The Good Stuff
Gut Performance™ combines highly nutritious foods that both you and your gut microbiota need for good health and top performance.
Gut Performance ingredients and formula have been scientifically developed and researched over the past 7 years to understand the reasons people taking the product were seeing improved gut function and as a result, vastly improved general health and wellbeing.
Why Athletes need a Gut that performs
New research shows that your gut performance is critical to your athletic performance! The gut and the good bacteria that live there (microbiome) plays a primary role in your ability to absorb nutrition; recover from workouts and handle stress. It affects energy levels, mood, metabolic function and how you feel on a daily basis.
Gut Performance™ helps your gut perform at an optimum level day after day be helping the good bacteria thrive whilst helping to eliminate the bad bacteria (prebiotic). Additionally, the highly nutritious foods in Gut Performance™ replace nutrients known to be essential to muscle repair and recovery.
The lining of your gut allows nutrients, amino acids, proteins and minerals to be absorbed into your body. If this cellular lining is compromised, then your body will not be making the most of the good stuff you are putting into it.
A healthy gut also eliminates toxins and waste products from entering your body, helping you to feel good. Toxins can enter the blood stream if the gut has been compromised by poor diet, drugs, alcohol etc. and chronic inflammation of the intestinal tracts can develop. Gut Performance™ has been shown to help reduce inflammation of the gut.
High protein diets can often have a negative affect on the good bacteria due to the fermentation of amino acids in the gut itself. Gut Performance™ is high in both soluble and non-soluble fibre (12% of recommended daily fibre requirement), which has a protective affect by ‘feeding’ the good bacteria. These high-fibre complex carbohydrates (indigestible carbs) are packed with natural phytonutrients that have an anti-inflammatory action often associated with some proteins.
Sugarcane Stem – The Secret Weapon
Sugarcane Stem, the sugar (sucrose) removed but the good stuff left behind. Sounds simple right? But what’s so special about our Sugarcane Extract is the technology process that has been developed by our scientists. In essence, we do the exact opposite of an ‘extract’ or simple vitamin; rather than take a small group of ‘good’ molecules out (or synthesise them) we take the one ‘bad’ out and leave all the good. No heat or chemicals are used to remove the sugar from the micronutrients and whole cell fibre. This allows special and important micronutrients and minerals, such as bioavailable chromium, to remain intact. Chromium is key to maintaining good blood glucose balance amongst other things.
Whole sugarcane has been used as a traditional medicine and highly nutritious food in Southeast Asia for over 1000 years. It is known to be high in essential nutrients and vitamins as well as containing a wide range of simple and complex sugars that provide the body with a low glycaemic index (GI) energy boost. When you take the sugar out and leave everything else like we have done, what you get is a high quality soluble and insoluble dietary fibre and micronutrient powerhouse.
Unlike most foods we eat today, sugarcane is actually the actively growing stem of the plant. This means this it has unusual fibres and nutrients compared to say roots or grains (which are largely storage devices and not directly involved in activity). Sugarcane is very rich in polyphenolic and flavonoid antioxidants, which are both used by the body directly and by our gut bacteria. Sugarcane stem has also been shown to be a very effective prebiotic, reducing ‘bad’ bacteria and increasing ‘good’ bacteria without letting any one group run away (as some fibre supplements do).
Also, it has been shown to be rich in natural chromium – a nutrient essential to blood sugar management but very hard to get into our diet (and supplements don’t work or may even be toxic). Finally, the multiple types of fibre in sugarcane stem have been shown to directly stimulate the intestinal wall thickening the mucous layer and protecting it from inflammation and disease.
Beetroot: The Weapon Against Bowel Disease
Beetroot is possibly one of the only foods to really earn the ‘superfood’ trendy label. Beetroot is known to be very high in a number of nutrients and multiple studies have shown benefits not just to general health bu sports performance.
Some things that make beetroot great;
Beetroot improves muscle performance
Beetroot powder is particularly high in organic nitrate, which is converted in the stomach to nitric oxide (NO). NO plays a number of important roles in maintaining good gut health. However, for people training or competing, NO acts as a vasodilator, opening blood vessels and allowing more blood and oxygen to be delivered to muscles.
Red Beets are awesome for the Gut
Red beets come loaded with complex dietary fibre, a carbohydrate important for digestive health. The fiber in red beets lowers the risk of diverticular disease, a disease associated with colon inflammation that causes gas, bloating, irregular bowel movements and nausea. Beetroot fibre also keeps you regular, softening your stool to make it easier to pass.
Red beets also offer digestive benefits because of their vitamin and antioxidants. In particular, it is high in B-9 (folate) content. A diet rich in folate has shown to reduce your risk of colon cancer. It can protect you from the higher risk of colon cancer associated with alcohol consumption. Folate also aids in new cell growth, so it plays a role in tissue repair and importantly, the repair of the digestive tract issue.
