Enjoying a healthy diet and lifestyle is a simple but powerful way to help avoid chronic disease. Researchers through cutting-edge technologies have gained insights into our body processes and how gut health assists us in staying healthy for longer.
Extracted from The Good Gut Anti-inflammatory Diet book
The influence of gut health
The gut’s main purpose is to absorb nutrients and distribute them around the body, where they can be put to use. It makes sense, then, that anything the bacteria in our gut produces will inevitably be transported around our bodies as well.
Over the past few decades, one area that’s grabbed the interest of researchers is the gut’s role – specifically the millions of teeming microbial residents that call it home – in all aspects of our health. Our gut plays a vital role in our immune system. Microbes help train our immune cells to distinguish between friend and foe.
Supporting the health of our gut microbiome by enjoying a healthy diet and lifestyle is one simple but powerful way we can really help drive down unnecessary and harmful inflammation in our bodies.
How the gut health affects inflammation
The chemical molecules and by-products the microbes in our gut generate help nourish us, calm our immune system and reduce our body’s overall or underlying inflammation load.
On the other hand, they can also set off harmful inflammatory responses not just in the gut, but the entire immune system network threaded throughout our body. As they say, what happens in the gut doesn’t stay in the gut!
Not all bacterial products interact with our body in the same way. Our cells can sense the metabolites produced by bacteria, because they have specific receptors that are activated by them. Different bacteria produce different by-products – some of which can cause inflammation while others help reduce it.
Eat your phytonutrients. Eating a wide variety of plant- based foods helps ensure you get the benefit of a variety of nutrients your body needs; aim to eat at least 30 different plant-based foods a week. More than 25,000 phytonutrients have now been identified – natural compounds that may help to prevent disease and reduce inflammation.
By including varied colours, it also makes the food more interesting and appealing, and gets you away from eating a bland beige diet! By including foods of all the colours of the rainbow, you will have a better chance of getting the nutrients you need. An apple a day really does keep the doctor away.
