How To Restore Gut Microbiome After Antibiotics

Explore holistic methods of how to restore gut microbiome after antibiotics. Learn essential strategies to enhance gut health and well-being naturally.

It’s hard to overstate the importance of having good gut health. After all, your gut health affects everything from your hormones to the health of your heart. When your gut health is suboptimal, the chances are your general health will suffer too. Many things can affect your gut health, including stress, diet, medications, or antibiotics overuse.

Antibiotics are sometimes necessary, but unfortunately, they can have a significant effect on your gut health. (Source)

This article will focus on how to naturally and effectively restore your gut microbiome after antibiotic use. This will help to improve your gut health and optimise your general health too.

Understanding The Gut Microbiome

Your gut microbiome is a collection of living microorganisms mostly housed in your large intestines. Your gut microbiome has a huge impact on human health. When you eat fiber you feed the microbes in your gut. This encourages them to thrive and enables them to support your general health. 

Different gut microbes within your gut microbiome have different benefits for your health as a whole. For example, some specific gut microbes help to support your gut lining integrity which has huge ramifications for both your gut microbiome and your gut health generally. (Source)

Other gut microbes help to improve your gut-brain communication which may reduce anxiety and depressive symptoms as well as reduce your risk of premature cognitive decline. (Source)

A large part of your immune system is also housed within your gut, so any perturbation to your gut microbiome can adversely affect your immune function as well as increase your risk of autoimmunity and chronic inflammation. (Source)

Whilst many of us will need to take a course of antibiotics that one time or another in our lives, repeated use of antibiotics can reduce the diversity of your gut microbiome and potentially lead to gut dysbiosis which is an imbalance of the types of microbes in your gut microbiome.

Antibiotics don’t discriminate against the type of microbes they kill. While they will target pathological bacteria that may be causing you infections, they can also disrupt your microbial diversity by wiping out beneficial microbes. This can have adverse effects on human health.

Antibiotic use can disrupt the microbial diversity in your gut point microbiome in such a way that the balance of good and bad bacteria is altered. You may end up with an overgrowth of bad or pathogenic bacteria and a depletion of beneficial protective bacteria.

Strategies For Restoring Gut Microbiome

There are a number of important strategies for restoring your gut microbiome. The best place to start is with a healthy diet rich in high-fibre foods.

When focusing on a high-fibre diet it’s important to consider the diversity of the fibers you are including. This is because having a wide range of fibers will help to feed a broader range of beneficial gut microbes.

High fibre foods act as pre-biotics which will feed and nourish the probiotics that are essential for a healthy gut. (Source)

Another key strategy for restoring your gut microbiome is to increase your intake of naturally fermented foods. This is because fermented foods contain a wide range of natural probiotics within them. This helps to repopulate a depleted gut microbiome. The combination of an increase in high-fibre and fermented foods will help to restore healthy gut flora.

Supplements For Gut Health

Supplements play an important role in restoring gut flora, especially after a course of antibiotics.

This is because probiotic supplements can provide you with a variety of beneficial microbial strains to repopulate the gut microbiome directly. This helps to restore your gut flora by replacing any specific microbes that may have been reduced or eliminated after an antibiotic course. (Source)

One product that can help to restore your gut flora post antibiotics, is the Human Tonik’s Synbio Tonik.

This synbiotic product provides you with four different microbial strains. These help to reestablish diversity within the gut microbiome as well as provide you with a good dose of beneficial bacteria.

The strains included within Human Tonik’s Gut Health Tonik can support your overall immune system and provide you with the beneficial bacteria required for gut health and general well-being.

Improving your overall immune system will in turn help to reduce the number of pathogenic bacteria you encounter in the future as well as protect you against other gut-based infections.

Some medical doctors now suggest that patients on antibiotics take a course of probiotics at the same time as the antibiotics to increase the beneficial bacteria in their gut. This is thought to reduce the side effects of antibiotics such as diarrhea and abdominal pain.

If you do take probiotics during your course of antibiotics, just be aware that it’s important to take them at a different time of day to the medicine to prevent them from becoming inefficient.

