At some point in your life someone has told you that “you are what you eat”. They were probably just trying to say that your diet will influence how you feel physically and emotionally, but recent findings may give that phrase a new meaning.
The gut microbiome is the ecosystem of bacteria that lives in our intestines. These bacteria feed off the food that we eat and in return they help us with digestion, produce vitamins and fight off harmful bacteria. Our microbiome is just as much a part of us as our organs. But since they eat the food we eat, what we feed ourselves will impact their health just as much as it does ours.
For our microbiome to function properly for us, we want it to be a diverse ecosystem made of many different species of bacteria. Our guts are home to hundreds of species of bacteria that all work in different ways to support our body. People with a more diverse microbiome are generally healthier than people with less diversity. People with a microbiome that isn’t very diverse or is imbalanced in some way have what is called “dysbiosis.” Dysbiosis can lead to health problems like bowel inflammation, obesity, depression, and many more. To prevent dysbiosis we need to maintain the diversity of our gut microbiome and to do that we need to give it the nutrients it needs.
Bacteria thrive when they are supplied with the sources of nutrition that they are best adapted to using. By eating a wide variety of foods, you will increase the diversity of your gut microbiome by making so more of them have their preferred source of nutrition. It is recommended that you eat thirty different plants a week to maintain a healthy and diverse microbiome. This may sound like a big ask but these plants can be in the form of vegetables, fruits, grains, beans seeds, herbs, and spices so you have a lot of options available to you. You should also avoid foods that have been found to be bad for your gut microbiome like processed foods, food high in refined sugar, and foods with saturated fats.
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