Felice Jacka, expert in nutritional psychiatry and gut health, and author of There’s a zoo in my poo, says that the more diverse your diet in general, but particularly your intake of plant foods, the more diverse your gut microbiota will be.
“It appears that a more diverse gut microbiota is associated with better health outcomes,” says Jacka, director of the Center for Food and Mood at Deakin University. “If you think about the analogy of a rainforest, a rainforest that has a great diversity of plant and insect life appears to be more healthy and robust, whereas if you have a monoculture, or an environment where one or two species are dominant , it tends to be less robust and resistant”.
a big one study found that people who ate more than 30 plants per week also had more diverse gut microbiomes than those who ate 10 or fewer types of plants per week.
That may sound daunting, but Debenham says, “It doesn’t have to be a crazy compilation of different foods. Simple changes can make a big difference.”
Swapping out your grains, adding different fruits and vegetables to your daily smoothie, using different proteins, herbs and vegetables in your salads all create more variety.
Jacka reminds that plant foods are not just fruits and vegetables, but also include herbs, nuts, seeds, legumes, and different types of whole grains. If you have oatmeal for breakfast with some berries, nuts, and seeds on top, that provides at least four different types of plant foods in one sitting.
But that doesn’t mean that this should be your breakfast every day for the rest of your life.
“To foster a more diverse community in your gut, you really need to diversify your plant foods,” says Jacka, who suggests rotating meals, so oatmeal one morning, rye toast with peanut butter the next, and eggs with mushrooms and herbs the next day.
“I’m an extremely lazy cook and also a very busy one,” she admits, “so at the supermarket, I go for muesli which has a lot of different kinds of grains, seeds and nuts, I pre-cook rice which has brown and red rice and quinoa together. : three different plant foods right away.”
Why is the diversity of our gut bacteria so important?
Our gut microbiome and its processes are linked to virtually every aspect of our health and function, including our skin, weight, energy, sleep, mood, and immune system.
Charging
“When you eat, within hours it is affecting your gut and the molecules that your gut produces as it breaks down plant fiber and polyphenols. Those molecules, or polyphenols, enter your body and affect virtually every system,” explains Jacka. “So, it’s very concrete and very immediate: What you eat will have an impact on your health and the way your body functions literally in a matter of hours.”
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