Most of us are probably feeling the effects of all that Christmas over-eating and drinking - which has a real impact on our gut bacteria and overall health - especially all the sugary treats.
Claus Christophersen is a senior lecturer in nutrition at Edith Cowan University in Perth, and has some advice on how to get your gut back to its equilibrium.
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Increased intake of sugar over the holidays will have done our guts no favours, he told Jesse Mulligan.
“If you have large amounts of sugar parts of it passes into the large intestine and that’s something that bacteria really thrives on.
“They will produce a lot of gas so you might have bloating or you might have stomach aches.”
Dial back the sugar and ramp up the fibre intake, he says.
Some pathogenic bacteria, or unwanted bacteria, are much better at utilising sugar, he says, so they will grow quicker and try to outcompete some of the good bacteria in our guts.
Fibres called resistant starches are important for gut health, they are found in pasta potatoes and rice, Christophersen says.
These are starches that are resistant to digestion in your small intestine so they come into the large intestine and can feed these good bacteria.”
To maximise the amount of resistant starch in these products we should let them cool down after cooking, he says.
“We know that when you heat up pasta or potatoes you break down these starch structures and when they then cool and retrograde they restructure and that’s the structure that is resistant to digestion in the small intestine and therefore it comes into the large intestine and it feeds these good bacteria and you get the production of these really beneficial metabolites.”
Pre-biotic fibres, inulins, found in garlic and onions are also beneficial.
Some people can have difficulty processing inulins but introducing them slowly to the diet will overcome this, he says.
In fact you can train the gut to get better at processing fibre.
“There is some research out there that you can train your gut microbes to utilise that is you previously haven’t been able to cope that well with dairy.
“It’s the same with fibres, if you load them up slowly then you handle them and you can eat a lot more of them and therefore have a healthier gut.”
He recommends we change diet gradually.
“It is much better to have a slow transition in diets.”
It’s the little things that make a difference, he says, like changing from white bread to a wholemeal bread.
Fruits and vegetables, as well as having beneficial fibres, have other benefits he says.
They have phyto-chemicals which are compounds that help with cardiovascular disease
The fibre in veg and fruit is not as easy to digest in the colon but is very good for regularity, he says.
“Regularity is very important for the gut because you need to have a certain flow through your system, so things don’t get stuck there and bacteria starts starving.”
The benefits of good gut health are felt throughout the body, he says.
“We know the gut is linked to other parts of the body so there is the gut-liver, the gut-lung the gut-brain axis.”
Often people make better choices when they eat well, for example are more inclined to exercise, he says.
“Anxiety and even depression have been shown to improve by improvement in diets.”
We all differ and have varying gut micro-biomes, so he says we should tune in to what makes us feel better.
“On the days when you feel really great, think about what you’ve been eating and that might play a role in that.”
