Food and Your Microbiome
By: Natalie Walker
It’s common knowledge that a hearty diet is essential for our health, but did you know that it’s also vital for the bacteria living in our gut? Microbes within your gut affect how your body feels and functions in countless ways. Let’s take a closer look at how important it is to feed your microbes nutritious meals.
Your gut contains different types of bacteria that are either helpful or harmful. The “good” bacteria in your gut are necessary for digesting food and extracting nutrients from food, while the “bad” bacteria can make you sick. When you eat nutritious foods like fruits and vegetables, symbiotic or “good” bacteria multiply and leave less room for pathogenic or “bad” bacteria to colonize inside the gut, thus keeping these harmful microbes from growing out of control. A diverse, healthy diet help keep your “good” gut bacteria in check as well. Different food groups feed and affect various types of gut bacteria – food monotony can overfeed some bacteria while starving others. For example, if you consume too many animal products and not enough plant products, important digestion-promoting bacteria go hungry while other bacteria multiply and cause metabolism issues. To make sure no one bacteria type becomes too dominant, it’s important to eat a wide variety of foods.
You may have heard the terms “prebiotics” and “probiotics” mentioned in relation to gut health. What are they and how are they different? Prebiotics act as a “gut fertilizer”, providing nutrients to the healthy bacteria already living in your gut and helping them grow and reproduce. Probiotics, on the other hand, add live bacteria into your gut to grow a diverse and balanced bacterial population.
Fiber acts as a prebiotic. Symbiotic microbes not only love being fed fiber but are also essential to digesting it. Foods like garlic, tomatoes, berries, and nuts pack a ton of this particular nutrient. These foods travel in one piece all the way to the intestine, where dense populations of healthy microbes live. Here, the happy microbes help break down these foods in order to fuel up before multiplying.
Consuming probiotics is a great way to vary your gut microbes and restore a healthy microbe balance. You may associate probiotics with a special supplement, but they’re found in foods you eat every day. As probiotics supply the gut with live bacteria, foods that undergo bacteria-friendly fermentation typically act as probiotics. Foods like cheese, pickles, yogurt, and milk are all great sources of healthy microbes. Consuming foods packed with these tiny critters diversifies your microbial makeup and helps bring your body into a healthy equilibrium. Incorporating probiotics into your diet is particularly important in moments when your gut composition might be unstable or vulnerable, such as after antibiotic use, falling ill, or even experiencing seasonal allergies.
Being conscious of your diet and choosing foods that benefit your microbes is a valuable protective measure against an unhealthy life. Your eating choices impact gut bacteria health, which can influence everything ranging from digestive problems to addiction risk. So next time you open your fridge and consider whether you should snack on a fresh apple or leftover pasta, remember that what you feed yourself is what you feed your microbes!