A dummies' guide to feeding your microbiome to make you healthy ahead of the documentary launch this Friday
Gut health goes Netflix
You know when a subject has gone mainstream when Netflix makes a film on it. Hack Your Health: The Secrets of Your Gut comes out in the UK this Friday. Hurray!
When the first edition of my book The Gut Makeover was published in December 2015 I felt like a freak talking about gut bacteria and its influence on our health – from weight and immune system to mood and skin.
I remember one particular early BBC radio interview where a news anchor kept asking me about old-hat calories when I was trying to explain the impact of gut bacteria on weight. It was like being stuck in the 1960s!
Anyway, gut health is now plastered on the side of London red buses advertising kefir (which you couldn’t even get in 2015 in regular supermarkets) and now we have Netflix covering the microbiome (the trillions of bugs living in our digestive system).
I always believed gut health wasn’t going to be a fad diet!
Some of you may know that I was a journalist back in the day before a nutrition degree and career as a nutritional therapist.
One of the first things you are taught in journalism school is to write as simply as possible.
Where there is a long or fancy word, replace it with a short mainstream one. Make sentences brief. When explaining a complicated story, simplify it so that a 9-year old gets it. Which is quite a skill. I’ll have a go at doing that with gut health today. No promises, but here goes.
(BTW if you know any 9-year olds - or adults who have seen the bus ads and would like filling in - please feel free to share this post. It’s free, and for all).
Make your gut make you healthy
Just before publication of The Gut Makeover, my publisher kindly arranged some media training for me with a guy who had trained Prince William (excuse the name drop - I was impressed you see).
Anyway, back to my point. It is, and was hard to explain the concept of gut health from scratch in those days (especially in 5-minute radio interviews).
The media trainer insisted that I “slay my darlings” (all the detail about the microbiome) and boil my message down to 9 words.
The ones we agreed on were: “how to make your gut bacteria make you healthy”.
With me?
So how do we go about manipulating the bacteria living in the digestive tract – the biggest quantity being in the last chamber, our bowel – for our wellbeing?
It’s simple. Really. Just do these 2 things – as regularly as you can. It’s this simple…
1) Bombard your body with a wide range of plants
Why? For the pigment colours (the “polyphenols”) and the fibrous textures in them.
What constitutes a plant?
Vegetables, fruit, nuts, seeds, herbs, spices, lentils and beans, grains, extra virgin olive oil - try to aim for 30 different ones in a week for best results.
They all feed your gut bugs so they multiply and bloom and create a happy and stable community.
The colours and fibres in plants are called prebiotics. They are food for the good guys, the probiotics which we will learn about next.
2) Eat some live foods every day
Live foods are ones that have been fermented and already contain “probiotics” – healthy microbes. They live in “live” foods and when we eat them these bugs are parachuted down into the digestive system. Here they eat prebiotics (if there are any around), and multiply which helps create a happy and stable society. Then we go to the loo and they come out the other end, so we have to eat some again. Some examples:
Sauerkraut
Raw cheeses (British supermarket ones tend to be Parmesan, Gruyere, Roquefort and Gruyere)
Kefir and live yogurt
Kimchi
Kombucha
Miso paste
The reason foods like sauerkraut, kimchi, and sauerkraut are so helpful is because they contain both prebiotics (either in the colour or the texture) as well as probiotics.
So if we eat the right foods to shape the microbiome into a healthy pattern of microbes, what are the main areas of our health they influence?
Weight
Fit immune system and protection against allergies
Good mood
A clear mind
Clear skin
Regular formed stools
Healthy heart
Energy
Healthy bones
Healthy blood sugar balance, less cravings and protection against type 2 diabetes
What kind of things aren’t good for the microbiome?
· A lack of live foods and diversity of plants
· A monotonous and mono-coloured diet eg the beige SAD (Standard American Diet)
· Ultra-processed foods and too much alcohol
· Stress
· Lack of exercise
· Lack of sleep and eating late at night - timing of food can impact the microbiome and your overall health as my book The 10 Hour Diet explains
· Antibiotics
So if you start manipulating the landscape of your gut with diversity and live foods, you could reap many different health benefits. Within weeks, you can often experience big improvements. Eczema or psoriasis playing up? Get on it for at least 3 months. Constipated, you could see a change in a few days. Flagging in energy - start upping your fruit and veg. Give it a go!
FINALLY for paid subscribers I’ll be sending out my reaction to the Netflix documentary this Friday in a review article bonus post.
Also for paid subscribers next Wednesday I’ll send a guide to gut-health quick easy working-from-home lunches.
If you’d like to receive those posts you can subscribe here…
Further info
If you’re buying kimchi read this.
Try this gut shot for prebiotics and probiotics combined.
Want to learn more about Parmesan?
Foods to improve mood.
That really is admirably simple and do-able. Now just to do it! Sorry I’m away for your kimchi class
Brilliant 🤗