How to have a great day at work: Get to know your gut health

In her regular column, business founder and wellness expert Nicola Elliott looks at one thing we can all do that will make our nine to five feel happier and healthier

Gut feeling: everything from our sleep to our mental health could be affected by this hard-working organ (Getty)

My mum is baffled by the sudden talk of gut health. “We didn’t think about this 20 years ago,” she insists. That is because almost all the scientific research that has been done on the gut has only happened in the past five-10 years.

This is pretty strange when you consider the fact that it was more than 2,000 years ago when Hippocrates proclaimed that “all disease begins in the gut”.

To be clear: when people talk about “gut health” they are not talking about an organ as such, but rather all microbes within the gut and their genetic material. We’ve known for a long time that the gut breaks down the foods we eat and absorbs the nutrients that support bodily functions but recent studies are showing way more fascinating links.