Research shows that if you do these five things, you could improve your immune health and digestion, reduce excessive appetite problems, increase your energy levels, and even possibly live longer.
Tips To Improve Gut Health
Eat More Plants
Eat more plants is my number one tip for improving gut health. It’s about the diversity of plants—the full range—because each plant contains different chemicals that are nutritious for our gut microbes. And remember that gut microbes, like you and me, have their favorite foods. So some microbes might like a purple carrot rather than an orange one. The more you do that, the more different microbes you have that will then act in their pharmacy role, pumping out all these vitamins and chemicals that help our health. This diversity is important.
Based on a study we did with the American Gut Project and the British Gut Project, we found that the sweet spot for optimum gut health was around 30 plants a week. You might be saying, “30 plants? That’s far too many; I can’t cope with that.” Well, you have to remember what a plant is. It’s not just a vegetable. It’s nuts, seeds, herbs, and spices. So my first tip is to add more herbs and spices to your cooking. Herbs and spices have the highest level of defense chemicals in them, which gives them those aromas and that incredible taste. So you don’t need much of it to have a really big effect on your gut microbes.
Spice It Up
If you want to get as many different ones as you can into your cooking, try combining those herbs. For example, selections of Mediterranean herbs where you get four or five of them in the same jar work very well. You can also get other ones where you’ve got the spices, so spice mixes are very common, again getting four or five. There are studies, and there was one recently in Singapore, that gave volunteers a single serving of spice mix. Within two weeks, they improved their gut microbes. So I think as long as you’re generous with it, it should have a good effect on your gut.
Mix It Up
So as well as buying mixed herbs and spices, you can also buy mixed grains and nuts. That gives you four or five plants straight away. When you get your nuts, don’t just go for one. Go for four or five of them.Remember each one is helping your gut microbes, who might be a bit fussy. It’s so gratifying to know that of the 30 plants a week, I’ve already got about a dozen of them ticked off that I just simply have to add to my morning yogurt.
Eat the Rainbow
Well, it’s all about eating the rainbow because these plants get their color and sometimes their bitter taste from defense chemicals called polyphenols. It turns out these same polyphenols that help the plants also help us because they’re like rocket fuel for our gut microbes. So it’s important to recognize which plants have the highest polyphenols so you can choose them ahead of the ones that don’t. So it’s super important to learn how to get more of these polyphenols into our diets.
Always pick brighter-colored plants over the others. For example, if you happen to come across some of these purple carrots, these will have nine or ten times more polyphenols than the standard ones. My other tip is to go for these green vegetables. Kale is a fantastic way to get your polyphenols. They’re slightly bitter, which is a really good sign, as well as dark-colored. Remember, each of these colors is going to give you a different chemical, a different pigment, and so if you want to feed your microbes different things, that’s why this rainbow concept is so important.
And of course, we all love chocolate. If it’s over 70%, it’s going to be packed with polyphenols that are good for you. As well as having your extra virgin olive oil, and, of course, the last of that trio that I can’t go without is my daily polyphenol dose.
Increase Fiber Intake
I can nearly guarantee there’s one key nutrient for gut health that you’re lacking. Over 90% of us are not getting nearly enough fiber in our diet to optimize our gut health. The hunter-gatherers in Tanzania (Hadza tribe). They’re hunter-gatherers who still have the same lifestyle as we did 30,000 years ago. It turns out that this tribe has twice as many microbial species, which means twice as good gut health as we do. They get fewer Western diseases and virtually no cancers or heart diseases.
Now, the simplest way to up your fiber content starts with whole grains. Whatever they are, it’s always better to pick the whole grain, darker version of it, like whole grain pasta, for example, which has twice as much fiber. Next, beans are packed with fiber as well as other nutrients, and I like to get a mix of them. You can get cans that have mixed beans in them that give you even more variety of fiber.
I like to add those to my pasta sauce if I’m having pasta with it, or even instead of the pasta, to make a nutritious high-fiber meal. Then you might want to swap out your normal crisps for popcorn. Three grams of fiber in a portion of popcorn. Your frozen peas. These guys have four or five grams per portion, which is amazing. And of course, back to your good old raspberries and other berries, which have one of the highest fiber contents around and are so easy to add to all kinds of meals.
And finally, let’s not forget about the skin of plants because that’s where a lot of the fiber is hidden. In potatoes, if you peel them, you lose over half of the fiber, so I always try to keep the skin on. There are some fruits as well, like these kiwis. Now I eat my Kiwis with the skins on.
Incorporate Live Microbes
Do you like your food dead or alive? I prefer mine alive, and by that, I don’t mean running around, but they’re full of live microbes in certain foods, certain fermented foods that end up being good for our gut health.
There are all kinds of ways to get your ferment. The one most people know about is good old yogurt. Yogurt means milk from cows, sheep, or goats and you add some microbes to it, and they grow and love living there. You get two or three different species in there. Most people don’t know that kefir, which is increasing in popularity, is like a super yogurt. So rather than just two or three microbes, there are often ten to twenty different types of microbes in kefir that can be used in addition to yogurt because it’s slightly more sour. So I tend to mix them up myself.
I like the taste of both, and so they’re really good, and you can add these to sauces, add it to salad dressings, for example, as easy ways. Kombucha is another one. It’s fermented tea. Make sure it hasn’t got too much sugar in it, but this stuff is fabulous to just drink on its own. And then, of course, you’ve got sauerkraut and kimchi, which are cabbage-based. One with chilies and other spices, and others just with some herbs. They’re both delicious on their own, whether it’s on top of an avocado or a sandwich. Studies have clearly shown that this improves your immune health and your gut health.
Avoid Ultra-Processed Foods
There’s one major food that we eat in the UK more than anyone else in Europe and nearly anyone else in the world that is slowly killing our gut microbes. It’s ultra-processed food. Ultra-processed food makes up nearly 60% of our diet in the UK. We know, particularly from our Zoe snack survey, that 75% of the snacks we eat, which is a considerable amount of our daily calories, are ultra-processed.
That means they’re harming our gut health every time we eat them, even if they’ve got some health halo saying they’re high in protein or high in this or that. They’re not good for us, so I want to suggest a few swaps in our snack habits that can make a dramatic change to you and your gut health.
Healthy Snacking
Always nice to have olives around because they’re a fantastic high-polyphenol snack. Popcorn is a really good swap for some of those synthetic savory snacks that we’re tempted to buy. You’ve got peanut butter, nuts, and seeds. Just a handful of nuts can reduce your risk of death by about 14% if you have them every day.
These are incredibly healthy. And eating the rainbow again with snacks that you can dip into something like hummus is so easy to have, as well as a handful of berries if you fancy something a bit sweeter. There are many ways to make the transition from an unhealthy snacking Habit to a healthy snacking habit and in doing so improve the health of your gut and its microbes