digest
Introduction
Looking after your gut health is one of the most important things you can do for your overall health. By the time you've finished this video you'll know exactly what to do. Research shows that if you do these five things you could improve your immune health and your digestion, reduce problems of excessive appetite, increase your energy levels, and even possibly live longer.
Hi, I'm Professor Tim Spector. I'm a professor of genetic epidemiology and a co-founder of Zoe.
Eat more plants
My number one tip for improving gut health is to eat more plants. It's about diversity of plants, it's that full range, because each plant is full of different chemicals that are nutritious for our gut microbes. Remember that gut microbes, like you and I, have their favorite foods. So some microbes might like a purple carrot rather than an orange one, so give them a treat. The more you do that, the more different microbes you have, and those will then be acting in their pharmacy role, pumping out all these vitamins and chemicals that help our health.
This diversity is really important. Based on a study we did with the American Gut Project and the British Gut Project, which I was leading, we found that the sweet spot for optimum gut health was around 30 plants a week. You might be saying, "30 plants? That's far too many, I can't cope with that." Well, you've got to remember what a plant is. It's not just a vegetable. It's nuts, it's seeds, it's herbs, and it's spices.
So my first tip is to add more herbs and spices to your cooking. Actually, herbs and spices have the highest level of defense chemicals in them, which gives them those aromas and that incredible taste, so you don't need very much of them to have a really big effect on your gut microbes. If you want to get as many of the different ones as you can into your cooking, try combining herbs. For example, selections of Mediterranean herbs, where you've got four or five of them in the same jar, work very well. You can also get spice mixes, which are very common. Again, getting four or five is good. There was a study recently in Singapore that gave volunteers a single serving of a spice mix, and within two weeks that improved their gut microbes. So as long as you're generous with it, it should have a good effect on your gut.
As well as buying mixed herbs and spices, you can also buy mixed grains and nuts, so that gives you four or five plants straight away. When you get your nuts, don't just go for one nut, go for four or five of them. They're all really tasty, and remember, each one is helping your gut microbes, who might be a bit fussy.
What I do as my go-to hack is make my own diversity jar, so I don't have to worry about it every morning. I fill it up with a variety of nuts and seeds. So there we've got it, my gut health cocktail. It's so gratifying to know that of the 30 plants a week, I've already got about a dozen of them ticked off, and I simply have to add this to my morning yogurt.
Eat the rainbow
For gut health, I always choose this over this, and I'm going to tell you why. It's all about eating the rainbow, because these plants get their color, and sometimes their bitter taste, from defense chemicals called polyphenols. These same polyphenols that help the plants also help us, because they're like rocket fuel for our gut microbes. So it's really important to recognize which plants have the highest polyphenols, so you can choose them ahead of the ones that don't. It's super important to learn how to get more of these polyphenols into our diets, and I'm going to show you how.
Always pick brighter colored plants over the others. For example, if you happen to come across some of these purple carrots, they'll have nine or ten times more polyphenols than the standard one. My other tip is to go for green vegetables like kale, which are a fantastic way to get your polyphenols. They're slightly bitter, and that's a really good sign, as well as dark colored. Remember, each of these colors is going to give you a different chemical, a different pigment, and so if you want to feed your microbes different things, that's why this rainbow concept is so important.
Of course, we all love chocolate. If it's over 70%, it's going to be packed with polyphenols that are really good for you, as well as extra virgin olive oil. And the last of that trio I can't go without is my daily polyphenol dose, which is my cup of coffee. Cheers.
Increase your fibre intake
I can nearly guarantee there's one key nutrient for gut health that you're lacking. Over 90% of us are not getting nearly enough fiber in our diet to optimize our gut health. This all came home to me a few years ago when I visited the Hadza tribe in Tanzania. They're hunter-gatherers who still have the same lifestyle we did 30,000 years ago, and it turns out this tribe has twice as many microbial species, which means twice as good gut health as we do. They get fewer Western diseases, with virtually no cancers or heart disease.
The simplest way to up your fiber content starts with whole grains. Whatever they are, it's always better to pick the whole grain, darker version of it, like whole grain pasta, for example, which has twice as much fiber. Next, beans are absolutely packed with fiber as well as other nutrients, and I like to get a mix of them. You can get cans with mixed beans in them that give you even more variety of fiber, and I like to add those to my pasta sauce if I'm having pasta with it, or even instead of the pasta, to make a really nutritious high-fiber meal.
You might want to swap out your normal crisps for popcorn: three grams of fiber in a portion of popcorn. Frozen peas have four or five grams per portion, which is amazing. And of course, back to your good old raspberries and other berries, which have one of the highest fiber contents around and are so easy to add to all kinds of meals.
Finally, let's not forget about the skin of plants, because that's where a lot of the fiber is hidden. In potatoes, if you peel them you lose over half of the fiber, so I always try to keep the skin on. There are some fruits like this as well, like kiwis. So now I eat my kiwis with the skins on.
Try fermented foods
Do you like your food dead or alive? I prefer mine alive, and by that I don't mean running around, but they're full of live microbes. Certain fermented foods end up being really good for our gut health, and there are all kinds of ways to get your ferments. The one most people know about is good old yogurt. Yogurt is basically any milk, from cows, sheep, or goats, with some microbes added, and they grow and love living there. You get two or three different species in there.
What most people don't know is that kefir, which is increasing in popularity, is like a super yogurt. Rather than just two or three microbes, there are often 10 to 20 different types of microbe in a kefir. Kefir can be used in addition to yogurt, because it's slightly more sour, so I tend to mix them up myself. I like the taste of both, and they're really good. You can add these to salad dressings, for example, as easy ways to get them in.
Kombucha is another one, which is fermented tea. Make sure it hasn't got too much sugar in it, but this stuff is fabulous to just drink on its own. Then of course you've got sauerkraut and kimchi, which are basically cabbage-based, one with chilies and other spices and the other just with some herbs. They're both delicious on their own, whether it's on top of an avocado or on a sandwich.
I tend to find all kinds of fascinating ways to get my ferments in, so that I can get several portions of fermented foods into my daily pattern of eating. Studies have clearly shown that this improves your immune health, and you'll improve your gut health too.
Reduce your intake of ultra processed foods
There's one major food that we eat in the UK more than anyone else in Europe, and nearly anyone else in the world, that is slowly killing our gut microbes. It's ultra processed food. Ultra processed food makes up nearly 60% of our diet in the UK. We know particularly from our own Zoe snack survey that 75% of the snacks we eat, which is a considerable amount of our daily calories, are ultra processed. That means they're really harming our gut health every time we eat them, even if they've got some health halo saying they're high in protein or high in this or that. They're not good for us.
So I want to suggest a few swaps in our snack habits that can make a dramatic change to you and your gut health. It's always nice to have olives around, because they're a fantastic high-polyphenol snack. Popcorn is a really good swap for some of those very synthetic savory snacks we're tempted to buy. You've got peanut butter, nuts, and seeds. Just a handful of nuts can reduce your risk of death by about 14% if you have that every day, so these are incredibly healthy. And eating the rainbow again, with snacks you can dip into, like hummus, is so easy to have, as well as a handful of berries if you fancy something a bit sweeter.
Tim's gut friendly snack ideas
There are many ways to make the transition from an unhealthy snacking habit to a healthy snacking habit, and in doing so really improving the health of your gut and its microbes.
Wrapping up
Thanks for joining me on this gut journey. I hope you enjoyed it. Do leave us any comments; we'd love to know how you got on. And if you want to learn more and go to the next level, do check out our videos. So it's goodbye from me, and it's goodbye from my gut microbes.