In this moment, the world-renowned gut-health expert Dr Will Bulsiewicz discusses the relationship between your gut health and overall well-being, including your mental and physical health. According to Dr Will, our gut is like a muscle that we can strengthen by eating a range of diverse superfoods such as leafy vegetables, legumes, and fruit. These high-fibre foods can supercharge your immune system by boosting the production of short-chain fatty acids, lower your cholesterol levels, and stabilise your bowel movements. The benefits of creating a diverse gut microbiome aren't exclusive to you, but in fact, your microbes are later inherited by your children, influencing their future health.
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Is that it? The story's just getting started though. Okay. Yeah, the story's just getting started because the issue is that, that's the simple part, right? These magicians that live inside of us release these short-chain fatty acids for us. By eating fibre? By eating fibre or resistant starches. Okay. But then those short-chain fatty acids go to work and our immune cells, our human cells have receptors to receive these short-chain fatty acids and act upon the information that they receive. So you could think of them as like a signaling molecule in the sense that your gut microbiome is now talking to your body and telling your body what it wants your body to do. So it's training it. Yeah, but it has the ability to like flip genes off and on. Okay. It has the ability to turn down your immune system. So as an example, when I think about autoimmune conditions, if we were to get like super into the details of autoimmune conditions, what you would discover is that we need more short-chain fatty acids to empower these specific cells called T regulatory cells. And those T regulatory cells would actually turn down our immune system and protect us. So, and it's not to say that autoimmune diseases are exclusively the result of a fibre deficiency. There is certainly a genetic component, but there was a genetic component 200 years ago, 300 years ago. And yet those, these conditions really weren't that much of a problem back then. So many of these conditions didn't have a name until the last 100 years. And, and the emergence of them, many of them have increased 500% in the last 50 years. Why would that be? It clearly is not genetics. So it has to be related to our diet and lifestyle. And ultimately when we talk about our diet and lifestyle, we're talking about our microbiome. And really the, one of the most important places to start, as you say, is with the fibre. I think so. You said earlier on, we have to start slow and low with fibre. Yeah. And that's because we've got to build up those microbes that respond to the fibre and turn it into the short-chain fatty acids, right? Your gut is like a muscle, right? Like this is, this is the way that I want people to understand this. Your gut is like a muscle and a muscle is capable of work, but it has limitations. And the more that the muscle has been trained, the more capable of work it is. So if you lift weights, you might start at 50 kilos. If we're doing a bench press, you might start at 50 kilos, and then you go to 55 kilos, and then the 60 kilos, and you work your way up. And that's the process of growing strong. And your gut works the exact same way. So if you expose your gut to food, specifically a diverse mix of different foods, you are training your gut and your gut will become more capable of consuming those foods over time. And then you can eventually get to a point where you don't have to then restrict based upon your capabilities, because the capabilities are limitless. Now you can eat whatever you want. And is all fibre the same? No, not all fibre is the same. Fibre is a very generic word. Fibre is like the word protein. No one would claim that the protein in a fish is the same as a protein in a bean, yet both of them contain protein. Fibre is unique to individual plants. There are many, many different forms of fibre to the point that we don't even know how many exist. So what we know is this. It's rather simple though, right? Despite that complexity, it's rather simple. All plants contain fibre. Every single plant has unique forms of fibre. We do split it into two major types. These are again umbrella terms. These are big labels. Soluble and insoluble fibre. The soluble fibre is the kind that dissolves in a drink. It disappears. You don't even know that it's there. Yet typically the soluble fibre is feeding the microbes. That's the prebiotic fibre. Insoluble fibre is the kind that's the grit. So like if you were to add it to a drink, it's not dissolving. It's going to be there no matter what. You could boil the drink. There'd still be fibre in it. So insoluble fibre most of the time is not the prebiotic fibre, but it does still serve a purpose. It helps in terms of your bowel transit, which affects your gut microbes. It helps in terms of your bowel movements, which affects your gut microbes. It helps in terms of other things such as your cholesterol and your blood fat control. So both types of fibre, both soluble and insoluble, have advantages. You don't need to worry about those individually. You just need to know that plants have fibre. Every single plant has a unique form of fibre and every single plant will feed unique families of microbes as a result of this. You have these F goals you talk about in the book when you're recommending diets that you think people should consider. And I think it's important because this word diet is quite stigmatized, right? And it can lead to like disordered eating and things like that. So I think it's important for us to talk about that a little bit, but I do want to know what these F goals are. And when you use the word diet, you're not saying something that's unsustainable in short in order to have a short term. I'm saying actually the opposite. Like I want people to have abundance. In fact, I would, if you were to ask me, what is the biggest misconception that exists in the gut health space? My answer to that question would be that people are very quick to restrict and less quick to add back. So with regard to F goals, um, this is my general framework. It is not the like only thing, but this is my general framework for how I remember to organize my day in terms of foods that I'm trying to seek out. Each letter represents different categories of food. So F fruit, um, I think fruit has been inappropriately, uh, villainized. I think