Recent studies tell us a healthy gut is crucial to our digestion, immunity, weight management and even mental health.
I watched the latest Netflix offering, The Secrets of Your Gut. The takeaway from it was that we need to increase the range of foods we consume to keep up our levels of good gut bacteria (microbiomes).
Whilst this makes absolute sense, maintaining a good gut environment takes work and effort. A lot of effort.
You can forget about just supplementing your diet with that friendly bacteria drink in those dinky little bottles, it just doesn’t hit the spot – even if the frenetic energy displayed by the girl in the advert would make you think otherwise.
A minimum consumption of 30 different fruits and vegetables per week is required to keep our gut flora healthy. Now we are being told 60 is optimal. I don’t know about you, but I’m not sure I have enough waking hours to deal with the actual consumption, let alone the prep.
Liquidising is the only way. We’re not talking about a mango, banana and almond milk smoothie (that’s only three ingredients anyway), nope, we are talking hardcore which includes the tough stuff; kale, chard, spinach and the like. I have tried and miserably failed.
For starters, no matter what you include, it always ends up a consistent shade of sludge (think Armani circa 1995) and even if you are a stalwart and get past the aesthetics, the taste is vile. It also takes a very long time to prepare and it’s an expensive habit to maintain.
If you would rather bypass the conventional channel, there’s always faecal transfer. I’ll leave it to you to look up the details, but I’m warning you, it’s not pretty.
There have been many food health trends over the years – low-calorie, low-fat, low-carb, high-protein etc. All now proven to have been damaging to our gut health in one way or another.
Even more recent trends like fermented foods are coming under scrutiny.
The overload of advice and the inevitable post-counterfactuals cause nutrition angst. Enough already. Common sense must surely prevail.
Eat what’s in season, eat as many fruits and vegetables as possible, cut out processed foods (those unnatural colours should have been a bit of a hint) and eat in moderation.
I’m hopeful that if I do this, then the odd bar of Cadbury's and the occasional swig of Diet Coke won’t wreak havoc with my friendly bacteria who may, like me, just fancy going on a bit of a bender now and again.
- Shelley-Anne Salisbury is a mediator, writer and the co-editor of Suburb News, themediationpod.net.
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