We're
talking to Joanna Nolan of Be Nourished about her kimchi and sauerkraut, plus
looking at what makes for a healthy gut.
Be
Nourished makes and sells organic, cultured vegetables. These
probiotic super-foods are teeming with live organisms and essential enzymes
that aid digestion and repopulate the digestive tract with beneficial bacteria.
Jo
says, "As a mother of two children I became interested in nutrition while
looking for ways to nourish my family. I stumbled upon Sally Fallon's
book, Nourishing Traditions. I thought sauerkraut might be one
of the easiest fermented foods to experiment with. However, I soon discovered
that if I wanted the benefits of organic, raw sauerkraut made from fresh, local
ingredients, I was going to have to make it myself."
Jo
noticed some positive results in her family's health, "Having included these
fermented vegetables into our family’s daily diet we found that sugar cravings
and allergies, such as hay-fever, were suddenly disappearing."
What
are 3 Things to Avoid if You Want a Healthy Gut?
- Highly processed foods that contain sugar. It's possible that sugar (particularly the component of sugar, fructose, in processed foods) causes imbalances in gut bacteria which in turn may affect our digestive systems.
- Artificial
Sweeteners. With
the push for reducing sugar intake and the possibility that more people
will be attracted to using sugar substitutes I Quit Sugar says
that, "Artificial sweeteners could have an effect on gut and
metabolic activity by actually changing the composition and function of
our gut microbiota. Sugar alcohols, for example, sorbitol and
mannitol, can cause problems for people suffering from Irritable Bowel
because they don't pass easily through our cell walls, meaning that gut
bacteria digest them."
- Alcohol in excess. One small glass of a nice, red wine (red wine is low fructose) with a meal can be beneficial but over-doing the alcohol can result in many, many serious metabolic problems.
3 Things You Can Do to Improve Gut Health
- Exercise. Research has shown that
"... regular exercise could reduce the risk of colon cancer by up to
25%," quotes I Quit Sugar.
- Don't run
yourself ragged! Recent
research has shown that there may be a link between imbalance in gut
bacteria and mood disorders like anxiety and depression.
- Eat fibre-rich
foods like
vegetables and whole grains and fermented foods like sauerkraut, kimchi,
yoghurt (made with full-cream milk or pure coconut milk and unsweetened of
course).
ABC
reporter, Tony Jones, interviewed microbiologist, Guilia Enders, about her
book, Gut: The Inside Story of our Body's Most Underrated Organ which
addresses these six points and more. Here's a link to
the complete interview on ABC.
From
the transcript:
TONY
JONES: Let's look at some of the areas
you focus on in your book and the first one is the possible link between
obesity and gut bacteria. Are there studies which show the difference between
the gut bacteria of obese and normal weight people?
GIULIA ENDERS: Yes, there are plenty of
studies, actually. And we see, for example, that there are some bacteria that
can be found in people with higher weight. ... I like to call them the
"chubby bacteria" because we see that they can actually harvest more
calories out of the food you eat. And we see that overweight people ... when
they go to the toilet, there are less calories that they excrete and other
people, they just excrete more of the calories they take up. Then we see that
there are things like diversity. Having a more diverse gut ecosystem will
actually be a very protective thing for people struggling with overweight. We
see that some diets, when they work on one person they don't work in another
person. A study that showed that a diet worked when it altered the gut
flora.
TONY
JONES: So how do you know? I mean, how do
you know if you've got the right level of diversity in your gut bacteria to
actually help you, for example, maintain a healthy weight or avoid diseases
like diabetes? As you say, there is a link or there appears to be a link.
Guilia Enders goes on to say that we need to become more aware of our own
gut. Are we eating enough fibre, how are our stools...? "If
you're basically eating very low fibre, and industrial nations eat about half
of the fibre that the World Health Organisation recommends, then you'll be
pretty sure you don't nurture your microbes as well as you could..."
Let's
become aware of this whole new area of research into the gut biome being
carried out in the field of microbiology.
A
customer comments about her experience of beginning to use the fermented foods from Be
Nourished. "After starting to eat these cultured vegetables I
have found I am losing my cravings for sweet things. I never thought I would
like fermented food, but these are amazing and now I am getting the whole
family eating them," That's encouraging!
