New Year's Resolution?
Resolve to grow your 'gut' garden in 2025
Happy New Year!
Most people who make a New Year's Resolution, resolve to focus on healthier eating. Learning all about the “microbiome garden” growing inside you may be a good way to start. Research shows good health is linked to healthy bacteria in your gut, and diet is an effective way to achieve a balanced and diverse microbiome. Here are two steps to get you started . . .
STEP ONE:
Start with diversity
A wide variety of foods in your diet assures you are getting lots of nutrition for optimal health, but it also adequately feeds the many different microbiota in your “gut” (mainly the large intestine, where most of our gut microbiota reside). Trillions of microorganisms comprise our gut microbiota. This includes bacteria, viruses, fungi, and protozoa living in the intestines. These microorganisms play a vital role in digesting food, supporting our immune system, producing vitamins, and having an impact on mood and behaviour. Strong evidence shows maintaining a balanced and diverse gut microbiota is important for overall health and well-being.
Poor food choices low in nutrition (like refined sugars and other processed foods) fuel and grow the types of bacteria that do not contribute to good health – while the healthier, nutrient and fibre-rich foods (and particularly plant-based foods) grow and maintain the beneficial bacteria that help our mind and body operate optimally. And since fibre is the primary food for our microbiome, plant foods should be your focus – that’s anything that grows from the earth: vegetables and root vegetables, fruit, nuts, seeds, legumes, and whole grains. These high fiber foods are known as "prebiotics" and they serve as food for "probiotics" (the bacteria in your gut), allowing the bacteria to function properly and effectively. And don’t worry, this doesn’t mean you have to give up meat. But it does mean you should have more of the healthier choices for meats (like fish and poultry and less red or “deli” meats). Also, avoid having the large amounts we humans typically consume!
Fermented foods (also called probiotics) contain live microorganisms similar to the beneficial bacteria naturally found in your gut. These foods include yogurt, kefir, hard cheese, sauerkraut, miso, natto, kimchi, and others. Check the label on your probiotic vegetable products: make sure they’re unpasteurized, as pasteurization kills the bacteria (however, with fermented dairy products, like yogurt and kefir, the beneficial bacteria cuture is added back after pasteurization). Also, for a pickled product to be probiotic (like pickles, carrots or salsa), it must be fermented, not just pickled in vinegar. The product should be labelled “fermented” or specifies that it contains “live cultures” or “bacterial culture.”
How do you practise diversity? Avoid eating the same thing at every meal or every day. Even if those foods are considered very “healthy” this lack of diversity won’t be feeding all the different strains of bacteria in your gut, because they all require different structures and properties from foods. You’ll lose out on the benefits of having a diverse culture in your body. So, for example, when having your usual almonds and blueberries with your morning oats, try a different nut and fruit each morning. And have a different grain occasionally, instead of oats, like quinoa, barley, or buckwheat, for example. When you shop for groceries, change up the items on your list. There's lots of different vegetables, fruits, nuts, whole grains, and other foods. Try someting new!
Another tip: Realize that a meal of small amounts of lots of different foods (like eight to 10) is way better for you than a meal of large quantities of only three or four foods. Incidentally, The American Gut Study (the largest published study to date of the human microbiome) found those who ate more than 30 or more different plants each week (veggies and root veggies, fruit, nuts, seeds, grains, legumes), have a much more diverse microbiota than those who eat less.
STEP TWO:
Focus on the quality of your food choices
Ensure your food choices are primarily those that are less processed. For the most part, your optimal food choices are those that still closely resemble the way they looked when they grew (or walked) on this planet (well, you should at least be able to tell what the food is by looking at it – which rules out cookies and other baked goods, because you can’t tell, just by looking at them, what’s exactly in them!).
Unfortunately, the more you tamper with (or change) a whole food, the more you change its chemical structure (its matrix) which results in the loss of many vital nutrients, including fibre. Buy foods that don’t require an ingredient label. Or the ingredient label should list very few ingredients – primarily the food it is supposed to contain – and any added ingredients should be things you could find in your kitchen cupboard.
Keep most of your choices in their whole-food form as they were created in nature: Choose apples more often than apple sauce or apple juice (a whole apple offers significantly more nutrients than apple sauce or juice – and far more fibre to feed your microbiota). Choose fresh fruit as a snack more often than eating a sport or nutrition bar. Or more often, choose to eat whole grain kernels (or berries) like wheat, oats, or barley, etc., more often than items made from the flour of those whole grains (yes, there is a difference: whole grain kernels – cooked on the stove like rice – retain far more nutrients and fibre than the flour when the grain is milled). Incidentally, cooking your food choices is fine, just don’t overcook them! Use low-temperature methods to help retain the most nutrients, like steaming or roasting.
There are volumes of information and details impossible to cover in a single health article. Research is ongoing but studies continue to show strong evidence that a healthy gut means a healthy body and mind. Stay curious. Educate yourself on maintaining or improving your diet. It’s a great way to start 2025 and ensure you enjoy a lifetime of good health.
Eve Lees is a Health Writer and Speaker.
Sources and more information:
About the American Gut Project:
More tips to diversify your diet:
More info on the microbiome:
Signs of an unhealthy gut:
More tips to diversify your diet:
ZOE is a UK health science company dedicated to research on the human microbiome. They offer services you can pay for to test your microbiome, but I personally feel the science is still too new for this. However, you can still benefit from ZOE's research by signing up for their free newletter. You'll receive current information and research on this interesting topic. They offer a vast selection of articles and podcasts. Go to this link, and sign up at the bottom of the page: https://zoe.com/whitepapers/gut-microbiome
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