Human Tonik’s Gut Health Tonik also includes four complimentary prebiotic strains to ensure that the probiotics establish well within the gut by giving the beneficial bacteria the right amount and type of food required for their survival. (Source)

These probiotics affect the overall immune system and gut health function. By increasing our levels of beneficial bacteria we can see there is a clear role for the use of probiotic dietary supplements following antibiotics.

Lifestyle Changes To Support Gut Health

Stress management is an essential lifestyle change to support your gut health.  This is because when you are stressed you are at a higher risk of gut inflammation, leaky gut, and gut dysbiosis. (Source)

Chronic stress and elevated cortisol levels may increase your levels of inflammatory cytokines that can negatively affect the GI tract. Similarly, stress can also impact your gut health by reducing the levels of beneficial microbes. This can enter you into a vicious circle whereby stress worsens your gut health and your poor gut health increases your stress.

When you are under chronic stress this can also affect your immune health negatively making it harder for your body to deal with pathogenic bacteria in the gut. So by managing stress through yoga, meditation, exercise, and quality sleep, you can enhance your gut health which in turn will support your immune health. This is an important aspect of managing your gut health over the longer term.

For many people, physical exercise is a great method of stress management. It can reduce elevated cortisol levels, improve sleep, and give you an endorphin boost when you’re feeling low.

Physical exercise also works to maintain a diverse bacterial profile within your gut. Studies have shown that moderate aerobic exercise, endurance exercise, and even strength training can help to increase the bacterial diversity in your gut. (Source)

This can help you rebuild your gut microbiome after antibiotic use. So you can see exercise and physical activity as helping you in two ways, both by managing the gut-damaging effects of stress and directly increasing the diverse bacteria profile in your gut.

Specifics Of Gut Recovery

When trying to restore your gut microbiome after antibiotics it’s natural to want to know how long exactly it will take to heal your gut microbiome post antibiotic treatment.

The reality is that your gut microbiome is as individual as your fingerprint. This means it won’t just be an antibiotic treatment that determines how diverse or healthy your gut microbiome is. There could be other factors at play that are affecting your gut recovery.

For example, you may be under lots of stress, eating a poor diet, or on specific types of medications such as proton pump inhibitors. You may also have additional gut health issues such as Crohn’s disease or IBS.

But you may find that within three or so months of starting a gut recovery program post-antibiotic treatment, you are likely to experience improvements in your gut microbiome. The more holistic approaches you take to try and improve your gut microbiome, the better the chances are of this happening in a shorter time frame.

We are aiming to increase the diversity of the gut microbiome to reduce the number of harmful pathogenic bacteria in the gut microbiome and to encourage a strong gut lining by reducing your risk of a leaky gut.

If we can achieve these things through a number of lifestyle changes, such as dietary modifications and appropriate supplementation our chances are high of healing our gut microbiome in a reasonable time frame.

Of course, if we need future antibiotic treatment this could delay our gut health recovery. It may even set back the health of our gut microbiome for a period of time. Being patient and continuing to maintain your gut health over the longer term will have the best health outcomes going forward.

Some people find benefit from adding in an additional tool to heal their gut microbiome. Some people this missing tool is apple cider vinegar. This natural vinegar, complete with “the mother” is rich in living, active compounds, and can help some people with symptoms of indigestion, improve gut lining health, and support the health of the gut microbiome. Some people also find that when they come off from acid-reducing medications – switching to apple cider vinegar is a natural alternative for their digestion.

If apple cider vinegar is safe for you to try, you could experiment with adding it into your gut healing protocol post-antibiotic treatment.

Advanced Tips For Gut Health Maintenance

Nourish Your Gut

To maintain beneficial gut bacteria going forward you’ll need to regularly consume pre and probiotic fibers. Consistently consuming these foods will give you the best chance of maintaining beneficial gut bacteria and achieving a healthy gut microbiota.

Exercising moderately on a regular basis has also been shown to increase beneficial microbes within the gut environment however extreme exercise routines are more likely to exacerbate dysbiosis issues, so don’t go overboard with your activity levels.

