Gut bacteria, ‘the gut microbione’ ‘the human gut microbiota’ ‘friendly bacteria’ ‘internal eco system’ are words you may be seeing a lot recently, especially in relation to obesity and the ground breaking treatment, faecal transplantation! Yea that’s right, transplanting faeces from a healthy gut into a not so healthy gut sounds so wrong!
However, fecal transplantation is an amazing breakthrough tackling infectious bacteria often resistant to antibiotics. It is also thought a higher diversity of gut bacteria is key to staying thin, with studies showing faecal transplantation helping transform obese rats thin!
Fibre is food for the bacteria to thrive and fermented foods help produce short chain fatty acids
How this will eventually become part of a treatment strategy for obesity we don’t know yet. What it does demonstrate is we need lots of different bacteria in the gut to remain healthy now and for future generations.
It would seem that genes are not the only things at play when it comes to our health or obesity. The scientific community is examining internal and external factors that influence the eco system in our guts.
There are a few possible reasons for the decline of gut bacteria diversity.
Owning pets or working farm animals often means a much healthier or diverse bacteria in our guts, due to exposure to different external bacteria. Generally we live in clean houses, wash our hands regularly and rarely come into contact with animals or dirt from the land, all of which may impact our guts bacteria negatively.
We know that caesarian born children tend to have more allergies, asthma and other health issues than those born naturally. Naturally born children receive a good dose of their mothers’ bacteria via the birthing canal. Breast fed children tend to have an advantage too, sharing their mother’s bacteria and immunities.
Over prescribed antibiotics over the last 40 years may also have negatively influenced our guts environment and the serious issue of antibiotic resistance.
Common vitamin supplements vitamin K2, B12 and Biotin can actually be produced by a healthy gut. We need these vitamins for many functions within the body for example, blood clotting, detoxification, the metabolism of sugar and fat, immune function, energy and nerve metabolism to name a few.
When we look at the gut and the vitamins produced, it makes total sense that a reduction in diversity of gut bacteria, especially in the first 100-days of life, the most important time to create a good gut environment for our future, can profoundly effect our long term health.
So how can we get one step ahead? How can we improve the diversity of bacteria in our own guts, to create an abundance of healthy bacteria?
Here are some gut boosters:
- Fasting
Intermittent fasting may create a better gut environment. Reducing calories and increasing the space between meals means less time spent on digestion and more time fighting the bad bacteria. This is a hypothesis at the moment, but there is plenty of logic in it.
- Eat more fermented foods, fresh vegetables and fruit
Eat more fermented foods as part of your diet, although alcohol in the form of fermented grapes doesn’t count! Eat more vegetables and fruit like apples helps support the gut environment by providing fibre. Fibre is food for the bacteria to thrive and fermented foods help produce short chain fatty acids, which nourish the colon.
Add more of these foods to your diet for a healthy gut
- Kefir
- Natural live yoghurt
- Fermented vegetables like saukraut
- Kimchi (Korean pickle)
- Miso paste (fermented soya and rice)
- Nutritional yeast flakes
- Eat more vegetables and salad (fibre helps provide the food for the good bacteria to thrive)
- Stewed apples
- Reduce Sugar
Reduce fizzy drinks, alcohol, and junk food, sweets and takeaways. You can change your bacteria within 24 hours, so get started and in no time you should be feeling better!
The bottom line is we need to improve our diets, we can’t and shouldn’t rely on food manufacturers for our nutrition advice.
If I dare be so bold and say the human race depends on some serious changes to the food on supermarket shelves. We have to take this into our own kitchens. In fact, if you want some inspiration why not try my favourite veggie stir fry, here’s the recipe!
Julie offers friendly one to one nutrition consultations in London http://nutritionaltherapylink.co.uk/
