"It All Begins in the Gut!"
Five Strategies to Improve Your Gut Health
by Jeff Leach
Below are five suggestions on how you might improve the health of your gut microbes (and some other microbes in your life).
Avoid antibiotics. It’s a familiar story by now: overzealous use of antibiotics are driving antibiotic resistance among microbes at an alarming rate. But it gets worse: the average child in the developed world will likely receive 10-20 courses of antibiotics before his or her 18th birthday. This, coupled with the low therapeutic doses in animal feed – and food, may be shifting our gut microbes into an unhealthy state and possibly contributing to the metabolic disease of obesity.
It’s also well documented that following a course of broad-spectrum antibiotics, it could take weeks, months, or even years for your gut microbial community to bounce back – if at all. During this period of imbalance, opportunistic pathogens can set up shop. Or worse. While antibiotics are clearly needed in some scenarios, ask more questions before downing them without a care.
Open a window. For 99.99 percent of human history the outside was always part of the inside, and at no moment during our day were we ever really separated from nature. Today, a National Activity Survey found that between enclosed buildings and vehicles, modern humans spend a whopping 90% of their lives indoors.
Though keeping the outside out does have its advantages – protection from the elements and decreasing your chances of being eaten by a zombie – it has also changed the microbiome of your home. Studies show that opening a window and increasing natural airflow can improve the diversity and health of the microbes in your home, which in turn benefit the inhabitants. In the not-so-distant future, building codes will likely reflect the biological benefits of rewilding our living and workspaces. Never hurts to get a head start.
Adopt an ecological perspective. Familiarize yourself with the writings of Aldo Leopold, John Muir, and other important and interesting – past and present – naturalists and ecologists. The human-microbial superorganism is a vast ecological system, subject to the same rules of resistance, resilience, and balance as any ecosystem on the planet. The sooner you learn to tend your microbial garden, the sooner you will understand how human ecology and your health is nothing more than understanding our history and place in the larger biosphere.
Eat more plants. This is not a hard one. I don’t mean to give up meat, but I mean to eat a greater diversity and quantity of whole plants. This is the single most important (in my opinion) dietary strategy for improving the diversity and health of your gut microbiome. In short, your gut microbes thrive on a diversity of fermentable substrates (aka dietary fiber). But not all fiber is the same (physically or chemically), so consuming a diversity of whole plants will assure a steady flow of substrates for your resident microbes.
And try to eat more of the whole plant, not just the soft and tasty parts. Consume the entire asparagus, not just the tip; consume the trunk of the broccoli, not just the crown; consume all of the greens at the top of the leek, not just the bulb. By doing so, you will guarantee that the harder-to-digest portions of the plant will extend the metabolic activity of your microbiome deep into your bowels. Also track how many species of plants you eat in a week – shoot for 30-40, or more.
Get your hands dirty. More to the point: start a garden. Getting your hands dirty and covering more of your body (and food) with mother nature’s blanket will help you not only connect with the natural world we have tried so hard to remove ourselves from, but will reacquaint your immune system with the trillions of microorganisms on the plants and in the soil. The loss of this interface with the terra firma of our evolutionary past – body to soil, body to nature – is where the wheels came off the wagon.
As people of the world move from poverty to middle class, they also move from the gritty reality of our ancestral life to the promise of modern development and its triple-washed produce and squeaky-clean surroundings. Reconnecting with ecosystems, through gardening or some other ‘outside’ means, will allow you to understand and manage your inner-ecosystem. There is no better way.
About the Author
Jeff Leach is the Founder of the Human Food Project and the author of Honor Thy Symbionts. His opinions on health and nutrition have appeared as Op-ed articles in the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Sydney Morning Herald and his peer-reviewed research has been published in the British Journal of Nutrition, European Journal of Clinical Nutrition, BioScience and Microflora, Journal of Archaeological Science, Public Health Nutrition and many others. He splits time between New Orleans and Africa.
