Are You Feeding Your Gut Right?

Michael Pollan did an amazing job in his his recent New York Times article, “Some of My Best Friends are Germs”, http://nyti.ms/11eiEVZ. We just don’t appreciate the trillions of bacteria that live in our bodies and work on our behalf (most of the time). It’s truly a must-read article.

There are a couple of passages that struck me, as a dietitian, that need to be highlighted:

With our diet of swiftly absorbed sugars and fats, we’re eating for one and depriving the trillions (of bacteria) of the food they like best: complex carbohydrates and fermentable plant fibers. The byproduct of fermentation is the short-chain fatty acids that nourish the gut barrier and help prevent inflammation. And there are studies suggesting that simply adding plants to a fast-food diet will mitigate its inflammatory effect.

Viewed from this perspective, the foods in the markets appear in a new light, and I began to see how you might begin to shop and cook with the microbiome in mind, the better to feed the fermentation in our guts. The less a food is processed, the more of it that gets safely through the gastrointestinal tract and into the eager clutches of the microbiota. Al dente pasta, for example, feeds the bugs better than soft pasta does; steel-cut oats better than rolled; raw or lightly cooked vegetables offer the bugs more to chomp on than overcooked, etc. This is at once a very old and a very new way of thinking about food: it suggests that all calories are not created equal and that the structure of a food and how it is prepared may matter as much as its nutrient composition.

While the article is quite lengthy, it is well worth taking the time to read it. The Smithsonian recently televised a program called “The Aliens Within Us” with the same premise – we’re cheating our body’s bacteria by what we eat, by using antibacterial soaps, by basically being germophobic.