1 April / Gut Health With Jo Kelly / ipress cafe
Come and Join Health Coach Jo Kelly to uncover the possible causes of your tummy upsets and how your Gut Health may be impacting your skin, mood and basically every part of your health!
You will learn some cool tips and tricks of how to incorporate your Essential Oils into your daily routine to improve your overall wellness.
Time: 10.30 – 12
Date: Wednesday 1st April
Place: iPRESS Mt Eden
Gut Microbiome Basics from Health Coach Jo Kelly
The Human microbiome is an all-important determinant of our health – both physical and mental. These are organisms (bacteria and fungi mainly), they are both on our skin and inside us, mainly in the colon and in the female reproductive tract. They are unique to each individual, but we also see trends of similarities in geographic populations.
The four main factors that have the biggest impact/change to our microbiome –
Firstly – what we are eating – modern industrialised food-like substances that we consume a lot of today, stimulate a very different population of organisms than whole natural foods.
Secondly – overuse of antibiotics – they wreak havoc in the microbiome. Antibiotics are needed in about 10% of the instances which they are now prescribed. Unfortunately, we are consuming antibiotics in ways most of us don’t even know – in conventionally produced dairy and meat products (non-organic products).
Thirdly – delivery of babies via caesarean section – the GI tract of a fetus is sterile. From the moment of birth, it begins to be colonised with microorganisms and continues for a few weeks after birth. These first organisms get established permanently and are pretty much there for life. When babies are born vaginally, the organisms they pick up come from the birth canal, they are swallowed on the way out. If born by c-section, the organisms come from the mother’s skin which is a totally different population of bacteria and fungi.
Fourth – the decline in breast feeding – human breast milk has unusual carbohydrates in it and unusual sugars that are indigestible by us, and these are pre-biotics. What we know about pre-biotics is that they stimulate the growth of some organisms, namely pro-biotics (good gut bacteria).
There has been a massive rise in a lot of conditions we see these days compared with just 40-50 years ago, that are ‘mysterious’, hard to pin-point the cause… conditions such as asthma, allergies, gluten sensitivity, declining mental health, autism, ADHD, auto-immune diseases, just to name a few. There is however a very strong correlation between the declining state of our microbiome and increasing rate of c-section births and reduction in breast feeding. You can draw your own conclusions from this.
I apologise if any of this is a trigger for you… when I started learning about the microbiome and especially these facts around c-section births and breast feeding this induced massive Mum-guilt for me. My baby was born by emergency c-section. If I’d known then what I know now, I would have done a super simple trick that’s gaining popularity – taken a swab to the hospital and swabbed my vaginal tract straight after birth and then swiped it around inside my baby’s mouth.
And when my milk started to dry up at 7 weeks, I would now be using the shit out of fennel essential oil to try to get that supply back up. My son has had so many gut issues and we’ve worked so hard on them. But I’ve also worked hard on letting go of my Mum-guilt around this and focus on what I can still do.
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Date: Wednesday 1st April
Time: Wednesday 10:30am-12pm (please arrive at 10.20, grab your coffee and snack down stairs, we start at 10.30am sharp).
Location: iPRESS CAFE
421 Mount Eden Rd, Mount Eden, Auckland 1024