“All disease begins in the gut.” ~Hippocrates
It’s been well over two thousand years since Hippocrates made this statement, yet its never been as true as it is today.
The understanding about the role of the gut in our overall well-being seems to grow by the day. Besides being important to our mental and emotional health, digestion plays a key role in our natural immunity and protection against disease.
Poor diets, consumption of alcohol, stress, the use of antibiotics, and toxic chemicals in our food, water and environment, all deplete our healthy supply of beneficial bacteria. This gives opportunities for unhealthy bacteria and yeast strains, like Candida, to take over.
These repeated insults to the lining of the gut can weaken the intestinal wall, causing a disruption of normal transport and surveillance of food from the digestive system into the body. This can then lead to food sensitivities, and trigger autoimmune reactions -activating autoimmune diseases, asthma, eczema and psoriasis.
One way to ensure that your digestive tract stays as healthy as possible, and keep disease at bay, is to regularly repopulate your good gut bacteria.
There are three simple ways to achieve this:
1. Eat your daily serves of fresh fruit and vegetable
Our gut microbes thrive on fibre, both soluble and insoluble, and this is found in fruit
and vegetables. The more serves of fruit and vegetables you eat everyday the healthier
your gut will be.
2. Eat Resistant Starch
Found in green bananas, cold white rice, cold white potatoes and cold cooked oats,
resistant starch is the very favourite foods of your gut bugs. It is the food that feeds them with their required nutrients. Feeding the trillions of gut bugs with their favourite foods,
3. Stop eating fermented foods and taking a probiotic
Often people think the easiest or most effective approach is to buy a supplement. However, this is just not so. Probiotics in a jar have limited amounts of strains, so you only end up feeding a few populations of gut bacteria, which can be detrimental to health if taken long-term.
It is best only to use a probiotic supplement following a course of antibiotics. Then choose a probiotic that has the most variety of strains in it. Taking the same probiotic long-term will effect the overall diversity of your gut bacteria.
In regards for fermented foods, unless this has been your heritage, and you have grown up eating fermented foods, incorporating large amounts of these foods will only lead to an over populations of unhealthy to you, gut bugs.
Remember, as human’s we are only 68-70% the same when it comes to our gut microbiome and it’s diversity. What keeps me healthy is different to the ones that keep you healthy. So unless you have grown up eating fermented foods, do not eat everyday.