (and can lead to an imbalance of bad vs good bacteria.)
This is crucial because when left unchecked, inflammation can lead to three critical gut health issues…
Three Critical Gut Health Issues and Their Connection to Inflammation
Critical Gut Health Issue #1: Unbalanced Gut Microbiome
Your gut microbiome contains trillions of bacteria – both beneficial probiotic bacteria and harmful pathogenic bacteria. A well-balanced gut microbiome has substantially more probiotics than pathogens, and contributes hundreds of benefits to your overall health, including balanced inflammatory responses.
But if anything upsets that balance – either in the gut bacteria or the inflammatory responses – serious issues can arise. And, even worse, pathogens and inflammation kind of egg each other on. Pathogens create pro-inflammatory compounds, which in turn can harm probiotic bacteria. And inflamma