Red Sorghum: Ancient Gut Food
Red Sorghum is a traditional gluten free grain known to be high in resistant starch as well as a range of antioxidants. It is used as a low inflammatory alternative to wheat based foods. Unlike many grains used today that have been extensively modified by humans to be better for processed foods, red sorghum is largely the same as it was found in the wild. Similar to wild rice, red sorghum maintains a large amount of micronutrients (traditionally bred out of grains because of their bitter tastes and unwanted colour) and has a large resistant starch component. Resistant starch makes bread hard to rise (which is why that have been bred out of wheat) but resistant starch feeds the gut microbiome in unique and healthy ways.
But it is the combination of the ingredients that is the key…
The reason why most supplements fail to produce results is that unlike foods, they are very simple. Is isn’t enough to take vitamins, or have a fibre supplement, or pop an antioxidant pill. Our guts just aren’t designed to work that way. By combining very nutrient dense, whole foods in clever ways to make sure that all the components your body needs are present at the same time you can effectively replace the things that you need when you are training hard wiht a shake.
For a Healthy Mind
The gut produces some very powerful neurotransmitters that regulate mood, appetite and energy levels. New research shows that the gut has a major impact on brain function and the balance of neurotransmitter agents. poor gut health has been shown to increase the onset of mental health issues such as depression and poor cognition. as we all know, competing and winning is as much about the mental approach as it is the physical and technique side of things.
Detoxify your Gut for a Healthy Body
The guts microbiota is sensitive to high levels of hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline, which are common in training and competing athletes.
The gut’s lining is made up of a cell layer with each cell held together by a ‘tight junction’. These junctions allow nutrients into the bloodstream and keep toxins out. The ‘tight junctions’ can be damaged by various chemicals and compounds such as cortisol, anitbiotics and other drug therapies, making the junctions more permeable, letting toxins into the body and absorbing less nutrients. When these toxins enter the bloodstream, it can make you feel ill and trigger an immune response. Chronic inflammation can develop. Gut Performance™ helps maintain the cell integrity and normalise the gut, reducing inflammation.
Poor gut health may also inhibit the gut’s ability to get rid of harmful compounds from the body. We are constantly exposed to various chemicals that mimic the hormone estrogen. Estrogen is found in plastics, our water, some foods, personal care products and so on. Dietary fibre is necessary to bind to estrogen in the digestive tract so that the body can get rid of it. Fibre also reduced the amount of an enzyme called B-glucouronidase that breaks apart bound estrogen that was on its way out of the body so that it can re enter the body via the large intestine causing cell damage and inflammation, so you get a vicious cycle.
What is the Microbiome?
We have 2kgs worth of bacteria in our body made up of roughly 10 trillion viruses, fungi and organisms – mostly in our digestive tract – also known as out ‘microbiome’. They outnumber our Genes by 10-1 and scientists now believe they may be more influential in our day to day life rather than just passengers along for the ride.
They protect us, they know the difference between harmful pathogens and the non-harmful ones that make a journey through your intestines.
These bacteria are more agile than our human cells, they can reshape and cultivate according to their environment. They can actually swap genes and bits of DNA amongst themselves.
They affect pretty much everything from hormone production, breaking down food, absorbing nutrients, making vitamins, regulating appetite to the production of serotonin.
Modern life has had a negative effect on our gut
The robustness of our microbial community can make a massive difference to out health. The intestinal microbial population in particular is very sensitive to dietary changes (both for good and bad). The good news is we can take an active part in changing it ourselves, and we need to! In the last century, the Western world has been producing more and more highly processed foods. These foods are bursting with additives and simple carbohydrates and reek havoc on the Microbiome.
Antibiotics are necessary and have saved many lives, but they are like a nuclear bomb on the ‘war on bacteria’ – they strip us of all bacteria, the good and the bad. Problem is, is the post antibiotic phase is not handled properly, it can allow the nasty ones to take over when our guts repopulate.
We’ve also created a very sterile environment, not good for our guts, we need to encourage the good bacteria again. We can’t say for definite what a ‘healthy microbiome’ should look like, the research is still very new, but we know Gut Performance™ will get you back on the right path again.
Keep watching this space!
More Facts
Gut Performance™ is a Food with Purpose™, contains no artificial colours, flavours, preservatives of chemical stimulants.
- Natural
- Minimally processed
- Non-GMO
- Non-addictive
- Hypoallergenic
- Gluten Free
- No artificial colour, flavour, preservatives or chemicals
- Safe – no adverse side effects
- Cannot be overdosed
- Scientifically developed
- Australia