Stress Reduction

We also know the gut and brain work closely together, so another lifestyle recommendation for maintaining beneficial gut bacteria is to reduce stress where possible and spend more time in the rest and relaxation response. This can improve your gut-brain communications and help to maintain your gut health going forward.

Protect Your Gut Microbiome

In order to reduce harmful pathogens from establishing in your gut microbiome in the future, try to reduce your intake of stomach acid-reducing medications such as proton pump inhibitors. (Source)

Over-reliance on these drugs can reduce your stomach acid to the point where pathogenic microbes can take over within your large intestines causing dysbiosis.

Nutritious Diet

The overgrowth of harmful pathogens is made worse by over consumption of refined carbohydrates and sugars as these types of foods feed the pathogenic bacteria encouraging them to thrive.

Instead, reduce your risk of harmful pathogens by focusing on healthy proteins, complex carbs in moderate portions, and plenty of healthy fats and vegetables.

Probiotics And Prebiotics

Stocking up on probiotics can also help to crowd out harmful pathogens. Similarly, consuming plenty of pre-biotics will help to ensure your short-chain fatty acid production is effective which may prevent leaky gut.

Leaky gut can occur if you have an insufficient production of short-chain fatty acids which is often caused by a fibre-depleted diet. Reducing unnecessary antibiotic use and managing stress may also help to reduce the risk of leaky gut and increase overall well-being.

Conclusion

To conclude, it’s important to consider a number of holistic approaches when trying to rebuild your gut microbiome post-antibiotic use.

Modifying your diet so that it is naturally higher in fibre is a good starting point. This will ensure you are getting sufficient prebiotic intake to support your new gut microbiome.

Making a range of naturally fermented foods at home is a good way to increase your probiotic diet intake through the diet too.

However, it can take time to naturally restore your gut microbiome so taking a well-balanced pre and probiotic supplement may make it easier to improve your gut health following an illness. So, why not try Synbio Tonik to get you back on track?

FAQs

How Long Does It Take To Restore Gut Microbiome After Antibiotics?

Everybody’s gut is slightly different so it’s hard to give an exact timeline. For example, if you have had repeated courses of antibiotics in recent years it may take longer to rebuild your gut microbiome.

However, within three months of following a fibre-rich diet and taking a high-quality probiotic supplement, you will likely have restored some of the microbial diversity as well as increasing some of the beneficial microbes that were previously lacking from your gut.

Can Probiotic Supplements Fast-Track The Restoration Of Gut Flora?

Good quality probiotics supplements such as Human Tonik’s Gut Health Tonik can help your gut to recover post-antibiotics.

The reason for this is that high-quality probiotic supplements such as this one can increase the diversity of your gut microbes as they contain multiple beneficial strains. This product also contains a high CFU number which makes it more likely that the microbes will reach your gut alive.

The addition of the pre-biotic will support the probiotics to develop and grow in your gut. This type of supplement in combination with a fibre-rich diet can make it easier to restore your gut after antibiotics.

What Foods Are Best For Rebuilding Gut Microbiome After Antibiotics?

Prebiotic foods such as oats, garlic, and onions are very good at feeding the beneficial microbes living in your large intestines. This can help them to thrive and may reduce your risk of dysbiosis.

Similarly, probiotics are good at increasing the diversity and density of helpful microbes living in your gut. Aim to eat a wide range of high-fibre foods for the pre-biotics and fermented foods for the probiotics. You may wish to supplement with a high-quality product too.

How Does Apple Cider Vinegar Affect The Gut Microbiome?

Apple cider vinegar acts as a prebiotic that may help you rebuild your gut microbiome after antibiotic use. Make sure you buy a product that contains “the mother”, which means it is “alive” and contains beneficial compounds for your gut health.

What Are The Long-Term Strategies To Maintain A Healthy Gut After Antibiotic Use?

Ensure that you follow a fibre-rich diet packed with prebiotics, and increase your consumption of naturally fermented foods which are a good source of probiotics too.

Consider taking a high-quality synbiotic pre and pro-biotic supplement to increase your chances of maintaining healthy gut microflora following antibiotic use.