Improve your gut health and improve your overall health.

Your immune system is primarily in the gut so it makes sense to make your gut as healthy as possible to increase your immunity to infections, recovery from illness etc.

Also a healthy gut reduces inflammation in the body. Why is this important? Cancer, heart disease, stroke, arthritis, asthma, eczema and many other illnesses are caused by or made worse by inflammation. For more detail on this and the difference between short term, useful, inflammation and long term, harmful, inflammation check out the Zoe podcast where the experts discuss all things gut microbiome. It’s more interesting that it sounds! 😂

A healthy gut is one which has lots of good friendly bacteria.

And to keep them happy you need to feed them plenty of fibre. So now you know it’s important, thankfully there are 5 simple changes you can make to what you eat which will add and feed these friendly bugs and greatly improve your gut health.

  1. Eat a diverse range of plant foods - at least 30 different ones a week. This will greatly increase the amount of fibre you eat which is the food for your friendly bacteria in your gut. This also includes nuts and seeds so it’s not too difficult to get quite a few just by having mixed seeds on a salad.

  2. Eat the rainbow. Not Skittles! Different coloured plants have different polyphenols which are very helpful to a varied gut bacteria. This includes coffee and dark chocolate (70% or higher)

  3. Eat small amounts daily of fermented foods, Kefir, kimchi, sauerkraut etc

  4. Give your gut a break. Try to have a 10-12 hour window where you don’t eat every night.

  5. Don’t ‘poison’ with Ultra Processed Foods. This reduces the good bugs and frequently doesn’t have much fibre. So keep the ready meals and junk ‘food’ to a minimum.

As with all change, start small. Focus on one of these first and then gradually expand so that you are doing all of them. You are probably already part way there already.

Exercise and inflammation

You can also help to reduce inflammation and improve health with regular exercise. Well of course I would say that eh?! But it’s true and you can find out more about exercise and repair mechanisms here.