What are some of the best foods to promote gut health?
Some of the best foods to promote good gut health include:
Plants - fruit and vegetables! The saying ‘eat a rainbow’ is one of the best ways to get a variety of different fruit and vegetables into your daily diet. Different colours help provide different phytochemicals (plant chemicals) and fibres, which feed our gut bugs.
Fermented foods like kefir, yoghurt, miso, kimchi and sauerkraut provide probiotics that also contribute to a healthy gut.
How do certain foods impact gut bacteria and overall gut health?
We need both prebiotic foods and probiotic foods for optimum gut health. Prebiotic foods feed the microbiota (our gut bugs), these are things like fruit, vegetables beans and legumes, the more variety the better! Eating a rainbow of different coloured foods ensures that we are providing a variety of different types of fibres and other phytochemicals like polyphenols, which feed our gut bugs, who in turn help us digest and absorb the nutrients from food, defend us from pathogenic bugs and even make vitamins for us
Probiotic foods contain live bacteria that contribute to the health of our gut. They can act like tourists in our gut: the time they spend there enriches the environment, they can help crowd out less beneficial bugs and support our immune, hormonal and mental health and more.
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