Can it really be time to start thinking about Christmas already? How did that happen?
Do you sometimes worry about how the excesses of food and alcohol at Christmas time will affect your health and digestion? Do you sometimes deny yourself that extra serving of Christmas pudding or the extra dollop of gravy or brandy custard because you know your gut will punish you for it later? Well what if I told you it has more to do with what you eat in the lead up to Christmas rather than what you eat on the day!
It all comes down to the state of your microbiome, or the colony of bacteria that reside in our large intestine. You can think of it as your own personal internal farm yard. There are many different species of microbes or animals in this gut colony. Some are beneficial to us and get along well with everyone else in the colony. These could be the chickens, sheep and cows. Some are star players and keep law and order amongst the rest of the inhabitants. These could be the working dogs or the prize bulls. Others can cause damage and disruption. These could be rabbits, rats and ticks. The cleaner the environment we keep for our farmyard, and the better the quality of food we feed the inhabitants, the healthier they will be and the more the ones we want in the farm yard can grow, flourish and reproduce.
Because these microbes that live inside our intestines are living beings, they each have their own genetic material and produce their own wastes and metabolites directly into our digestive system. Did you know that we have such a large number of microbes living in our gut that the amount of genetic material they contain is hundreds of times greater than the amount of genetic material in our own cells. This means that your microbiome can have a greater influence on your health than your own genes!
The picture below shows just some of the ways this colony of gut bugs can influence the way our body functions. The metabolites they produce can directly affect our immune system, heart health, nervous system function and bone health, not to mention digestive health. The more we feed our personal colony the right foods, the happier they will be and the more the types of species we need in our gut will flourish. So the better we feed our gut bugs during the lead up to Christmas, the better the health of our farmyard on Christmas day and the more resilience we will have to enjoy ourselves on the day.
There are a number of foods which have been shown to enhance our microbiome. (If you would like a copy of the full list, just send me a message.)
However, simply concentrating on the following 3 foods during the next couple of months will benefit you on Christmas day.
Natural rolled oats
Blueberries
Colourful vegetables.
These foods will provide what your farmyard needs to make it happy, harmonious and function well. Namely fibre, resistant starch, polyphenols, fructo-oligosaccharides and inulin. These things provide nourishing food for the gut bugs and the right environment in which they can thrive.
