HEALTHY AND HAPPY
Healthy food means a happy gut — and need not be difficult to prepare
While the science of gut health is new and evolving, one thing we now know for sure is that for good health we all need a diverse, happy and healthy community of good gut bacteria. In her 2019 bestseller Eat Yourself Healthy, author Dr Megan Rossi (founder of the Healthy Gut Doctor and research fellow at Kings College London) states that “unlike our genetic make-up, over which we have no control, we have the ability to shape our gut microbiota (GM) simply by how we treat it ... By learning to create a diet that is varied, delicious and keeps your GM happy, the research suggests that you will soon see the benefits, and these go beyond kicking pesky gut symptoms, to increasing your ability to fight the flu, your happiness levels, your metabolism and even the health of other organs, such as your heart and your liver.”
When we eat, we don’t tend to think about what those trillions of microbes that look after us might like, we think about what we feel like eating.
So how can we make useful long-term changes that can help support our GM?
Eating a wide range of colourful fruits and vegetables provides our bodies with polyphenols that good bacteria feed on and turn into nutrients we need and can’t get anywhere else. Eat lots of colourful fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and legumes and you’ll get plenty of polyphenols. Flaxseed and sesame seed are also good sources, as are red wine, black and green tea, cocoa, dark chocolate, herbs and spices.
Good gut bacteria thrive on fibre. Each plant-based food group — i.e. whole grains, legumes, vegetables, fruits, nuts and seeds — contains different types of fibres. Building your diet around wholegrains, fruit, vegetables, nuts and seeds is a great way to increase your fibre intake and support your GM. If you don’t currently eat a lot of fibre, ease into your new high-fibre regime gently or you may find yourself feeling bloated and gassy.
Live microbes found in foods like yoghurt, kimchi, blue cheese, miso, kombucha and sauerkraut also support a healthy GM. And recent studies show that Omega-3 increases diversity in the gut and also enables good gut bacteria to release very beneficial natural anti-inflammatory compounds. Good sources of Omega-3 include oily fish, nuts and seeds and plant oils.
It seems that occasional fasts, even as short as 16 hours, give our gut bacteria time to recover and grow. A few times a week, have an early dinner and a late breakfast with nothing in between.
Given that 70 per cent of the body’s immune cells live along the gut, keeping it happy is extra-important to keeping yourself healthy. These easy recipes are designed to satisfy both your gut and your taste buds.