Luckily there are a lot of natural ways that you can improve your gut health. Let’s break it down into 3 steps.
Step 1 – Ditch the junk.
It’s always best to start with removing the causes of poor gut health aka triggers of gut inflammation – and that means cutting out the junk.
Eliminate excess sugar, processed foods, alcohol and then anything you might react unfavourably to – perhaps dairy, grains and/or nightshades (tomatoes, capsicum, peppers, chilli, eggplant, white potatoes)?
Giving yourself a mini cleanse by getting inflammatory triggers out of your diet for a few weeks can be a real eye-opener. If you’ve never tried it before, it can bring a lot of clarity about just how much influence our diet has on our physical and mental health.
NB If you intend to do a full-on elimination diet it’s best to have the support of a health practitioner as it’s not uncommon to experience some serious detox symptoms (think headaches, fatigue and bowel movement changes) PLUS if you’re used to eating a standard western diet it can be really hard to know what to eat once you remove lots of foods!
Step 2 – Improve diet quality.
Once you’ve removed the bad stuff, the second important thing you can do to improve your gut health is of course improve the quality of what you do eat.
Remember that not everything we ingest is successfully digested, absorbed and then metabolised. By eating nutrient-dense foods, we allow ample macro- and micro-nutrients into our gut to maximise the chances of absorption.
Some of the most nutrient-dense foods are liver, oysters and shellfish, red meat, full fat dairy (if tolerated), fatty and bone-in fish, eggs, nuts and seeds, dark chocolate (yay!), dark leafy greens like kale, broccoli and bok choy, organic beetroot and fermented veggies like sauerkraut.
Step 3 – Support a healthy microbiome.
Next we need to consider the health of our microbes, that’s over 100 trillion bacteria and yeasts living in our gut!
First of all we can do this by not killing them off (see step 1 – removing junk food!).
Secondly by eating fibre and prebiotic (different to probiotic) foods we can literally feed the friendly bugs to keep our gut healthy.
Fibre basically resists digestion by us and therefore becomes food for the microbes living in our gut. The microbes help us to break down, absorb and digest our food better, they play a role in producing vitamins and feel good hormones, plus they produce short chain fatty acids which help reduce inflammation and repair the gut lining. In short, we want healthy microbes.
What foods have a lot of fibre? Fruits, vegetables, nuts and seeds and even cacao – so basically real foods from nature.
Getting a little more specific, you may have heard the term ‘prebiotics’ and wondered what they are. Prebiotics are compounds in plants (usually fibre) that have been proven to effectively modulate the microbiome i.e. create positive changes to our gut health. Prebiotic rich foods include leek, garlic, onions, artichoke, asparagus, green bananas (think banana or plantain flour) and cooked then cooled potatoes and rice – quite easy things to incorporate into your diet.
Lastly we can supply our gut with additional microbes to help tip the balance in favour of the good bugs. This is where probiotics can be helpful. Probiotic-rich foods and drinks include kombucha, kefir, miso, sauerkraut and kimchi and thanks to the buzz around gut health at the moment, you can now purchase many of these foods and drinks ready made. (Hint: they should always be in the fridge section!)
The function of your gut really is key to your overall health.
There are three steps to improving gut heath – removing the junk, improving diet quality and supporting the microbiome.
The main ways to improve all of these naturally is by eating nutrient-dense whole foods. Foods filled with nutrition, probiotics, and fibre and eliminating common gut irritants like added sugar, processed foods and alcohol.
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Kelly Moriarty is an online health & nutrition coach and founder of The Green Body Plan.
After 5 years as a veterinarian Kelly was unhealthy, stressed out and generally dissatisfied.
She now helps professional women make the same changes she did to beat burn out, lose weight, recover their energy and take back control of their health naturally.
kellyannmoriarty.com 