The maintenance of a healthy gut is the best health insurance you can have. Gut health is foundational to human health because of the many essential function it performs, but also because if we look after our gut we necessarily do all the things that will achieve health in a broader sense. This is why it is step 1 of my strategy for optimal health.

The gut consists of a long tube from your nose and sinuses to your colon which is about 9 metres long. It is our means of extracting nutrients from the foods we consume, and the lower (or large) intestine is home to about 100 trillion bacteria. That is 10 times the average number of cells in our body. In a healthy individual, this massive population of microbes is stable and diverse, enjoying a symbiotic relationship with us, their host. This means that they eat what we eat and our nourished by our food. In turn, they perform many functions which help us, including breaking down some foods so more nutrients are available to us to absorb. In many cases they actually make available otherwise inaccessible nutrients. They also play a key role in the immune system.  The gut constitutes 80% of our immune system so a healthy gut means a strong immune system. Recent scientific research is shedding more and more light on the role of the gut microbes in brain health and its effect on mood. So we can see that a healthy gut is essential to our well-being.

Right living focuses on avoiding disease by strengthening the immune system rather than treating symptoms of avoidable diseases. This is why achieving and maintaining a healthy gut is the starting point.  It is an approach that actively builds health and lays the ground for making the best use of the correct diet, which is step 2. These two points inter-relate as we see below.

The term microbiota is the name given to the entire population of microbes within the gut, and the term microbiome is the name given to the sum of all their DNA. There are different types of bacteria that live in our gut, but not all of them are good for us. Pathogenic is the name given to those that harm us. In a healthy individual, the populations of both beneficial and pathogenic bacteria will be stable and the beneficial bacteria will dominate. A broad diversity of the microbiota is required for a healthy gut. The greatest influence on the profile of the bacterial population comes from the food we eat. Some foods are preferred by the good bacteria and others are preferred by the pathogenic bacteria. Some things we eat kill them all indiscriminately, just as some of the products we use in the home environment do as well.

Probiotics and prebiotics

Probiotics are live microorganisms which when administered in adequate amounts confer a health benefit on the host. They are an exogenous (from outside the body) source of beneficial bacteria. Probiotics are what we use to populate or repopulate the gut. Fermented vegetables are an excellent probiotic.

Prebiotics are a non-digestible food ingredient that promotes the growth of beneficial microorganisms in the intestines. They are fibres in plant foods, which is why a diet with adequate fibre from organic fresh vegetables is important.

There is little point in taking probiotics without adjusting one’s diet to include the necessary food for them, which are the prebiotics. We have to address the need for both in a well designed or well formulated healthy diet.

1. For a healthy gut you must change your diet

Modern eating habits are bad news for gut health. The foods people typically eat either kill all bacteria indiscriminately or feed the pathogenic bacteria but not the beneficial ones. Pathogenic bacteria prefer sugar, but the healthy guys you want in there, the beneficial bacteria, prefer fibrous vegetables. The typical modern western diet is very high in sugar and therefore compromises the beneficial bacteria.