Environmental Toxins and Gut Health: Part 1

Are you interested in learning more about how to reduce environmental toxins in your life?

We live in a world where environmental toxins are constantly impacting us. Unfortunately, the awareness of what these toxins do to our mental and physical health is limited.

It’s necessary to take individual responsibility to limit this toxic exposure on your body and in your life. Although it takes effort to decrease your toxic burden, the benefits for your health are substantial. When you low toxify your life and adopt practices that support your health as a lifestyle, you will create more space for your body to thrive.

With the continuous bombardment of toxins from food, water, and the environment, our bodies are constantly fighting. By minimizing environmental toxins, you can significantly decrease a source of constant stress on your liver and other detox organs. This gives your body space to begin healing.

By minimizing environmental toxins in your home and life, you can dramatically improve your gut and overall health.

Chronic disease is prevalent throughout our country and in western culture. Heart disease, diabetes, cancer, autoimmune diseases, and neurologic diseases affect so many people and heavily impact an individual’s quality of life. I’ve learned from experience and in my training as a gut health coach that gut health is a major player in chronic disease management and prevention.

Decreasing toxins and chemicals in your life is an important step to gut healing, as these toxins destroy the good gut bacteria and promote an environment for the bad guys to take over.

Toxins will wreak havoc on your gut lining, allowing particles into the bloodstream that aren’t meant to be there. Toxic substances overwork the detox organs, cause inflammation in the body, and disrupt your natural processes in a number of ways.

In our modern world, there’s a motivation to make things inexpensively and in quantity. This mentality ignores the impact that these chemicals and toxins have on our health and well-being.

They affect your mental and emotional health, gut, nervous system, brain, and your body’s ability to function properly. They restrict your body’s ability to absorb nutrients and minerals and interfere with communication between various organs and systems.

It’s important to understand the toll these toxins take on your body and mind as they accumulate in your system. One exposure to most chemicals and toxins is a small burden to the human body. However, when toxins are coming in from all directions on a consistent basis, the body doesn’t have time and space to recover.

Toxic Burden

The best way to explain toxic burden is that each of us have a bucket that will hold a certain amount. Stress and toxins accumulate over time and at some point, the bucket will become maxed and begin to overflow.

To maintain good health, we must keep this from happening by taking consistent action to minimize toxic stress. This includes cleansing toxins that have accumulated in the body, minimizing toxins and chemicals coming in, and minimizing and dealing with emotional stress.

You’ll know when your bucket is overflowing when symptoms present in your body. These first symptoms are the body’s way of letting you know that something needs your attention.

Listening to these early messages and addressing the root cause can help you avoid more serious health challenges.

All types of stress contribute to the accumulation in the body, including physical, mental, and emotional stressors. All of these stressors create inflammation and have a major impact on your physical and mental health and well-being.

Reducing toxins in your environment is a way to significantly lessen a major source of stress in a way that is sustainable. Once you have outfitted your home to be low toxic, there’s little work that has to be done to maintain these changes.

I invite you to minimize stress in any way that’s possible for you so that your body can focus on dealing with unavoidable stressors and begin to heal.

Lessen The Burden From Environmental Toxins

Much of our toxic exposure is in our home environment and this is where many of us spend the majority of our time. Fortunately, this is the area that we have the most control over and can make changes to the most easily. Some chemicals and toxins are obvious, but many are hidden.

Unless you buy low toxic products, there are chemicals and toxins that permeate the air and absorb into your skin from bedding, mattresses, furniture, furnishings, clothing, laundry and cleaning products, home maintenance products and materials, water, food, and air.

This is the first post in a series on the topic of environmental toxins. If you’d like more information about environmental toxins and/or gut health, subscribe to my email list by signing up for your complimentary gut health guide. I’ll notify you by email as I write more on environmental toxins and other gut-related topics.

Now, let’s dive into some simple strategies to clean up some of the most harmful sources in your water and air. Below are a few ideas to move towards a low toxic life, but there’s much more that can be done.

Here Are Some Ideas to Reduce Environmental Toxins in Your Home:

1. Clean up Your Water:

Water is essential for our bodies to function optimally, and helps to eliminate toxins and waste. Unfortunately, tap water has many chemicals and toxins that hinder the body’s natural processes and cause problems in the body.

Here are ideas for reducing toxic exposure from your tap water:

Get a water filter for drinking.

• It’s easy and effective to invest in a quality water filter. Purifying your drinking and cooking water can go a long way toward reducing your toxic exposure.
• Carbon and reverse osmosis filters are great for both under or on the counter. Reverse osmosis filters out virtually everything and is the best option for drinking, in my opinion.Many people choose to add minerals back into the water as it purifies those out. I like to add trace mineral drops to my drinking water, but you can get a filter that will remineralize as well. These are easy to install and can go miles in promoting your health.
• Remember to take a glass or stainless steel water bottle with you when you go out to ensure that you’re drinking clean water wherever you are. Plastic water bottles leach chemicals into the water even if they are BPA free.

The quality of the air you breathe has an impact on your gut and overall health because there are toxins and chemicals all around us.

Furniture, furnishings, home materials, paint, and even our clothes and bed linens off-gas chemicals into the air. There are molds and toxins that develop over time. Dust collects and binds to toxins in the environment and we breathe it in.

But, there are plenty of things you can do to minimize the toxins and chemicals in your home, so you can feel good about the air you’re breathing.

Open the windows daily.

• Open your windows for at least 10 minutes, even in the winter. Indoor air is much more toxic than outdoor air in most places. Allowing fresh air to come in and toxic air to leave can change the quality of the air in your home significantly.

Have filtering house plants in every room.

• A few great filtering plants are the snake plant, dracaena, spider plant, and peace lily. These plants will decrease toxins and chemicals in the air and improve the atmosphere in your home.

Use a quality HEPA air purifier.

• An air purifier will filter out toxins, chemicals, and dust in your home. HEPA filters are able to filter tiny particles that other filters miss.

Use low toxic products and materials.

• Buy non-toxic or second-hand furniture and furnishings.
• Use “no VOC,’ or at a minimum, “low VOC” paint, glues, and stains.
• Buy low toxic materials for projects and home maintenance.
• Use natural materials that are low toxic. These will bring natural elements into your home, improve the atmosphere, and play a part in making your home a low toxic sanctuary.

Low Toxic Living

The immense toxic burden we experience in our world today is not typically due to one source. Rather it’s the accumulation of toxins from many areas of life that bombard your body every day.

Individually, some of these chemicals and toxins may seem minute. However, as toxins continuously build up in your system, they’ll eventually wear your body down resulting in symptoms and/or illness.