Gut Health
How Does Bone Broth Heal the Stomach?
Your gut is the foundation of your health, see how bone broth supports your gut health.
Your gut is the foundation of your health. From obtaining nourishment to fighting off diseases, your gut influences almost every vital function in the body. Thus, it becomes crucial to maintain gut health and this can be done primarily by having a good diet. Some foods like bone broths are particularly beneficial for your gut and are claimed to have gut-healing properties. Is that true? Yes! And here’s your explanation for that. Read on.
A bit about bone broth
Before digging into scientific evidence for its gut-healing properties, let’s see what bone broth is. Bone broth is a stock produced from the bones, tendons, and ligaments of animals such as chicken, turkey, cattle, hog, lamb, and fish. It’s prepared in an acidic medium to extract the collagen peptides and turn them into gelatin. To enhance the flavor, several spices and condiments are often added.
What is a healthy gut?
Your gut can be called healthy, first, if it has an optimum population of the healthy gut microflora. Let me explain. Numerous microorganisms live in your gut, from which some are beneficial and others aren’t much of use, while some might even prove to be harmful if they exceed a certain number. A healthy gut has a good balance between the population of good and bad gut microbes.
Second, your gut decides which all substances should enter your bloodstream and eventually reach every corner of your body. It’s highly specific in allowing the substance to pass through and this is a healthy condition. But sometimes, the gut is unable to act as an efficient barrier, and this condition is known as leaky gut where some unwanted wastes enter your blood from the gut and this can wreak havoc in your system. It can cause irritable bowel syndrome, Acne, autoimmune disorders, Celiac disease, Crohn’s disease, etc.
How does bone broth uplift your gut health?
The main constituent of the bone broth is gelatin which can be termed cooked collagen, and collagen my friends has been scientifically proven to improve gut health in several ways. Collagen protein supplements have been shown to reduce the harmful inflammation markers and thus reduce the inflammation in conditions like ulcerative colitis.
According to a study in 2017, the epithelial barrier dysfunction of the intestine can be improved by collagen. It was seen that the gaps between the gut cells were eventually closed creating a tighter junction and thus preventing the leakage of unwanted substances. The barrier dysfunction is mainly caused by alpha-TNF which is an inflammation marker. Collagen peptides attenuate alpha-TNF by inhibiting harmful inflammation pathways.
Collagen protein supplements also have tissue repairing properties which will help in healing the gut. It has a high amount of glycine, an amino acid with anti-inflammatory and antioxidant properties. Bone broth might also help with the growth of good gut bacteria. There isn’t extensive research in this area, but whatever we have is quite promising.
One important thing to remember
Type I, II, III, V, VI, VIII, and IX collagen peptides are no longer present in any single source of animals on the entire planet, except for grass-fed cattle grazing on the grasslands of New Zealand. So if you are planning to get a bone broth supplement, get New Zealand’s collagen protein.
Here we are! Are you planning to have some steaming, flavourful bone broth any time soon? Comment!
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