You are what your microbes eat
When we choose our food, we tend to pick what we enjoy – but that’s not always to the taste of the trillions of microbes that dine with us, says Nutrition Editor Eve Kalinik
IF WE WANT a happy gut, we need to satisfy the taste buds of our gut microbiota. One of the key ingredients in the recipe for a healthy gut is dietary fibre. Fibre is a type of carbohydrate that we don’t have the ability to digest, but provides a veritable feast for our gut microbes. They gobble up fibre with delight and, in return, provide us with plentiful amounts of positive substances that help support our immune system, manage inflammation and even influence our mood.
Dietary fibre is found in all plant-based carbohydrates, encompassing all types of vegetables, fruit, whole grains, nuts and seeds. Each of these plants contains different types of fibre. For example, oats provides beta-glucan, legumes, such as lentils, have raffinose in abundance and cereal grains are loaded with lignin. Just as we have our favourite flavours, our gut microbes have preferences for the fibre they like to eat, so it is important to aim for diversity, rather than focusing on quantity alone. In providing different types of fibre for our gut microbes, we support an overall more heterogenous and healthier gut microbiota.
Feed smarter
Guidelines suggest that adults should eat around 30 grams of dietary fibre daily, which roughly equates to one piece of fruit, six portions of vegetables, two servings of whole grains and three portions of nuts and seeds. It sounds like a bit of a task, but if you think about adding a spoonful of nut butter to porridge oats, plus a serving of berries, sprinkling seeds over salads and vegetables and aiming for a mix of three types of veggies at lunch and supper, you have pretty much hit your quota.
Remember to get variety in types of fibre – that could mean adding a different fruit or vegetable to your weekly shop, rotating morning oats with other grains, consuming a variety of frozen berries and having a few flavours of nut and seed butters that you can mix and match. Variety is the spice of our inner gut microbial life!
we explore prebiotics – what they are, how they support the gut and how we can include them in our diet