fruits amazingly good for us. In fact, people that consume more fruits are less likely to have diabetes. They also lose weight fermented. Uh, we've talked about fermented. You can add more diversity to your microbiome by adding fermented food. We need this G G stands for greens. Greens have almost no calories yet. Tons of nutrition. That's good. And grains by grains. I don't mean refined grains. I mean, unrefined grains. So like whole grains, so good for us. Those are gut microbiome foods, high in fiber and, um, resistant starches. Oh, stands for Omega three supersedes. So that's chia, flax, hemp, and also walnuts. Um, those contain Omega three fats. Those are healthy fats that we need more of. A stands for aromatics. So that's onions, garlic, shallots. They're delicious. They're also great for your heart and protect you from cancer. L is legumes. So, uh, legumes includes beans, peas, and lentils. Um, I would go back to saying like, to me, this is the number one, the number one super food, um, because they're gut health foods and they're longevity foods. And if we look at the evidence with heart disease, cancer, stroke, diabetes, all, all across the board, you're going to see these reduce your likelihood of having those diseases. Um, S I, when I got to S I kind of lost my mind because I felt like I have more that I want to say. So let me just pack it all in. So S stands for shrooms, meaning mushrooms, um, mushrooms technically are not plants, they're fungi, but they contain fiber and are incredibly good for us. So they are honorary plants. Um, S also stands for seaweed. So most cultures don't consume seaweed, but like for example, in Japan they do, and they're incredibly healthy as a result of this. It's another source of unique types of plants with unique sources of fiber. And the last is I'm going to, in the book, I said, sulforaphane, which refers to a cancer fighting chemical that you will find in broccoli sprouts. But, um, I want to re rephrase this to say sprouts. So sprouts to me are super foods. There's something magical that happens. What is a sprout by the way, for people who are wondering, you can take any, um, any seed. Um, and if you quite simply add water, you will unlock nature because basically that seed is waiting to germinate and grow. So when you enter this code of basically like unlocking it with water, it comes to life. It opens up and out shoots this plant. And that, that plant is the sprout and the sprout is tremendously high in fiber protein, but also phytochemicals. There's unique chemicals that you will find in these plants in a disproportionate level compared to, for example, you know, uh, I mentioned broccoli sprouts, broccoli sprouts have 50 to a hundred times more cancer fighting chemical than adult broccoli has. So eating a pinch. So eating a pinch of broccoli sprouts can have you can provide just as much benefit as eating ahead of broccoli. So interesting, so if you're a parent and you follow the F Goals diet that you lay out in your book, The interesting thing I find is if you're a mother and you're having a child, you're very likely to eat broccoli for a good amount of time, and the more you're a mother and you're having a child, the more likely it is that you're going to eat broccoli for a good amount of time, and the more you're a mother and you're having a child, you're then going to pass on some of your microbiome to that child. And also, I was reading about that mice study conducted that shows how the Western diet induces a loss of microbial diversity that can compound over a series of generations. Yeah, that was a Justin Sonnenberg study. So Justin Sonnenberg is a guy that I'm a big fan of. He's out in Stanford and he actually wrote a blurb on my first book, Fiber Fueled. And so the issue is that we want to understand microbial loss that can occur over generations, because clearly our generation is different than our grandparents and it's hard to do with humans because it takes us like, you know, these days, 30 or more years to create a new generation. So, but with mice, you can do this very quickly. So he basically started off with mice with a certain level of microbial diversity. The diversity of the microbiome is a measure of the health of their microbiome. And then he saw what happened with a low fiber diet. And so basically what he saw is that if you put them on a low fiber diet, that mouse will start to lose diversity and then it will transfer that on to its offspring. And then that offspring who's still on a low fiber diet continues to lose diversity and transfer that on to their offspring and so on. And what he found was that if during this process you intervene and you add back the fiber, you can actually restore on some level the diversity within the microbiome. You can wake them back up, they can come back. But the issue is you won't get all the way back to the starting point. So there is a certain level of loss that has taken place as a result of those choices that were occurring over generations. If your grandmother has 1,200 species of microbes in her gut as a child, but by the time your mother was born, she had 900, that's what your mother got. Then if your mother loses 300 species in her microbiome, now you start off with 600, half of what your grandmother originally had. Right. And at some point, the loss of those species becomes problematic because each of those species is there with a purpose, we evolved to have them. And when they're absent, they're not able to do their job. And the other microbes may not be able to step up to actually do the job of what's missing. It's just such a great case that, you know, keeping ourselves healthy is keeping our children healthy as well, in many respects. And we also live with our children. So we're creating an ecosystem in our homes of these microbes on everything. I think that's completely true. And I also think that, like, when we think about generational issues that exist, so, you know, in many studies, they'll say, if your parents had this, then you're at risk for this. And we have assumed that these are genetic things. Yet much of the genetic research, much of which has been done by Tim Spector, my partner at Zoe, much of that has not played out to prove that it is in fact genetic. I think what's happening is not just the transfer of microbes, I think it's also the transfer of lifestyle. And the lifestyle that gets transferred by generation is, if it's unhealthy, then unfortunately, you're transferring along the problems that come with that.

Thu Jun 20 2024